Liz Lerman

Founding Artistic Director, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange

It's safe to say there aren't many people who have been likened to both Mahatma Gandhi and Woody Allen.

But Liz Lerman took from her father, a civil rights activist in Milwaukee, both a strong grounding in Jewish culture and a belief that our efforts can help change the world.

From her mother, Lerman learned something of equal value and, paradoxically, it came after her mother's death. Determined to respond to her mother's passing in dance, Lerman—at the time a young choreographer in Washington—realized she couldn't find elderly dancers to portray the ancestors who would welcome her mother into the afterlife.

That led her to begin teaching dance at a senior home and, ultimately, to launch the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, a troupe whose members range in age from their 20s to their 70s. Guest artists and community participants have ranged up into their 90s.

It's part of Lerman's philosophy that dance is a birthright that belongs to everyone, not just the young and beautiful.

"If you have people of different ages, you're able to tell your story differently," says Lerman, 58. "I can't imagine anything other than an intergenerational work environment, but one forgets how segregated by age our world is. As we understand the demographics of aging in the Western world, I think there are lots of ways of peeking into what this decision on my part has brought."

Throughout her career, which has earned her prizes including a Macarthur ‘genius' fellowship, an American Choreographer Award and Washingtonian magazine's Washingtonian of the Year Award, Lerman hasn't shied away from tackling subjects that don't normally make it to the stage.

The Nutcracker may have included plenty of toy soldiers, for example, but that was a far cry from Lerman's take on the military in the Dance Exchange's 1983 New York debut, Docudance: Nine Short Dances About the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters.

If that seems like a rather obscure topic for a dance performance, so is another Lerman project using dance to examine the human genome and the implications of genetic research on how we understand our place in the scheme of nature and how we will make choices in the future. Other dances have focused on immigration (in commemoration of the centennial of the Statue of Liberty) and on Jewish history and identity.

Lerman believes dance can serve to illuminate virtually any pressing subject in society. And by incorporating music, imagery and the spoken word, Lerman has taken dance from the level of an abstract art and made it, in essence, into animated storytelling.

"As beautiful and as telling as movement is, sometimes audiences need a place to park their brains," she notes. "Talk helps people connect."

She also has focused on community involvement, something rooted both in the social activism she learned at home and in her experiences as a graduate student, when she realized that dance shouldn't be just about the performers expressing themselves but, ideally, should be a collaborative process with the community.

"An artist can grow artistically in community, so that it's not just, ‘Oh, I'm doing something good for the world,'" Lerman says.

Several of Lerman's community projects have been groundbreaking. A two-year residency under the auspices of the Portsmouth, N.H. Music Hall culminated in a week-long festival of public events, exhibits, stage and site-specific performances, storytelling, music and dance, all exploring the 200-year-old shipyard's role in Portsmouth's history. The project was hailed as a model of pervasive community engagement.

The Dance Exchange then coordinated the Hallelujah Project, a major initiative in performance, celebration and participatory art-making at 15 sites across the country, celebrating each community's history. The creative process demanded intense collaboration in each site to find out what was unique to that community and what issues were of particular importance – in effect, helping each community find its voice.

"I think it's pretty big for a community to feel that they're involved," Lerman says. "There's a kind of elevation of value, of meaning. I think a lot of people don't understand that their lives are art, that their daily acts are creative acts. We help them to see that."