Liz Lerman: seeking a wider spectrum - inclusion of elderly dancers

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Cathryn Harding

Liz Lerman's Flying into the Middle, which premiered last winter in New York City, is as good an introduction as any to Lerman's vision of dance. It has all of her favorite ingredients: spoken words (in this case the forty-seven-year-old choreographer's hilarious tribute to all media); unexpected pairings among Lerman's diverse dancers, who range in age from mid-twenties to early seventies; and plenty of thrilling bursts of movement that race along to Tchaikovsky's exuberant Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50. At the end of Flying, Lerman and her nine dancers form a pile of crouching bodies. The youngest is at one end, Lerman is smack in the middle, and the oldest dancer is ascending the human mound, stepping toward the unknown at the back of the stage. It's a perfect Lermanesque moment. Having paid tribute to the middle and to her own inclusive brand of dance-making, Lerman makes plain that the very notion of the middle makes sense only when seen in its full display, when couched in the spectrum of all that comes before and after.

Indeed, she could be said to have devoted her career to exploring this spectrum. For twenty years, her Washington, D.C.-based company, Dance Exchange, has pursued a vision of dance that transcends boundaries of age, genre, and purpose. In Lerman's world, dance is more than just steps to music performed on a stage. It's theater, story-telling, and personal encounter. It's also something that occurs in many different settings - sometimes in theaters and senior centers, sometimes in elementary schools and on the Capitol lawn. And it takes all kinds of dancers to do it. Lerman has always refuted the conventional notion of concert dance that features the impossibly streamlined bodies of young people executing a series of perfect leaps and turns. She gained a lot of attention in the early years for her work with elderly dancers. These days Dance Exchange (which conducts a winter workshop this month in Washington, D.C.) comprises dancers of all ages.

Lerman's ideals have remained remarkably consistent in the two decades that she's been working, yet hers is not a quota-driven art, glazed over with political criteria. Rather, Lerman's dances arise organically from a wellspring of humanism and a simple delight in movement. A recent work, Safe House: Still Looking, explores the company's individual experiences of danger and safety using narrative as well as eerily calculated movement. This Is Who We Are, her 1993 tribute to the new and improved Dance Exchange (five members joined the company that year), begins and ends with the full company joined in a circle, torsos bent and touching gently, their heads lowered into one another's open palms. In one wonderful section, the dancers face front in a straight line, each doing a unique movement according to his or her own ability. They're together and yet apart, illustrating her tenet that theater "can be strengthened by a bunch of different people doing it." Her work, she says, "is really about people dancing, not dancers dancing," and as a frequent program-opener, This Is Who We Are makes that point right away.

Lerman says her earliest memories of moving are when her family lived in Southern California. Their house was the first built in a new subdivision. The backyard was flat and flood-prone. "Whenever it rained there'd be an inch or two of water in the backyard, and we would just go racing out and throw ourselves around in the water." The family moved to Milwaukee several years later, and by the time Lerman was a preteen, her coastal freewheeling had become a kind of dancing she now calls "lyrical Midwest."

Her teacher, Florence West, may not have promoted an embroidered form of dancing - Lerman remembers it as "big dress kind of movement with no detail whatsoever" - but she was a fervent advocate of detailed artistry. "She mirrored something my father was doing at the time," Lerman says. "She believed we should think a lot. She'd read us poetry. She would make us work with texture. She thought nothing of having us paint for a couple of hours on a Suturday."

Those exercises - and West's insistence that her students study modern and ballet (unusual for the 1950s) - convinced Lerman of the openness between forms. And from her father's example, Lerman learned the importance of acknowledging everyone's humanity. She likes to tell the story of how her father, then head of Wisconsin's department of labor, knew the name of every person who worked in the buiding. "My father was very radical and lived his convictions," she says. When all their neighbors moved to the suburbs to avoid sending their children to integrated schools, Lerman's family stayed put. The household was filled with lively dinnertime discussions and lots of political events. In the midst of this, Lerman says, "there was always a sense in the household that I would dance. It was like, of course, Liz's dancing is really important. There was a feeling of incredible support."

West's eventual departure from Milwaukee deprived the teenaged Lerman of a major source of support. Already burdened with adolescent anxiety about body shape and weight, Lerman was further shocked to learn that her curiosity and populism were not welcome when she ventured into the wider world of dancing. After a summer at dance camp and classes in Chicago, she found herself struggling with dance. "My dad kept saying, don't confuse the institution with what's going on inside," she says. "That was helpful, but it still wasn't enough for me to figure it out. Had I decided to try to practice dance the way I was being trained, I would have left at seventeen or twenty-three."