There are certain words that, through sheer overuse, lose all meaning. “Natural” would be an example. (Is there any such thing as an unnatural egg?) “Green” is another one, describing everything from floor wax to insulation to architectural theories.
In the arts world, perhaps no word is more ubiquitous and therefore more meaningless than “community.” This is a shame, as a great deal of good work gets overlooked under the deadening shade of “community art.”
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is coming to town this weekend for their second visit to the Paramount, and—since Lerman is regarded throughout the world of performing arts as a true pioneer in “community art”—it seems like the exact right moment to try to restore some dignity and purpose to the phrase.
Throughout Charlottesville, many arts organizations strive to get regular folks engaged in their work. Sometimes that effort is described as “outreach.” Sometimes it’s called you-know-what. Live Arts, a nonprofit, volunteer-based theater group has been “forging theater and community” in Charlottesville since 1989. Artistic Director and CEO John Gibson has long observed the ebb and flow of arts terminology. “There are trends in everything, and there are certain language trends and social trends. At that intersection you find, among other words, the word ‘community,’” he says. “It’s useful in some ways, and those ways have to do with values, but its lack of usefulness comes from a lack of specificity. It’s like ‘diversity’ or ‘accountability.’ Everyone thinks they know what they mean by those words.”
The values to which Gibson alludes have to do with connecting people to stories. Indeed, Gibson is often heard to describe Live Arts as Charlottesville’s storytellers. That web of connection might come through working the concession stand at a show or taking the lead under the spotlight—all in service to theater and social meaning. “Our premise has been that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things, and it really comes from finding the right match and finding the right role,” Gibson says.
For Leah Stoddard, who directs Second Street Gallery, community means finding ways to 
convince people who would never dream they belong in an art gallery that there’s a place for them there. That doesn’t necessarily mean displaying the Crayola inspirations of Charlottesville’s many weekend artists. But Second Street puts on 15 outreach programs annually that “at the core are about accessing the living artist,” she says. “I want to break down elitist preconceptions of the white cube gallery being uninviting, not being for a broader audience.”
Playback Charlottesville, an improvisational theater organization that acts out real-life stories volunteered by regular people, makes “healing” its business, says Mecca Burns, a drama therapist with a six-year affiliation with Playback. In that regard, “community” seems to bear the sheen of social service.
Storytelling, breaking down elitist barriers, healing whatever ails a population—disparate notions of “community,” yes? No. At least not in the hands of Liz Lerman. In fact, all three of those concepts intersected in her very first stab at weaving the kind of collaborative, participatory, high-concept dance theater that would ultimately make her international reputation. That piece, called “Woman of the Clear Vision,” found the young D.C.-based choreographer grappling with her mother’s death and its apt artistic expression. To make the dance, she eventually enlisted elderly folks from a senior center, creating an indelible matrix of intergenerational, variously trained, community-oriented dancers. From those roots, Lerman’s big questions—Who gets to dance? What are the dances about? Where does the dance occur? And, why does dance matter?—took hold.
Out of these disparate impulses the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange was formed. And, to this day, the company remains an intergenerational, multicultural, topical dance organization. As much a facilitator of other people’s storytelling as she is a storyteller herself, Lerman has brought her troupe and its techniques (interviews, dance-making games, site-specific choreography) around the world. Not that her objective is limited to missionary work. Her Takoma Park, Maryland, studio is home to many institutes and workshops throughout the year, where professional trained dancers and nontrained, nonprofessional dancers alike can learn how to connect on important issues by collaborating on a dance.
Carole Baroody Corcoran, a recent transplant to Crozet, participated in one such “senior institute” in Maryland. When she heard that Lerman’s company was seeking local performers to join them in certain pieces slated for the Paramount show, she didn’t hesitate to get involved again (about three dozen locals will take the stage during the Dance Exchange’s performance here on May 20). “What was so great about Liz Lerman’s institute is that we created a piece of art,” Corcoran says. “It was a cross-generational, political and personal piece. I would have never thought that, without training, I could create something that’s also art. That was the transformative part. We had to create a dance in four days and perform it—me, a young Jewish woman in her teens, a Mexican American woman in her 30s,” says Corcoran, who is 52. “We created this dance talking about how there is a word in other languages that means ‘witnessing’ and ‘experiencing’ at the same time.”
The goal of Dance Exchange is for events like the Paramount performance, with its heavy community involvement, to take hold and flower into an expression of “community art” that is uniquely Charlottesville. Or Portsmouth. Or San Francisco. Or Gdansk. (All places where Dance Exchange has done community residencies and staged performances using locals.)
Lerman was often misunderstood (and sometimes derided) in the early years. Dances with talking? Dances about the defense budget? Dances with old people or people in wheelchairs? “What the hell is this?” you could practically hear the critics saying. But participants didn’t scoff, and neither did the MacArthur Foundation—in 2002, the highly respected organization granted Lerman one of its “genius” fellowships.
Lerman and I first met in 1990, when she and Dance Exchange traveled to Madison, Wisconsin (not far from her childhood home in Milwaukee). My earliest encounter with her
techniques was in a senior center, and—being a brash young critic with strong opinions about dance—my first thought was (you guessed it) “What the hell is this?” But talking to Lerman that night, and continuing to watch her closely (sometimes very closely) over the years, has taught me more about the nature of art than any other artistic encounter I’ve had. With great admiration and affection, I chatted with her last week about the fickle definition of “community,” how she maintains interest in her work after three decades, and what it means to be dubbed a “genius.” Here’s some of what she had to say.
Cathy Harding: In all the years we’ve talked about your work, I don’t know if we’ve ever actually discussed this directly, Liz: What does the word “exchange” mean in the context of what your company is doing?
Liz Lerman: Initially the idea of exchange was simply that there would be different artistic voices within the organization exchanging views. I wanted different backgrounds, different voices, different aesthetics from which to build both a company, a school and a point of view about dance. Now, it grew over the years because of all of our work in communities, and because of the idea of collaboration, which is so key to our work. I feel like it’s actually a good word to underscore what we mean by “collaboration,” which is not a one-way street but a two-way—often multiple ways in which people are gaining from each other.
On this subject of collaboration, it must have thrilled you to see that the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Dance Exchange did a two-year residency under the auspices of the Music Hall there, received a state award for a community arts organization that grew from your project. The press up there says the city arts organization dates right back to your Naval Shipyard project in the ’90s.
Yeah, it’s amazing, it’s wonderful and I think, from various places we’ve been over the years, there are little offshoots or tendrils of activities. That’s a big one because it went to a funding place.
On that note, this will be Dance Ex-change’s second visit to Charlottesville, and I understand there’s hope for a continuing relationship with the Paramount. How would that take shape, since the Paramount is a presenting organization?
Some presenters are starting to look at art now—art and art-making—as a possible substitute for a town commons. The idea is that all the ways in which we’ve broken up within society have a place to come back together for various reasons—some just for pure pleasure, but sometimes because of the content of the work. And I think many presenters see their role as having expanded. In that context, those presenters are the people that we like to build long-term relationships with because we know the work won’t just be in the concert hall.
Dance is the medium, but really Dance Exchange is about storytelling. Post-9/11, post-Katrina, there’s something about catastrophe that revives this art. Do you feel like Dance Exchange is in exactly the right place at exactly the right time?
Younger generations are seeking narrative again—albeit complicated, broken-up, nonlinear narrative. The desire for narrative is very present, including this sort of oral history, or basing it on the stories of real people, which we’ve been doing forever…you know, reality television is, in a way, an expression of that same desire. And so there’s definitely something afoot, and it turns out that the practices and principals we’ve been developing over these years are of use. They’re exactly in line with what people want, need, are hoping for.
After 30 years, what keeps the whole pro-cess fun for you?
Well, one of the things that makes it really fun is the nature of inquiry—what it is that we’re thinking about, and how lucky I am to get to keep discovering. I’m so lucky. I mean, I learn—but I realized during the big piece on genetics that I’ve been working on that it’s not the learning, it’s the discovery. It’s that moment when you put two things together, and you go, “Oh” and “Of course,” that’s what I’m trying to give audiences. I want them to have that, too. I want them to have a moment where they go, “Oh, right.”
You know, I could never have been a historian. I mean, I could have never submitted myself to academic rigor of, say, certain kinds of writing or books. I appreciate the rigor of the stage. But what the rigor of the stage allows me is a little bit more room to play with multiple ideas at once, to juxtapose things against each other, to be personal, passionate and somewhat dispassionate at the same time. Maybe other disciplines don’t allow you that kind of freedom—or, I should say, I’ve taken that kind of freedom. Without the stage, I don’t think it would be so much fun.
“Community.” Applied to art, sometimes it’s a just-add-water concept. It could mean any-thing. In 30 years you’ve seen these trends ebb and flow. The bottom line: What are you and Dance Exchange saying when you use that word, “community,” nowadays?
I probably mean overlapping circles of identities or of commitment or of the way people live. It’s like a permeable membrane for me that describes why some people have gathered together for a while. And it might mean they’ve gathered just for this piece, or we might have the community of that audience that night. When I talk about community-based work, I generally mean work that has contacted and been involved with people who might either be on stage or in the audience, who aren’t part of the professional company. It often will mean that for me. But you know I use the word with a lot more discretion now, just for exactly the reason you’re saying. There are so many versions of it.
Do these multiple meanings of the word concern you?
I’d rather people be fresh in their way of thinking about what a thing is. So I know that, even for me, when I hear people use the word, depending on who’s saying it, I may or may not challenge what they mean by it.
So, Liz, talk a little bit about getting the MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. I imagine the temptation would have been there for a second to sit back and say, “There, now I’ve arrived.” But I know you and my guess is that it actually fired you to strive further.
In reality, the first second of getting it made me feel the weight of all those years of work. I could barely stand up. I felt some elation, you know—there was an initial jump of joy, but then I sat down and I could hardly stand up. I became aware of those thousands and thousands of hours of work. So that was fairly interesting to me. I think winning it created an opportunity to actually make me more bold, and it certainly has made my partners more bold. I’m very persuasive and I know that I can get anybody to do anything, just about, but I can skip the first 20 steps most of the time now if they see MacArthur. People used to sit back and say, “O.K., show me.” Now they sit forward and they say, “So when are we going to get started?”
I imagine that one thing that stays constant for you is the basic discipline of being a dancer and a choreographer. What’s your routine?
For me it’s a little different because I don’t perform now, although I might again in a few years—I’m debating that. But for me, the rigor is in the mental relationship to what I’m trying to achieve. It’s a combination: the way I ask questions, the way I measure whether I’m doing a good job or not, and the way I fix it when I don’t think I am. And I think that that hasn’t changed at all. Maybe what’s changed is that I don’t beat myself up quite so much, which only means I can go deeper in my own inquiry.
With your own training as a historian and your parents’ political background, and being based in the Washington area and with your history of doing dances about things like defense budgets, I’ve got to think you’re going mad with the current political situation. Really, how do you keep yourself from not waking up every day and making an impeachment dance?
It’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? I’m actually musing about the fact that my 60th birthday is coming up, and I’m thinking about doing a docu-dance for that.