Legendary dancer, choreographer Liz Lerman has some advice about how to live a life full of motion

Liz Lerman is a visionary in the dance world. The choreographer, performer, writer, teacher and speaker has spent decades exploring the world — and our own minds — through movement.

Her choreography and artistic research has pushed the boundaries of dance — and where it exists in society.

And now, in her newest book, she’s asking a central question: How do we hold both form and change at once? It’s called "Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide for a World in Constant Motion" and, in it, she looks at creativity as a way of life, a practice.

And, she told me, her viewpoint from a lifetime of movement might be helpful for other people.

Full conversation

LIZ LERMAN: My hope is that people who use their bodies in life for work, for profession, and out of, you know, pure joy, have experienced a lot around mobility and motion and the surprise of losing your balance and all kinds of things like that. And that, yes, there's some information in there that may be fruitful for other people.

LAUREN GILGER: When you talk about the world kind of being in constant motion, do you mean like literally, like everything's moving all the time in some sort of cellular fashion? Or is this more like metaphysical to you?

LIZ LERMAN: Well, actually, Lauren, thank you, and it's actually all those things. And that's kind of the surprise, isn't it? I mean, really and truly, the ground is moving under our feet, our bodies are busy changing, and, you know, we know that there are large changes going on institutionally, culturally, and even with, you know, the air we breathe.

So it's I think an interesting way to consider that as much as we try to stabilize, maybe being able to manage all that movement would also be a useful, well, stance in the world.

LAUREN GILGER: Stance is a good way to put it. But it's also about maintaining form, right, within that. And you and I'm guessing you also mean form in kind of multiple senses of the word, right?

LIZ LERMAN: I do. And I think this is the thing that why we want to be able to hold both ideas, that we want to be able to be flexible and and adaptable and changeable, but at the same time, if that's all we do, people can't find you. You can't be seen. Even ideas, sometimes ideas are so mobile people can't grab them and talk about the same thing at the same time. So having a shape is really critical, but so is being able to move into motion and then be able to do both, just not at the same time except in rare instances.

LAUREN GILGER: There is a subtitle here as well. This is "An Insomniac's Guide for a World in Constant Motion." So I have to ask you about that part of it. I'm guessing you are the insomniac here?

LIZ LERMAN: Yeah, I am an insomniac. I will say we played around with a lot of other titles — Choreographer's Guide, A Mother's Guide, A Dancer's Guide. But the thing I like about insomniac, well, first of all, I am one, and a lot of people are.

And I think those of us who are have different ideas about it. Some people suffer, and I feel for them, who suffer. But I've come around to accepting my insomnia and actually harnessing and harvesting it. And there is a certain like exciting restlessness in it. And I think that restlessness kind of is almost an undercurrent of curiosity and sort of a constant inquiring mind at work. And so maybe a mobility exists there, too, that I'm curious about.

LAUREN GILGER: That's very interesting. So, yeah, cuz I think the the word insomnia comes with such a negative connotation. But it sounds like you do not think of it that way. Do you feel like a pressure, do you feel like like a little bit of a craze when you're in insomnia, or is this like a creative momentum to you?

LIZ LERMAN: You're asking such wonderful ways of looking at it, Lauren, because I mean, actually, maybe it depends a little bit where in life's cycles you are.

But I will say right now at this age, it's a surprise to me how alive it feels, but it is kind of like a burning, almost like a burning from the inside. And maybe that's, you know, those of us who are able to reach this age, I'm in my 70s, and just see how much ahead there is to do and how much incredible life is around us, that you kind of want to be in that, and that is underlying my insomnia anyway.

LAUREN GILGER: That's very interesting. So, I mean, you you bring up the idea of aging, and if we're talking about the world being in constant motion, our bodies constantly changing, aging is definitely what we're doing all the time, right?

I mean, how do you think about aging? And is it maybe a little different than the rest of us think about it and this thing that like we want to fight, we want to do anti-aging in every way we can, right?

LIZ LERMAN: Well, I'm not sure who who wants to do the anti-aging thing. It, it's interesting to look at the actual individuals involved in that.

But in my case, you know, I started dancing with older people when I was young. I was in my 20s. My mother died suddenly. It was a horrible thing, and getting out of that experience and finding some old people to be in a dance — because I wanted them to welcome her into whatever had happened to her — got me into this whole world of what is now called creative aging.

So I've been interested in, in older bodies and older people on stage and the expressions that people who've lived long lives and the knowledge that they have can give. So that's always been part of it. But now that I am old, it's a little bit different.

I don't love, I don't love every aspect of it by any means, and I'm caring for my, my partner, my husband, who's, who's sick, and and what that is like and watching So, you know, one of the things I write about in the book is as much as the book extols the knowledge that our bodies hold and how much if we paid attention to our own experience, I don't just mean with our bodies, but our experiences in general, how much we could harvest for for information.

I also want to acknowledge that, you know, our bodies things happen, and like I say in the book, climate change is not just the weather.

LAUREN GILGER: What is it beyond the weather? Explain that for us.

LIZ LERMAN: Well, if your loved one is sick, you're dealing in a whole new world where you're taking care of someone who used to be so strong and independent, and then you're taking care of all the things that that person used to do for you, and you're watching, of course, the decline of a brilliant mind and a funny human being. And so living with that is, I compare it to what it's like when you're raising a child, because, you know, in some ways caretaking is caretaking, but it's so different at the beginning and endings of life.

LAUREN GILGER: That's fascinating, yeah. I want to ask about the structure of the book because this is I think unlike some of the other books that you've written, a guide essentially for folks, right? Like it's almost a how-to. Talk about how you structured this.

LIZ LERMAN: Well, I would say it's a how-to, but it's a little bit of of a a scavenger hunt for for the reader. In some cases, there are actual essays. This is information. Here's some notes. This will tell you, you know, what to do.

In other cases, that information is embedded in stories, things that happened to me or to the people around me that I write about and try to get people to to sort of be in the moment with me and to understand the incredible information that's being shared in that moment. It's structured, though, in four major sections: allowing people first to think about this idea of lived experience and how we harvest it, and then the second we've addressed a little bit about shape and momentum and ideas of creativity.

The third section, though, is about rejection and reflection. And having been rejected so many times in my life and also even, you know, sometimes I think rehearsals are nothing but constant rejection, you're constantly in mistake-land and fixing. And a lot of the book is trying to get people just to adjust in a way. Maybe they think making mistakes in public is bad. I'm posing, "Hold on a second. There's a lot of ways to look at this. Try it like this." That's kind of the way it's a guide. And then the last section actually has real tools in it that you can actually try out.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. Well, I want to ask you about that because you're calling it the "Atlas of Creative Tools," which is a great title to begin with. How does one use this atlas? And why an atlas as opposed to like a, you know, set of, you know, directions?

LIZ LERMAN: Right. Well, you know, the wonderful thing about atlases, well, is they're beautiful. And over time and over history, you know, they they include a lot of well, how people viewed the world. Because the early atlases had dragons where we now understand to be an ocean or something like that.

So I'm interested in that in the actual what it says, but the metaphoric that can live inside it that might be interesting to your spirit. A lot of the tools in the actual atlas tell you how to, but they're also filled with the origin story, trying to acknowledge where they came from, how they can be used, their multiple applications. And in this book, the idea was to try to give people a paper version or a, the digital version of some of that without actually going to an online setting.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, I have to end this interview soon, which is a shame, because I want to ask you more. But I'm going to ask you about one last thing before I let you go, which is: so the idea here, right, you're you're looking at dance, education, politics, and and you write, spiritual practice.

And I wonder, because you view your work in that lens often, and I would love for you to articulate what that means to you. How is this in particular, this idea of constant motion and form within it, a spiritual practice for you?

LIZ LERMAN: Well, this is probably maybe at the most deepest place I'm I'm wondering and worrying and wandering in, and that is having had my own good fortune to be in relationship, say, to my rabbi for so many decades and observing this incredible person and so many people I know involved in religious seeking, that that act of trying to seek, research, understand what's not almost quite nameable, and yet we keep trying to look for names for that.

As I grew in my life as an artist, Lauren, and as a choreographer and a writer, I began to wonder if creativity isn't another form of that, that my own investigation, trying to understand as much as I can say to you, "I can teach you how to be creative, I can show you how to do it," and I can, I still can't explain the moments when something happens that neither of us understood to be possible. And that feels to me spiritual, really.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, I bet it is. All right, we'll leave it there. Liz Lerman, a choreographer, writer, educator, speaker, Institute Professor at ASU's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, as well as author of the new book, "Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac's Guide for a World in Constant Motion." Liz, thank you so much for coming on The Show, I really appreciate it.

LIZ LERMAN: Oh, thank you for having me. Wonderful conversation.