By any standard, Liz Lerman has had an incredible career.
For over 50 years, she’s been creating original dance theater and choreography, writing books and teaching. She ran the world-renowned Liz Lerman Dance Exchange for decades, and more recently, she’s been a professor at Arizona State University. She’s been a Guggenheim fellow and the recipient of a MacArthur grant. Her work has been commissioned by prestigious theaters and academic institutions all over the country — like Harvard, Arena Stage and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
But what is her artistic legacy? Lerman recently turned 77, and while she’s hardly slowing down, it’s a question she’s been thinking about a lot. Not just for herself — but in general, for any artist. What are you supposed to leave behind? It’s a complex intellectual notion. And so, as she’s always done, she’s been exploring it through movement.
For an ongoing project called “My Body Is A Library,” she’s been working towards what she calls an “Atlas of Creative Tools," a way of leaving a record for future artists about how to find a creative practice that leads to meaningful work. The project is ongoing.
Lerman joined The Show to discuss how there are two words, or values, that she knows are core parts of her vision: conviction and investment.
Full conversation
LIZ LERMAN: What I think underlies those words, you might be able to do something that helps someone else or makes a change that perhaps can be for the better. Even though my field did not see that. It's not like dance said, oh yeah, we need you to do political work or oh we you know we want you to work with the old people or everything.
No, no, no, no, that was not in the dance field at all. And to be honest, even at ASU, which is an amazingly innovative, incredible institution, I still have to sort of fight my way into saying, and this stuff counts. It counts.
SAM DINGMAN: Well this makes me think I heard you say in an interview once that your father did civil rights work and your mom was an artist, a painter, if I'm not mistaken.
LERMAN: She was an unfulfilled artist of many things. I would say a gardener, piano player and wanderer.
DINGMAN: Right, right. But you, you said in this conversation that I heard, you have that, what you just articulated, this idea that what you do ought to impact other people and outlast you. That, that was something you got from him, and that what you got from her was what I'm now realizing in this moment is what we might call conviction.
This idea that if you want to make it as an artist, it has to be vitally important to you for it to be at all to anybody else. And that we could kind of see your career as the marriage of those two impulses.
LERMAN: Thank you for saying that and for bringing them into the space, I mean our room, because I, I do feel that way.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So this, this makes me think of of the questions that have kind of been at the core of your dance practice. Where is the dance happening? Who is it that's doing it, and what is the, the story that it's telling?
If I'm not mistaken, you made your first dance in 1974?
LERMAN: Yes, yes, of course, New York City winter.
DINGMAN: Did you have a sense for yourself right from the beginning of the import of those questions when you were making that dance?
LERMAN: I don't think so. I think they were driving me. Sometimes I think it's when you're deeply in trouble that these, when you've tried everything else and nothing you know works and then you are thrust into the situation where you have to try something else, that's when I think those things start to prove to be true.
DINGMAN: OK, could, could you give me an example of that?
LERMAN: I think, if I think about, you know, certainly the big changes my mother's death, in particular, it's like what was I going to do at that point as a person in their 20s? And when I went looking in my, what was my then choreographic toolbox, and I had gone through some good institutions and I've been brought up in a Western way of thinking about dance.
There should be a lot of tools in that toolbox. They were totally useless when your mother dies and you're 27 and you're like wait, I don't care about shape. I had to go through a system that I devised in the moment that I should find out what a sad shape was. Oh, it's a curve. Oh, how many ways can I curve my spine might lead me to understanding a way to think about grief.
DINGMAN: That's really interesting. I, so there's that question, what is the story that the dance is telling? That was a fairly personal story that you were telling, but you have also done work that addresses the political.
LERMAN: I think political is personal. Like it's personal to me what our government spends in the defense budget. I mean, I'm, I feel personally about it, it's my dollar and do I really want to do that thing? And so my curiosity about the defense budget was one of the early political pieces. I mean it wasn't that I was gonna change the system. I wasn't gonna be an activist.
I like, I just needed to understand part of my curiosity is that all subject matters should be possible, not just love and death It is the stuff of our life. But secondly, I would say, and then this is maybe more like, the way I think about art making in general, is that there is the performance piece, but there's all the stuff you do on the way to get into the performance, all the interviewing, all the talking to people, all the workshops, all the testing, all that stuff right now. That feels to me really important.
I just think people need to be in close relationship to each other in a humane way, deeply engaged in something that matters to them, and sitting in a circle with librarians to hear their stories, maybe move a little bit together. Tell why they ever decided to become librarians in the first place. This to me is really important cultural work.
I mean the first way we're experimenting with the project happened to come out of this thing at the Harvard Law Library where they, most of the books that deal with Latin American law and other countries lives in the basement.
And for years they've been meaning to bring them upstairs. But when we heard this, my colleague McGregor said, oh, well, let's make that the dance, and we are. And so we're actually moving the books and the audience is gonna get to actually put a book on the shelf and we're gonna actually, you know.
DINGMAN: But it also, if I may, speaks to the idea of space. And you, you invoked the idea of space earlier when we were talking about your parents, bringing them into the space. I, I mean, I guess now that I'm talking about it, this is one of your questions. Where is the dance taking place? Why is it important to you for not just the dancers, but the audience to be so aware of the space where the dance is happening?
LERMAN: For one thing, it takes people out of their passivity. We did a project where, th, the each character had their own room and the audience wandered through this incredible array of beautiful rooms and you got to sort of know the dancers. And then eventually you came on stage and you listened to two people and then you took your seat.
So that we had a theatergoer who's a big donor in Washington, D.C., and she'd gone to that she came up to me after she said, listen, I've, I've gone to a million. I've never been on the stage that I then sat and watched, and it changed everything for me.
It feels entirely about a certain reverence for our bodies and what they're capable of. A, a, a wish that we could have relationships with them that allowed for the kind of knowledge bearing that I feel lives in our bodies. I know that's not the first place people go when they think about, how do we know things? And it's just, we're diminished by not having this relationship.
DINGMAN: Another thing I heard you say in a, in an interview once is that early in your dance career, you would actually be told leave your mind outside, just bring your body in.
LERMAN: Well, this was a comment I made and I was thinking about it just yesterday because I was thinking about authoritarianism. And you know the arts are not exempt from authoritarianism. And classical ballet, I mean it's so much better now and there's so many amazing people in classical ballet world, so if you're out there listening, I'm not condemning the whole field.
But by and large the way I was raised in classical ballet, it is an authoritarian regime. And they told me literally leave your brain outside, and that is what authoritarians want. They do not want people to think.
And, and I, I think coming to grips with that within my dance world and challenging that and saying wait a minute.
DINGMAN: Right. I mean, I guess that that brings us to, to your last question. We've talked about the story the dance is telling and, and where it's happening but that's that last piece. Who is doing the dance?
LERMAN: The who. In the few dances I've made where I really care about the steps, most of the time I'm willing to revise everything because it's a different person and they're gonna do it differently. And finding that relationship between what that person is thinking, doing and feeling in the moment in which they're, you know, extending their arm out or something like that. It, it matters. Yeah.
