Everybody Say Hallelujah: the Minneapolis, Minnesota, residency

Hallelujah/Minneapolis: In Praise of Beauty and Disorder
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis, Minnesota
June 17, 2001

Acts of God and acts of terrorism intervened in the "Hallelujahs" for Minneapolis and southern Michigan. In Minneapolis, the performance took place outdoors — in the rain. And in Michigan, the Dance Exchange was in a community workshop during the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001, which would overshadow not only "Hallelujah," but everything, for a long time to come.

"Mysterious circumstances arise," said Liz Lerman, looking back on those interventions and quoting a Los Angeles "Hallelujah" participant. In the process of every substantial residency, Lerman told me, something unexpected comes along to change the course of things, and you have to be ready for that change. To observe "Hallelujah" is to watch a company of artists always in improvisation mode, on their toes, dancing to the music of time.

Anticipation of the unexpected is the Dance Exchange’s greatest strength and greatest stumbling block. During the process of creating a new piece with 100 people, the creative funnel stays open while new information is gathered, new perspectives are incorporated. No matter how they try to prepare the community participants, everyone is dancing in the dark for most of the process. They must create the parts without knowing the precise context of the whole. They must be ready for enormous changes at the last minute. "We didn’t know what we were doing" is the most frequent complaint from performers in every "Hallelujah," and for some the tension is almost unbearable.

"There are times when I know I will be clear, and times when I have to give up any sense of clarity," said Dance Exchanger Margot Greenlee in an interview. "I understand how someone new to the process could feel confused. Two days before the performance, I have an ‘anger spike.’ I come from a discipline where you’re rehearsing something you know — far in advance — and you want everything to be the same each time. I create with as much confidence as possible and am ready for changes." Greenlee had to do some fancy dancing in Minneapolis.

Nobody should have been surprised that it rained the afternoon of June 17. During a rehearsal only two days before, the entire cast had to run for cover into the lobby of the Walker Art Center when a massive black cloud suddenly appeared over the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Darkness fell, thunder and lightning convulsed the atmosphere and hail the size of quarters bounced in the street. Even midwesterners gaped in awe as the whole garden blinked like a strobe light.

There was a rain plan. If it rained hard, the whole thing would be moved into the dance space in the Basilica of Saint Mary across the street. But that would have been to sacrifice the unique aspect of this work: performance among, within and about the massive pieces of art installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

"In Praise of Beauty and Disorder" stands out as a site-specific work. Instead of merely siting prepared choreography in the garden, the Dance Exchange and some 100 community performers created new dance works in direct response to the form and content of the monumental artworks in the garden

The13-year-old Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is the largest urban sculpture garden in the country. Its 11.2 acres are an open-air gallery for more than 40 works by artists from all over the world. The garden is a project of the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board; the Walker owns everything from the grass up (with the exception of the conservatory), and from the grass down, it belongs to Minneapolis. The garden opened in 1988 and is a significant Twin Cities landmark and gathering place. All week preceding the performance, the "Hallelujah" rehearsal was surrounded by park visitors, weddings, Father’s Day picnickers and art lovers.

The garden features four roofless galleries of identical size, lined with evergreens and separated by wide walkways. They lead to an open expanse of grass, trees and water, with the city’s skyscrapers as a backdrop. At its bottom is a 300-foot-long arbor and perennial garden. On the left side is a conservatory and to the right a bridge over I-94, connecting the garden with Loring Park. All these elements support works of art.

As in most sculpture gardens, most of the works are by men, and most of those make me think of erections. There’s Martin Puryear’s "Ampersand," two granite columns 13 feet tall and sharpened like a pencil, one piercing the sky, the other piercing the ground.

Frank Gehry’s "Standing Glass Fish" in the conservatory/greenhouse is spectacularly penile. Tony Smith’s "Amaryllis" is a piece of Cor-Ten steel, thrusting into the sky in an illusion of balance. Ellsworth Kelly’s "Double Curve" is two whopping bronze plates, slightly bent and standing 18 feet tall. There are other penis sculptures by Giacomo Manzu, Isamu Noguchi, Henry Moore, Jonathan Silver, Richard Stankiewicz, Mark di Suvero, David Nash, Alexander Calder and Charles Ginnever.

They are either crowned or goofed upon by the garden’s famous centerpiece, "Spoonbridge and Cherry" by Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen, a 5,800-pound spoon, bent upward to an unnatural angle and topped with 1,200-pound red cherry. In the summer, the cherry is wet.

Liz Lerman chose to ignore most of these erectile monuments to Modernism, and selected a complement of more recent works for the Minneapolis piece. Barry Flanagan’s "Hare on Bell on Portland Stone Piers," which looks exactly like a hare on a bell; Nari Ward’s "Rites of Way," an installation created in a community-arts residency and memorializing a St. Paul neighborhood obliterated by Interstate 94; Sol Lewitt’s "X with Columns," two lines of cinderblock punctuated by openings and crossed in the form of an X; Brower Hatcher’s "Prophecy of the Ancients," four stone pillars supporting an inverted mesh dome; Judith Shea’s "Without Words," a rumpled bronze raincoat, an elegant cocktail dress and the fragment of a molded head; and others. A significant dance work was done inside one of the roofless galleries, in the Jenny Holzer piece, "Selections from The Living Series," a rectangle of granite benches inscribed with Holzer’s manufactured aphorisms. Another roofless gallery did pay tribute to Modernism with a segment of the Dance Exchange’s homage to Ted Shawn, "In Praise of Fertile Fields," performed in and around pieces by Kelly, Smith and Richard Serra.

Some observers said it was the first time they had seen or heard of a piece performed in, with and about the artworks in a sculpture garden. Philip Bither, the Walker’s performing arts curator, noted, "We have had a lot of projects by artists in the sculpture garden – Ann Carlson, Merce Cunningham, Elizabeth Streb — but most used the garden more as a set piece and focused on their own work. This piece attempted to address the forms and nature of the sculptures and to fully utilize the garden."

"In Praise of Beauty and Disorder" was structured in four parts. In the dress rehearsal, it opened on the steps of the Walker, with the audience sitting on the curbs of the sidewalk across the street. It featured the Dance Exchange company in a graceful/comical wedding scene, accompanied by Bob Een’s music on live violin, viola, percussion and cello — along with Lucas Zarwell’s recorded sounds of shattering glass. Above them, hanging from the railings of the roof terrace, was a table set for a banquet, but slightly skewed and in apparent danger of falling on the dancers. While they performed love duets and a series of dances people do at weddings, Margot Greenlee and Vincent Thomas waltzed regally as bride and groom. The rest of the company formed a string of dancers on a diagonal down the big staircase, holding hands, passing wedding-banquet plates.

MC Peter DiMuro took a microphone and told a story about his family dinners: His mother always chose china with off-center patterns because she thought they were more beautiful. He told another story about Buddha holding a large diamond over the cavity where the world would be born, and dropping it. It shattered into millions of pieces, all beautiful. This was a creation story, he said, to illustrate that all humans come from the same origin.

DiMuro then split the crowd into two sections and sent them off into separate rooms in the garden behind them. After the performances in those rooms, they were to switch sides, assuring that both groups saw both pieces.

For "Benches" in the "Holzer room," the audience proceeded around the rectangle and took up places facing into the center, where Twin Cities dancers from a conglomerate "All Come" group performed a piece they had created during the residency. Moving on and about the benches, the dancers sometimes lay under them, their bodies horizontal to the granite forms, and sometimes sat on the ground, their legs and feet under the benches, while they mimed carving the words on top. Accompanied by Aaron Barnell on a zjell (a xylophone from Ghana), a group of dancers carried another dancer through the air above the benches while she read their texts into a microphone:

In the Kelly-Smith-Serra "room," the Lerman company performed "the men’s section" from "In Praise of Fertile Fields," from the "Hallelujah" created at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2000. This section, "Jacob’s Pillow: Field Section and Jacaranda," celebrated the style of the founders of Jacob’s Pillow, Ted Shawn and his wife Ruth St. Denis, especially St. Denis’ use of flowing fabric and the boldly muscular pre-Modernist style of Shawn’s Men Dancers. It included a double duet: a man and woman, and two men.

Thereafter the audience was directed into the larger garden to wander about on a "scavenger hunt’ of dances.

All around Flanagan’s "Hare on Bell on Portland Stone Piers," children from Young Dance, a company of 8-18-year-olds, performed "Rabbit Run," a series of frantic running phrases carried off without a hitch.

"Lifelines," a piece beneath the mesh dome of Brower Hatcher’s "Prophecy of the Ancients," was performed by dancers from the "All Come" group and North High School. Women from the Jeremiah program, an education and economic-assistance program for low-income mothers and with children, contributed short recorded stories about moments in their lives that had produced unexpected outcomes — reunions with lost parents, an enlightening encounter with a homeless person. To this soundtrack, the dancers wove a giant cat’s cradle of string under the dome, echoing the structure of its web, then danced within it.

Teenage girls from Sheridan Global Arts and Communications School danced "Yeah! We’re Like Wow" beneath di Suvero’s "Molecule," three monumental steel beams forming a tripod, painted red and pointing off at several angles. The girls danced together and separately in sharply different directions while voicing answers to the unfinished sentences "I am …" "I was …" "I will be …"

In "Four Fathers, Four Corners," at Lewitt’s "X with Columns," four storytellers from the "All Come" group appeared in sequence in the doorway-shaped opening of the sculpture and told stories about beauty and disorder intersecting in their lives with their fathers. Honoring Father’s Day (June 17), one told the tale of her father, who was a poor communicator with his family until he contracted cancer of the larynx and couldn’t speak. Each quadrant of the sculpture featured a different father story told by a different teller in counterpoint to a short piece by three dancers, using gestures drawn from the stories. The same dance was repeated in each quadrant, offering the possibility that the movement might take on a different meaning or have a different relationship to the text. This piece was choreographed by Margot Greenlee.

Farther down the garden, Ward's "Rites of Way" is a structure based on the floor plan of a 1940-41 ice palace, designed by Clarence Wiginton, the first African-American architect in St. Paul. Small houses, elevated above a field of clear-beaded curtains that call to mind dripping or freezing water, hold photos and documentation of houses destroyed in the Rondo neighborhood in 1964 to make way for Interstate 94. The objects were donated by community members, photographed onto clay tablets and preserved in hanging bundles inside the houses. They may be viewed from beneath. In the dance work, "Whistle Blowing," sound was as important as movement. Dancers from Young Dance blew whistles while they moved in unison through the clacking beaded curtains, standing, running, lying down.

At the bottom of the garden, for "Arbor Stories," seniors from the Southwest Senior Center and the St. Paul Jewish Community Center appeared under the arbor, some in wheelchairs, while dancers on the grass facing them performed to the seniors’ recorded stories — some about love. The dancers, from Art and Religion in the Twin Cities and Rimon, the Minnesota Council on Jewish Arts, then proceeded to Judith’s Shea’s "Without Walls" and performed "Coats and Rituals," a short piece in raincoats, echoing the bronze raincoat in the sculpture.

Each of these pieces in the scavenger hunt was to be performed three times, giving the audience ample opportunity to see at least a large portion of them. Following that sequence, the whole cast came together in front of the arbor for Part Three, a piece of mass choreography with china plates that came to be called "The Plate Dance." Peter DiMuro told another creation myth, this time a Norse legend about the god Thor breaking the ice god into a million pieces. Live musical accompaniment was integrated again with Zarwell’s sound work composed of shattering and crashing glass. In the middle of the piece, about 40 children obligingly smashed its stately order by running through it at breakneck speed. Then the whole company moved into the trees near the Shea piece and performed a phrase in which they fell to the ground, then rose to contemplate the trees.

Part Four of the piece occurred on a raised stage near Siah Armjani’s bridge over the Interstate. There the Dance Exchange was to perform two repertory pieces, an excerpt from "Blessed," choreographed by Bebe Miller, and the signature "Hallelujah" work "Gates of Praise." In addition, there was a new piece on the program, "Minneapolis: Egg Dances" by the teenage dance company from the Association for the Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota along with the Dance Exchange Company, choreographed by Peter DiMuro. The dances were preceded by a short performance by the Basilica of Saint Mary International Gospel Choir.

Much of this program was still in process even during the dress rehearsal, with many alterations at the last minute. Major change occurred during the actual performance. Because at curtain time it definitely looked like rain, DiMuro told the audience they would have to choose to see only one of the "rooms." During those pieces, the rain began in a soft drizzle, but the audience bore up bravely, some ducking under umbrellas, others holding umbrellas over the musicians. To shorten, but not abandon, the time frame, the scavenger-hunt pieces were performed only once, not three times, fragmenting the audience experience even further. New bits were added to the margins of the performance, improvisationally incorporating some of the dancers who had not been able to make it to the rehearsals. Margot Greenlee and Peter DiMuro — dressed as a bride and groom — captured audience members on the sidewalk, listened to (and videotaped) their stories and performed the stories’ gestures back to them.

There was a brief timing dysfunction, so the audience did not all arrive at the plate dance simultaneously. DiMuro carried off some brave feats of emcee improvisation to keep the audience laughing till the rest arrived. By this time, approximately one-third of them had fled the rain.

For Part Four, on the raised stage, volunteers attempted to dry the marley with mops and a giant squeegee, but nothing could keep it from being as slick as ice. The audience huddled under umbrellas and gazed up at the performance with apprehension, waiting for the drenched dancers to slip and fall. They seemed delighted by the Hmong piece, a mixture of traditional Hmong dance forms and Dance Exchange narrative gesture. At the end of the performance, Lerman got a thunderous ovation while the bells from the Basilica rang out.

It is hard to describe the blissful expressions on the faces of those who stuck it out to the very end, as if they had accomplished something miraculous. "The last 30 minutes was the best stuff I ever participated in," said Liz Lerman later. "For people who stayed it was totally spiritual." The participants repaired to the roof dining room of the Walker, where they met in small groups and talked about their experience of the piece. "At the post party, I had to take Thomas (Dwyer) to the airport because his partner Rachel was dying. The rain was her tears," said Lerman. "I got back in time for the small groups. It was wonderful, beautiful. This one was magical, maybe spiritual. People knew something was happening that no one thought was going to happen. Something new. I saw people start to cry. The rain was such a beautiful rain. It was kind of cleansing. People were very connected, huddling together, close to the action. Close to the will to create."

One reason I have taken on the massive job of following and reviewing "Hallelujah" is to attempt to include the entire residency project in the dimensions of the artwork. But if public performance is part of the residency, then it, too must be reviewed. I warn the reader that I have seen more than my share of performance art and community-art process, but am not an experienced dance reviewer.

Overall, it was a privilege to be there for this one-time-only event. I prefer my performance outside — outside the museum, outside the theater, outside the mainstream. I also prefer work that incorporates first-time artists, the more the better. Almost nothing can drag me into a theater anymore, except the prospect of ordinary people making art. Lerman is well known for this kind of work, but perhaps less well known is her fanaticism about quality — not just for new performers, but for her professional dancers as well. The formality of her inclusion of the Jacob’s Pillow piece and the Bebe Miller work testifies to that. Every "Hallelujah" audience gets some professional dance work to satisfy their appetites.

Personally, I don’t love dance. For me, in "Hallelujah," it is only a holder for Lerman’s world-view, her inclusion of everything and everybody whenever she can. It is rare to find an artist so obsessed with every minute of the process of artmaking and just as passionate about the lofty ideals that guide the work (and life) itself. It has been said Lerman is a rabbi in artist’s clothing, as engaged with practice as she is with theory. The more time you spend with her, the less possible it is to argue with that.

While I had my problems with some important aspects of this residency, I am still enthralled, and as is usual with this work, it is hard to put a finger on what feels so miraculous about it. I clearly recall one moment, about three days before the performance, crossing the street between the Walker and the garden with the hair standing up on the back of my neck. There was an eerie feeling of luck and serendipity, of being in an extraordinary place at a fortunate time.

Lerman’s mass choreography can be stunning on the stage in a theater — all those body types, all those cultures, males and females 8 to 80, moving in one direction together — but to be surrounded by it, as far as you can see or hear, in a garden filled with art, that’s something.

The rain was a blessing in many ways, but in the last analysis, it cracked the structure of the work. It did create something new, but something was lost as well.

In my view, this piece was hampered not only by the rain, but by its attitude toward narrative. This site-specific work was entirely a different animal from a linear stage production. The audience was flung out all over the garden, and there was no chance that they would experience it in any predetermined sequence. Almost every part of the piece incorporated language, either live or recorded. Stories were told in their entirety or piecemeal, with phrases stacked upon each other like shuffled cards. It is one thing to deconstruct narrative and displace its momentum with disorder, mirroring the chaos of contemporary life, in a defined space like a theater. It is another to tantalize a roaming audience with scattered text, as if beckoning them to a meaning they couldn’t possibly grasp. For some observers, the frustration produced a strange feeling of failure. Several audience members told me it was this fragmentation of the narrative that drove them away, not the rain.

One of the dancers in the piece, Wendy Morris, addressed this problem: "There’s an inherent problem in combining narrative text, abstract movement and sculpture. The text invites the audiences’ minds onto a linear track, and then what you give them to engage with kinesthetically and visually demands that their minds let go of a linear structure."

Dance Exchange Humanities Director John Borstel responded to the narrative elements differently: "One thing that was notable to me about the Minneapolis performance was the aggregate effect of experiencing the stories and content at each of the sites around the garden. They may have appeared disjointed or disconnected taken one by one, but as I moved around I started to perceive little associative resonances between them, ways that the stories seemed to talk to each other, to cross-reference each other in subtle ways. Some of this may have been by design, but more of it, I think, was the natural happenstance that occurs when disparate material is juxtaposed — much like what happens when we build a phrase, then add a new text to it, and a significant gesture coincides with words that seem to reflect it ... very postmodern.

"Thus the audience member was placed somewhat in the role of constructing their own narrative, based on the order in which they experience the material and the personal references they brought with them. This challenge is going to alienate some as it fascinates others. I'll admit that I experienced these threads more intensely in the dress rehearsal, where there was more opportunity to see and hear more of the material."

I disagree with Borstel here. In addition, I found it problematic to expect repeated gesture and image to carry over such a wide expanse of time and space. Many observers were mystified by the wedding imagery and the significance of plates. Lerman may have relied too much on the introduction she and DiMuro (the project leader) presented in the program, handed out to audience members as they hustled to find a spot on the sidewalk before the piece started. There was simply no time to read it, and it found its way into pockets, purses and the gutter.

In the program, Lerman and DiMuro framed the work as a meditation on the theme of "beauty and disorder," and asked the audience to watch for moments when these concepts surface — "what’s beautiful, what’s disordered, when are the two the same and when are they next-door neighbors. The way the event is structured is in itself a formulation of some concepts inherent in the theme. But we also hope you’ll find plenty to watch that’s interesting just for what it is — whether inspired by the wonders of the Garden or by the stories of love, death, birth and creation that kept emerging when we asked people to tell us about a time when they experienced beauty and disorder together in the same moment."

Through this lens, one can see the piece proceeding from the order of the strictly delineated "rooms" at the top of the garden into the chaos of the scavenger hunt, and finally coming together at the bottom of the garden in the mass dance piece by all the participants. Scattered throughout were stories about incongruity, accident, paradox and surprise. Even setting aside the narrative problems described above, it is hard to see how the audience could have grasped the frame without reading the program notes.

I discussed these matters with Lerman, and she responded, "I hope it was like a necklace: You go piece to piece and hear a full bead. Overriding everything was the beauty and messiness of creation. Each piece was beautiful. There was an arc from beginning to end, and each piece was complete in itself. Text played differently in each one. Other things contributed to the arc, like the Buddha story in the beginning and the wedding in the opening, then the reappearance of the wedding couple in the closing. There was birth, death and love, beauty and disorder. In the best of all worlds, I would have tried to formulate stories link-to-link, but we all struggled so much. The plates appeared on the dining room table symbolizing beauty in the ordinary, which falls apart, breaks up. For theater people that’s no structure, and for dance, it’s structure. The text I like best is what you get from poetry. Beauty and disorder, order and disorder, the expected and the unexpected. Peter tried to tell people that they weren’t going to see it all."

Lerman said she was broken-hearted that the audience didn’t get to see both rooms at the top of the garden, because she felt the structure-into-chaos motif would have shed some light on the use of both text and movement. She was especially fond of the Jacob’s Pillow piece in the Kelly- Smith-Serra room. "The minute I walked into that room at the sculpture garden," she said, "I thought of these sections. I thought the softness of the fabric and the music and the men would look so great against the green and the black and the rigidity of the sculpture. And then, with the duets, the sculpture took on other dimensions — hiding places, rooms, people watching. It was about the sexual innuendo as well as ambivalence of Shawn. Well, actually, I think he was bisexual, in that his passion for Ruth was real as his passion for the men."

If they do another site-specific work, Lerman said, they will try harder to get the narrative structure working. "Text wasn’t so important in this piece," she allowed "just a tool. I was excited about the overarching visual images that recurred. It was important to Kazu [Nakamura] — the plates, the tables — he talked about it more than others. We kept returning to it. It’s a narrative device. I think we’re onto something new for narrative. Kazu doesn’t know how to think in small pieces. Ask him a question and he always starts at the beginning and goes to the end. He’s very imagistic. I love hearing him do this. I warned him there were too many visuals and we talked about which to drop. The part he helped me keep was the table. He carried it for a while and I came back. He held it for me. When I came back it was still there."

Lerman regretted that the audience did not get to see "Gates of Praise." "‘Gates’ was set in triangles with stars, like heaven has crashed to earth," she said wistfully. Because the stage was slippery with rain, she said, "Bebe’s piece was like heaven and earth: They had to keep bent knees, use their torsos twice as much. The top half was in heaven, the bottom on earth. The audience had to feel they were important, necessary. We wanted them to see the stage show so they would go away full. I’m glad we did this one. There was a lot of praise in this one. I was nuts about the Hmong dance. Our presence made people look at that dance. In a festival, you see a Cambodian dance, you walk past it. For Americans it all looks alike."

She much appreciated the graceful contributions of dancer Martha Wittman, who appeared handling eggs in various places throughout the garden, followed and led by a musician playing a tuba. "Martha and the tuba guy: She’s in Holzer with the eggs and in he comes. She follows. She’d look at him, play with the eggs, stop the sound, bowl with the eggs. Martha is like a complete artist in every sense. I leave her to her own devices and off she goes. Look over at her and she’s improvising. It was an idea born partly out of the scheduling conflict, because she came in late. It was a happy accident. So much is like that. We have so many ideas, they are like horses lined up at the gate. We try to catch just one."

Given its monumental scale, its site-specific nature and the numbers of participants involved, Walker Curator Philip Bither was concerned about everything in the project, especially final artistic quality. A presenter of the Walker’s reputation has a lot to lose. "There’s a split in the curatorial world about this work, even Liz’s," he told me "that it’s not valid. Others might do it only to develop partnerships process. Yet, I chose to move forward with Liz and ‘Hallelujah’ because I was convinced of its potential both as remarkable process and as a very accomplished, powerful final product."

Bither felt the performance "was up and down a little. The conceptual thread was not clear. The themes of beauty and disorder, linked with the production elements, didn’t come off. Some of it was due to the rushed nature due to the rain, some verged on a community-theater level. It was not one of the strongest in all of its artistic elements," he went on. "But it was incredibly beautiful for me — the plate dance, the Hmong company — it was very special in the face of natural disorder. The last hour and a half in the Walker restaurant with 150 participants of all races and ages mixed together at tables reliving and sharing, reinforced the positives."

I will attempt a deeper look into Lerman’s choreographic style later in these stories. But more intriguing to me is her stylistic influence on the shape of the whole residency, from its first appearance as a gleam in the presenter’s eye to the last echo of activity that happens in its wake, sometime weeks, months or years later. It’s all art to Lerman, and I agree.

The Minneapolis residency was produced by a partnership among the Dance Exchange, Walker Art Center, Intermedia Arts, Minnesota Dance Alliance (MDA) and Rimon. One notable issue in this residency was the negotiation between this team and the artists of Twin Cities.

The Walker Art Center is a major U.S. presenter of visual arts, film/video and performing arts, with some 80 performing-arts presentations and commissions every year, and dozens of partnerships. "Taking on large-scale, residency-based new work is something we pride ourselves in doing," said Philip Bither, curator of performing arts. Bither worked with Lerman on the original concept of "Hallelujah" when he was at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vt. There he also helped conceptualize other major community dance works with choreographers Bill T. Jones and David Dorfman. By the time "Hallelujah" was presented in Burlington, Bither had moved to the Walker.

In contemplating the Minneapolis residency, Bither partnered with other local organizations. "The decision to do it," he said, "was based not just on my longstanding belief in Liz's vision, but also on the fact that Intermedia and MDA were equally committed to a relationship with the Dance Exchange." [Rimon joined the team later on.] All four organizations had either collaborated with Liz Lerman in the past or knew of her work. "The fact was that four organizations in town believed in one artist, shared belief in one project. It so nicely integrated into the missions of each organization. We were clear with each other because Liz helped."

Intermedia Arts is a multidisciplinary center with an almost rabid dedication to both cutting-edge contemporary art and to engaging their communities in social and human issues. They present a calendar packed with exhibitions, performances and intriguing concepts, from fellowships and mentorships to potent youth programming to formal training in partnership for arts organizations to a tour of Minneapolis neighborhoods in which families bring their own art out into their front yards for exhibition. The latter is part of THICKER THAN WATER: Art as a Family Value, a multifaceted intergenerational program. Intermedia’s education and community-development coordinator, the inexhaustible Sandy Agustin, played a major organizational role in "Hallelujah," leaping into breaches wherever they occurred.

Rimon, an initiative of the Department of Identity and Continuity of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, calls itself the Minnesota Jewish Arts Council. It works to promote and strengthen Jewish identity through arts and culture and to cultivate relationships between Jewish artists, the Jewish community and non-Jewish institutions. Among many projects in its short history, Rimon has created a regional Jewish artists directory, as well as two ambitious conferences, "Arts and the American Jewish Experience" and "Arts and the Jewish Community." Rimon's co-chair, artist David Harris, provided yeoman’s service to the project, particularly in organizing and transporting community participants.

Minnesota Dance Alliance’s mission is "to create an environment that celebrates dance" in the state. MDA’s Dance Infusion program was instituted to "connect dancers with nondance environments," said Executive Director June Wilson. "We tried to pair local artists with Liz to connect them to communities so there would be a legacy after the project was through." It was through MDA that the partnership approached the thorny issue of inclusion and recognition of Minneapolis’ professional dance community.

Including local artists is always a problem for an artist from outside the community. In the Twin Cities, it was particularly sticky because many local choreographers have a long record of doing community-based work. This local work has meager support, compared with the budget that must be raised for a months- or years-long residency by the Dance Exchange.

Philip Bither, in his interview, addressed "the tensions in the active dance community here. There are 300-400 people making a living in the dance world. There are 15-20 ongoing companies. There was resistance from the artists to this project. Their question was: ‘Why does all the attention have to go to Liz, when we need it ourselves?’ It made me stop and question. There are artists who have made their living doing dance with the community. Some were dubious. Some chose to have certain kinds of connections. Some of the most vocal critics ended up being the happiest."

"How do you value local dancers in a project like this?" asked June Wilson. "We tried to value Liz, but it created an odd tension. We convened meetings, but sensed a barrier to openness. No matter what we did the local artists felt not valued.

"There are issues around the quality of the local artists’ work," said Wilson, "and it’s because of the choices they have made. It often feels like local artists aren’t putting rigor and consistency in their art form, and their engagement with the community. But there are not enough resources to keep them working. They need time to energize and nurture themselves."

Artistic work, whether personal or in communities, said Wilson, will be done by people who can afford it. "Economic needs are huge. Artistic engagement is a luxury for some communities. Until, as a society, we are willing to put value toward this engagement, it will always be a luxury. We don’t want to have people just survive, we want to make a life."

Community-arts work is costly to the artists, said Wilson. "Our artistic palette becomes narrower because of time spent in community work, which means there is less support because grant panels see low quality in the work samples. At the local level, what’s important is process. There are not enough resources for both good process and good product. Also, local dancers don’t maintain their companies. You shift where you’re putting your focus. Community artists focus on community. We haven’t yet said there’s a value in both."

Local movement artist Wendy Morris, who has been working with Twin Cities communities for 13 years, analyzed the problem: "Many local dancers with a lot of experience in the field didn’t want to be in a student position to Liz. In the local dance community there were questions in the air about the sponsors spending so many resources for a large-scale community-based residency with an outsider, when there is already good work going on here that remains unsupported. With Liz, the sponsors were able to raise the money to do this project ‘well,’ at a level of support that local artists don’t have access to."

Minnesota artists, like all others, struggle for support, but in fact they operate in a relatively comfortable environment compared to some communities. The state is well known nationally for its generous foundations and sophisticated government agencies. According to Minneapolis Star Tribune writer Rohan Preston, this generosity of support has its downside. "There is significant support for, and patronage of, the arts in the Twin Cities," Preston told me, "which makes it a great area for artists and families. I believe that artists should be paid well and always for their works. The challenge of such broad support for the arts is that it can foster mediocrity, a risk-averse, disengaged contentedness, especially if artists measure themselves in their own mirrors. Such things can distort the art in the scene, which becomes interior and more interested in self-perpetuation than in strong work."

"Rather than making dancers comfortable," said Liz Lerman, "I favor making them entrepreneurs. You’ve got to keep everybody looking for opportunities." The Twins Cities dancers’ resistance to her project reflects a larger struggle for visibility in dance, in Lerman’s opinion. "Many of the local artists are middle-aged, mostly Modern dancers. The Hmong dancers are thrilled, the theater people are thrilled. Who’s not thrilled? The people with profiles like mine. My hair is gray, I don’t move that well. But what’s actually happening to them is that they are being aced out by multiculturalism, they are aced out by pop culture, by hip-hop, potentially by younger dancers. But the dance world has to make room for these forms. It’s a movement vocabulary issue: Movement I generate personally is not as interesting as Marvin’s or Elizabeth’s [younger members of the Dance Exchange company]. I figure out ways to keep them challenged. If I only had people as good as me or less good than me — what a drag."

All eyes were on the "Hallelujah" partners as they tussled with the resistance of some members of the local dance community. Lerman’s determination to confront this problem is typical of her unwillingness to turn away from adversity. "The hell in ‘Hallelujah’ is not dealing with issues," she said.

The solution: ambassadors. A number of local artists were hired to act in liaison between the Dance Exchange and the community. Their jobs were to keep the people in their groups informed of the process and the rehearsals, to be on hand for them and secure their transportation, and to work with the company to help the groups generate creative work for the piece. This was designed to help build the piece, keep the ship on keel while the Dance Exchangers were out of town dealing with other projects, and to create relationships that could carry on in the community after the project was over.

I was on hand for a meeting with the ambassadors a week before the performance, while much of the creative work was still going on. Lerman used the meeting to prepare them for the uncertainty and almost constant revision ahead of them. Sitting in a circle on a stage in the Walker’s theater space, they talked with Lerman about what they had been learning in the project, received some training in the "Hallelujah" process and learned something about ownership.

The dance experience of the ambassadors ranged widely, but everybody had at least a little. In addition, some ambassadors were already in the project, like Sandy Agustin, David Harris and Kiyoko Motoyama Sims, associate director of community programs at the Walker. The group also included Leatha Swinehart, a dance major at the University of Minnesota; Barbara Rhudy, a student at United Seminary; Claire Tallen Ruen, a volunteer with Catholic Charities; Roberta Puzon, dance teacher at Sheridan; Sher Demeter and Luann Lanning, local dancers; Kimberly Richardson and April Sellars, teachers at North High; Wendy Morris, local movement artist; and Margot Greenlee of the Dance Exchange.

The meeting was an example of Lerman’s trademark teaching/workshop style: Draw forth material from the participants and build toward central issues for the group. Lerman began with a question of her own — "My fears bring up aesthetic questions: Are we compromising artistically or not, and when does that open the door?" — then posed three questions to the group: 1. What about sustaining the work after the project is over? 2. How does the work evolve? 3. Who owns it? "Listen to everyone’s answers," she suggested, "and see how you would organize her questions."

A typical contribution came from April Sellars: "I've been teaching and choreographing, but I never wanted to perform myself. This has opened me up to ways to get my students to reflect. I struggle to collaborate with my students, and their ideas are sometimes off the map. Working with Southwest Seniors, I see collaboration in a different way. I'm in my first year of teaching at North High, building relationships with students. Our communications are different since we became involved in this. I've learned about bringing guest artists into class, and about safety. There have been no scary moments in ‘Hallelujah’ so far. I'm also choreographing my own show, struggling to work with nondancers. It's informed my process, allowed me to see pedestrian movement in a different way."

Lerman’s comment: "What did you hear in her answer? How would you structure the questions? What do you need to talk about?"

Answer: "Building relationships with students and nondancers. The safety issue."

Other questions and comments emerged: The biggest challenge with my group is going outside their definition of dance. I fear I will never see this piece because I am in it. How much will my body get to move? Can we leave our groups to go and dance? How can I put movement into the self-esteem classes I teach? There were intimate moments in the elders group; they were astonished and interested, not repulsed or pathetic. Young people don’t bring a lot of baggage; you can really be ready to work. How do you instigate two-way learning?

Several specific and useful remarks were made. Kiyoko Motoyama Sims talked about her responsibilities: "In my environment as an administrator coordinating the project, sometimes my relationship to colleagues is about following up logistics such as rehearsal schedules. At times, I'm asked to act tougher than I wanted to be. Without that we couldn't make the work."

Kimberly Richardson brought up a painful moment: "How do we move from process to rehearsal with nondancers? In the senior group, a woman felt lonely and awkward and I thought when she spoke it meant she was ready to perform, but it all came out — she felt ugly, awkward, like she was fooling around. I see a lot of shame."

Lerman responded, "At the senior center you're moved because you're seeing something true. I define a great dancer as someone committed to movement and revealing something about herself. She may be putting up a fence — and that's why people think nonprofessional work is bad."

This topic generated a teaching from Lerman about the respectfulness of the Dance Exchange process and the interchange of learning with "nondancers." Said Lerman: "We used to call people nondancers, but not any more. Now it's people new to performing, new to choreography. I look back 20 years, I was an affiliate artist and it was all one-way, no idea that I would change who's learning. When I worked in a senior home and as a grad student at George Washington U., I took students with me, and I saw them change."

Lerman cautioned them to keep their artistic standards up: "Make sure people understand why they're doing what they're doing. As soon as you're condescending and you lower your standards for yourself, believe me, they'll know. Be the best you can be. But what if your leg is this high when theirs is only this high? That’s what makes us recommit to dancing. Your best can be not raising your leg this high. I know you all want to dance. Your 100% self is a person dancing and a person person. Keep your peripheral vision up. It would be a yucky world if you lived doing only what you know you can do.".

Wendy Morris brought up an important question that went to the center of the artistic process of the Dance Exchange — their method of calling forth a personal story from a workshop participant, and then extracting one phrase or gesture from that story to use in the performance: "My fundamental question is about using postmodern deconstruction tools in soliciting close-to-the-heart material. People are so grateful to be heard, they show such generosity in giving their material to be deconstructed. Is this a subtle dishonoring?"

The question of ownership comes up in every Lerman project, and is central to her work. She calls this kind of concern "preciousness," one that causes missed opportunities. Ownership was the very issue they would work on today.

To Morris, Lerman responded, "There's a joke about borrowing things from each other's religions. A Buddhist priest and a Rabbi were talking and the Rabbi said, ‘I would love to borrow your laughing God.’ And the Buddhist said, ‘I would love to borrow your 10 Commandments — for one week."’ She then moved to a consideration about working with one foot in the art world and one in the community: "For me, when art is so embedded in its community that it’s not called art, then I wonder if art that is not embedded has its quality measured by how far it is from community — so far that you don’t even know who the dancer is," she said. "It doesn’t mean you can’t have purity. Let’s say both are important. I go here — art — because that’s where the tools are. If I divorce myself from meaning, I can sometimes do my best work. Preciousness is about the content. I can put it back in and then it may teach me something, say, about my father. But who makes closure, who decides?"

Finally, the most important question for this group was their struggle with "hats": When am I a dancer, when a choreographer, when an administrator? Lerman moved them into a workshop to show them how to deal with the hat struggle, and with the fact that the final piece was being created by them in sections all over town, then sewn together and edited by the company members, and finally by Lerman herself.

"There are many levels of choreography and editing activity going on," she said. "Do you have authority to make decisions? Check in with the person responsible for you. Articulate the stage you are in. You are the people who can set the work in our absence, especially if your group needs it. And we’ll come and check. The question is: how to be invested in choreography that you don’t own, and someone comes in and fixes it, then someone else comes in and fixes it again. Practice it today, do your best, stay open and ask questions. I’m trying to push people’s skills and their comfort level."

Company member Margot Greenlee put in: "We all come to the open door differently. There’s the wide-open funnel again: a whole spectrum of people being able to be comfortable with it. We have to learn how to push past discomfort, be in learner mode, tracking how people think, how they form questions. It stays provocative if we’re not comfortable. I know it’s going to happen, just not on my schedule. My flexibility is getting stronger. I’m learning how to be a great leader and be a follower too, trust everybody alike."

"I may trust you implicitly, but I also trust myself," added Lerman. "That may not be the same as ‘like/not like.’"

The bottom line in the hat struggle, said Lerman, is take care of yourself the best you can. "The point about ambassadors as dancers: I need time to do both, or I would have quit a long time ago. If your dancer needs aren’t getting met in this project, I’m hoping they get met somewhere else."

For the workshop, the goal was to learn about decisions and ownership. First, the group did a Round Robin: Pair off, face each other; one is dancer, one is choreographer. After three minutes, the dancer moves left and gets a new choreographer. They do this several times, the dance being changed each time by the new choreographer, who gives the reason for her edits.

Then the dancer teaches the piece to the original choreographer, then both edit for distance (how it will look from farther away) and for theme (beauty and disorder) and with props (they are using a paper plate, which, in performance, will be real china).

Then duets perform for each other. Then they sit in one circle and note movements they like. Then they talk about collaborating and what worked, what they liked.

Much of this creative work would appear in the final performance, as part of the "plate dance" by all the participants.

I interviewed the ambassadors at several points during and after the residency, to see if the concept held up for them.

Wendy Morris told me, "The ambassadors were a cool new innovation with a lot of glitches. I’m thrilled that it was undertaken here. It took a lot of investment by a lot of people to make the ambassadorships happen: the local sponsors, Liz and the Dance Exchange, as well as the local dance artists who showed up for months without knowing where this was all leading. The ambassador role evolved into a kind of apprentice role. Some of the ambassadors were professional dancers, dance educators or artists relatively new to dance. The local dance community can be insular and hard to break into, so it was particularly satisfying for me to see new leadership emerging through the ambassador roles."

1. "Authority and responsibilities were murky. For example, Liz asked me to set a movement sequence with Mickey and Manny (two seniors from the St. Paul Jewish Community Center Writers Group). It was fun, but awkward in the end because I felt like I had responsibility — to Mickey and Manny, to the piece, to Liz — without authority to define a context, or make editorial choices. By oversight, the section fell out of the piece because Liz and Peter didn't have time to look it over. I still feel badly that I wasn’t clear with Mickey and Manny about what was expected of them, but I really didn’t know until the day of the performance.

2. "The Dance Exchange didn’t have much advance information about who the ambassadors were. It took me until the end of their residency to figure out how to use more of my capacity. The morning of the performance, even before Liz told us that the company was withdrawing, I realized that the Dance Exchange had shifted into pre-performance mode and they weren’t available to address the anxiety some of the cast were expressing. I called some of the cast together and asked them to lay out all their questions, which we clarified one at a time. It was satisfying to use more of my skill base and I wish I had found a way to do that earlier in the process. The ambassadors’ session was about preparing us to be edited. But I didn’t have enough information about the piece as a whole to generate useful raw material — and the Dance Exchange didn't have the time to edit more stuff anyway. It was easier to assume authority as time went on because at the end of a rehearsal process I had enough information about the whole to contribute effectively."

Sandy Agustin was both stressed and thrilled by the process. She appreciated the ambassadors concept, but found the reality tough going. "The difficult parts of the residency were scheduling — a huge deal — and not knowing what our responsibilities as ambassadors were going to be with the groups," she said. "If I could go back and change anything it would be transportation and scheduling. There was a mass of phone numbers for a lot of people. And for the seniors, transportation was a problem. Their bodies were frail; who would take responsibility for them outside of their center?"

She described one workshop that combined the North High students with the Southwest Seniors, an encounter that began in discomfort, then changed. "The first session, you could assume the students would be on one side and the seniors on the other. Kazu had them walk around, and the teens milled in the middle and the seniors outside. But they came around. There’s a picture of one of the students and Melvin, a senior, making a funny face. He made them laugh and you could see them open up. I watched one shy kid — who didn’t know what she was doing there — smile. The students were predominantly African American and the seniors were mostly white. In the end, only one North High student participated, but they will have that workshop for the rest of their lives."

Agustin was key in filling the problematic holes in the final performance, and she jumped at the opportunity. "I saw the piece on Saturday," she said. "I decided I wouldn’t be in the performance because of my responsibilities. I was blown away by the aesthetics, by Liz’s ability to bring in the community without diffusing her vision. "

She really had to pull out the stops when the seniors didn’t show up for the dress rehearsal. "It was a bit unclear how vital the dress rehearsal was. It was frustrating for the dancers and choreographers not to have the seniors show up. On the performance day, Liz said, ‘Sandy, can you take them over there and do something with them?’ I figured out the time with Peter — where and when. The seniors were at benches to the left on the scavenger hunt. They told stories about love that no one had ever heard before. People who came down the path stopped to listen to them. I wheeled them on a golf cart to do the dance phrase."

Again, Agustin’s initiative solved a looming problem: "Only one mom from Jeremiah showed up because many Jeremiah moms had just started summer school, which is required. I choreographed something for her and me and one other person. We were not far from the brick X. Maybe ten people saw her. Jeremiah was represented by a story that was on tape — the story about ‘My aunt was my sanctuary. She made me feel special.’ Audience members really responded. Some were saying, ‘Did you write that? That’s my story!’ It was serendipitous and so amazing."

There was much to be enjoyed, according to Agustin. "The seniors were so dressed up, I didn’t recognize them," she told me. "One with cerebral palsy, for her to feel like she could do something like that was such a relief. And it’s not just about feeling good. An event in such a big space made those who participated feel on top of the world."

Looking back on the ambassador experience, Peter DiMuro said, "We need to think about teaching ambassadors more as a year-long training institute, or a three-day Dance Exchange Tools training, and developing their own work alongside. We need to go back and say what did you learn and where does that intersect with your own work? What part is training for artists and how satisfying is that for them, vs. the product?"

Mid-week I met with Dance Exchange Humanities Director John Borstel to talk about "Hallelujah." He told me the Dance Exchange is concerned enough about process and learning that they work formally on a Tool Box, with six or seven sessions at home in Takoma Park throughout each winter and spring. They work through one technique and discuss it. The tools break down the Dance Exchange methods used to introduce the idea of dancing-and-talking to those new to the approach, and as a way to explore the relationship between movement and meaning. They see this rigor as a way of maintaining a record of their techniques and passing them along, as well as a product for possible sale. The Tool Box is being developed in part through support from the Animating Democracy Initiative of Americans for the Arts, a civic-dialogue project.

Borstel talked about "Hallelujah" as "a way to package what we do. In some ways it’s what we’ve always done, but we put this frame around the package." He noted how labor-intensive the initiative is, in terms of developing new work. "Ninety minutes of workshop will produce about four minutes of material," he said. "The company has been here, back and forth, over at least a year, observing, building relationships. We started to finalize the material three weeks ago, but we don’t have a lot of content yet. It’s different from Houston, there was a lot more building material from the get-go, for 1 1/2 years. Liz gets bored doing the same thing twice. We use each project to take a different tack. This time it was about building material during the final period."

Speaking of tools, I asked him Wendy Morris’ question about postmodern deconstruction of personal material from the community, and he answered, "There is a series of questions around that: Who owns it and has rights to the material? Aesthetically, what’s abstract and what’s literal? But really, I don’t know of a case of anybody expressing, ‘You took my material and it’s showing up and I’m not sure how I feel.’

"In a small group there’s less exposure. When people share stories and others tell it, they have a chance to comment on it. We work with them and they can fix it. There’s more bad feeling around people’s stories not getting used. The reactions come out between two extremes: On the one hand we have had production people on staff who were just bedeviled by all the rearranging of order and content that continues through the teaching period. One of them left us to stage manage Cirque du Soleil in Vegas, where the challenges probably suit her better. At the other end of the spectrum, we had a participant in one project, a librarian who was probably grandmother age, who said, ‘What I learned from this project was how to commit to a process without knowing what the outcome will be.’"

"People accept it from us all the time," said Peter DiMuro. "We’re rearranging the story, but they’ve become part of the processing. Metaphor allows us to change the story — not to be disrespectful, but to allow more people to identify with it."

Liz Lerman’s response to this question took her to an expansion of her speech to the ambassadors, about "a new formulation on content and meaning. A new spectrum. There’s art that embedded in the community, full of context and meaning, but not considered art, and there’s art that’s remembered, but has no context and is in isolation. Take a non-hierarchical approach: What is possible in both? At the ‘art’ end are all the tools.

"Are you dishonoring personal stories by deconstructing them?" she asked herself. "No, we are bringing tools, demonstrating a form of listening. A big tool of postmodernism is giving up meaning. They might discover something they didn’t know, then you put the meaning back in. The place without meaning is the place where they can all come together. Just flip it on its side and ask what’s powerful."

In using her tools when working with communities, Lerman feels her obligation is to be the artist, not the therapist, not the community-builder. Others can take those roles. "My contract is to make art, but I know people will feel better if the art is better. My contract is not to build community, my job is to make art, but I know that if I push them to make good art in these community settings, their community-development will be better. If I let them make bad art, they won’t come together because there will be a bad feeling. You have to keep up your artistic smarts."

A short survey of some of the community participants touches on the joys and challenges of a "Hallelujah" project.

Association for the Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota: "It’s okay for you to marry our Hmong dances with your white dances," said one of the young women from the Hmong dance troupe to a Dance Exchange choreographer. This remark so delighted everyone in the project that it was repeated to me by five different people.

I interviewed five of the dancers at a rehearsal at the Lao Family Center in St. Paul. They were ages 12 to 15, and all but one of the girls were born in the U.S.; Yeng Thao, 13, had come from Thailand to Minnesota in 1995 with her parents. Choua Vang, 16, the most vocal of the young women, described their process with the Dance Exchange: "We take motions that represent something and stick them together. Like — putting on lipstick," and she made a circular motion around her lips. "We take memory and put it into motion." When asked how many sessions they had had with the Dance Exchange, Vang said "Too many to count. But it's relaxing. Once you get going, the days just melt away."

Vang goes to South High in Minneapolis, where perhaps one-third of the student body is Asian. She lives in a suburban neighborhood where most of her neighbors are Hmong. She described the AAHWM "dance crew" as 60-70 boys and girls who perform Hmong, Chinese, Indian, Thai and Laotian dances in public. Her only experience of the Walker was a visit there in elementary school.

"We've been working on this a long time," said Vang, "It's really fun, they are really nice people committed to the work. They view things openly."

The Walker’s Kiyoko Motoyama Sims and Chao Yang from AAHM were the project ambassadors for the Hmong dancers, and they also danced in the piece. Sims has been at the Walker for three years, and worked with Hmong people in a quilting project of the Walker, Intermedia and the YWCA of Minneapolis. "The Asian flavor of the Hmong dance came from certain hand gestures," Sims told me later in an interview. "They didn’t know what they were getting into with Modern dance. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Some people have preconceived ideas about Modern dance and that closes the window. They are used to learning steps from Chao. One said, ‘I didn’t realize how easy it is to work on choreography together.’"

Rimon: "Liz is a poster girl for this movement," said Rimon’s David Harris, referring to current efforts to weave the arts more integrally into the life of the American Jewish community. "She has a lot of backing from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. I participated in a project Liz did in the Twin Cities called ‘Moving Jewish Communities,’ on how to use her techniques to uncover ideas about Jewish identity. It planted a wonderful seed. The relationship between organized religion and artists is a very hot topic."

In September 2000, Lerman had her first encounter with the St. Paul Community Center senior writers, where the group brought forth the theme of this "Hallelujah." "Mickey Rosen, who had a stroke between September and appearing in the performance, has a very inquiring mind," said Harris. "He asked Liz at the workshop of 30 older peers, ‘Can you choreograph chaos?’ I had a dinner party the following night for 12 Jewish artists and already Liz was talking about this with excitement. Provocative juxtaposition, the appropriateness of the universe sending a little disorder into the mix." Rimon joined in as a partner of the "Hallelujah" project later that fall.

Harris enjoys examining the ethical issues of Lerman’s work, "how not to use seniors as mascots — ‘Adorable! Look at these old people move!’ We need to engage them as the humans they are. There is a tendency to use all seniors material the same way. One of the older men in ‘Hallelujah’ was more fit than the others, and he said it awakened his interest in movement. He jokingly told the Dance Exchange to keep an eye out for opportunities for ‘long-legged dancers.’ He hoped it would be in the New York Ballet and not the Dead Poets’ Society."

Harris regretted, as most "Hallelujah" participants do, that there was not more time for the company "to engage more deeply with who we were. The Art and Religion group, with whom we were paired, was primarily Christians. A lot of learning took place, but on occasions a little friction, too. It’s too bad that wasn’t investigated. Like when Rimon required that the performance not be on the Jewish Sabbath, so it was moved to Sunday. But then the other group asked, "What about my Sabbath?" Not every idea worked. We had hoped by performing on Father’s Day, we could use that as a springboard for intergenerational teamwork. But it was mostly a detriment: Many people had problems with doing anything at all on Father’s Day"

Sheridan Global Arts and Community School: Sheridan is an arts magnet school (kindergarten through eighth grade), one of seven magnet schools in the Twin Cities. All Sheridan students play the violin, and all children are exposed to the Russian language. It is located in a culturally mixed North Minneapolis neighborhood, including Somali, Hmong, Russian and Ukrainian people. Poet Mary Jo Thompson, a Sheridan teacher, told me her sixth-grade literature class produced "The Tempest" this year, wrote and bound books and practiced other paper arts. "We have tons of partnerships with artists and organizations," she said, "Our official arts partners are Theater Cultural Center, Hamline University Graduate School, Milkweed Editions, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the Walker. The kids read their work at coffeehouses like the Open Book: real work for real audiences." Before graduation, eighth graders present their work portfolios before an audience. They leave Sheridan with a CD of all their works-in-progress, including multimedia, audio and video.

"This was one of the worst schools in town ten years ago," said Thompson," and now it’s front-running, given the poverty rate. The parents come from so many cultures, with so little transportation. We have community PTA dinners that focus on a specific culture, with 400-600 people attending."

Sheridan dance teacher Roberta Carvalho-Puzon brought a dozen teenagers to "Hallelujah," but she was unable to participate in the performance herself because of family obligations. "I found out that for the majority of our students to be able to make it to rehearsals and the performance, I had to put in a huge effort, become a cab driver. It felt like all I did was pick up children and drop them off, plus coordinate a second carpool. But I fulfilled an old dream of mine through my students. Before moving to Minnesota, the only picture I had seen of the area was the Spoon and the Cherry. And I remember reading that the Walker was a place where so many performances happened. Well, I didn’t have the chance to perform there myself, but to see my students running through that field with their plates, as the most gorgeous leaders, was extremely powerful and emotional for me on that Dress Rehearsal Sunday."

Some of the Sheridan teens, who were just finishing their school year, were often challenging during the workshops and rehearsals. They tended to question every artistic process suggested to them. "Focus is always an issue with teens," said Kiyoko Motoyama Sims. "It’s always a tough call with a school. You’re working with a pool of students who might not want to do this kind of work. In terms of focus, it’s easier to work with a group like Young Dance or the Hmong troupe, who are already trained dancers. However, we believe in the value of working with young people who are not always exposed to arts. Sheridan and the Walker decided to collaborate on ‘Hallelujah’ since we both saw an exciting opportunity to stretch students’ skills through dance."

Finally, at the last minute, Liz Lerman was the one who made the difference, taking things in hand beneath the giant red steel sculpture after the dress rehearsal. "Liz gathered them and they were awed by the big cheese who had the power to keep them or let them go ," said Sheridan Ambassador Claire Ruen. "She said she wanted them to be beautiful. She gave them a simple task: Run through without chatter or vocalizing, except where you’re supposed to. They wouldn’t have known what to do if she had just said ‘focus.’"

Lerman added, "I tried to be so respectful of each one as a person, but demand more and not give them false praise. I said I was glad they were there and shook each one’s hand and said something direct. I said it was important to me how people thought about me and them, the impressions they take away. I said it was good but not good enough. ‘Do you want it to be better?’ I asked, ‘Which part don’t you like?’ and we worked at fixing it up. I kicked one girl out, after talking to her for a long time. You have to respect truthfully and hold the bar high. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? If you want to do better, I’ll show you how. The one who gave me the most trouble brought her mother and hung on my arm around the stage. We work on large things with 500 arms moving, but you still have to zero in on the individual."

Dance Exchanger Marvin Webb, who worked with Young Dance in the residency, said, "I think the result was awesome, especially for the kids. They were the real focus. But the Dance Exchange has made the decision of not having so many younger groups. In this situation, we had three. We will only have a maximum of two now. It spreads us really thin when we have to facilitate, dictate and administrate while creating."

Regarding the kind of personal attention paid to the Sheridan students, Lerman told me, "I would commit myself to the Sheridans — times a thousand — and I know I could change and save lives. Do I do that, or do I educate the art world and get it to change its mind? It’s actually more possible to work with the Sheridans. I’m sick of the ongoing inability for people to comprehend, ‘social work or art?’ And the time it takes! Time with my family is sacred."

The time problem. Dance Exchange Producing Director Jane Hirshberg and I talked over the phone a few weeks after the Minneapolis performance, and she reiterated something I had heard from others: 2001 was a killer year — seven intense residencies in which new work was created with 80-100 people in each community. (See "Hallelujah schedule.") The schedule was ruled by, you guessed it, funding cycles. "The National Dance Project money was great, but it forced an almost impossible schedule," said Hirshberg. "It’s hard if it’s not standard touring. It’s making something new at each site. We should have just done ‘Hallelujah,’ but we tried to do all the other stuff at home: the school, the expansion of our internship program. We hired five staff and three new company members. There was massive growth when we should have been focused on ‘Hallelujah.’"

Lerman, too, commented on the timing: "‘Hallelujah’ is slightly out of whack because of the funding. For National Dance Project funding, we had to do all these pieces this year. Next year there is more balance, we’re in the studio, too. There has to be time when we’re making dances for ourselves, out of our uniqueness."

So time had to be balanced along with everything else, rides for the seniors, the telephone tree, wedding outfits from the Guthrie Theater’s costume room, the bells of the Basilica, and, of course, the weather. Lerman made a telling comment one day during rehearsal as we looked into the threatening sky: "We’re funny. I’m continually surprised at how marginal I like to keep things." She told me about a moment when she was crossing the street in front of the garden with a group of young participants and she observed: "I think this is going to be like a Happening," and then laughed. "You’re too young to know what I’m talking about." She was talking about the intriguing specter of chance.

Every morning during my visit, the Dance Exchange company met for rehearsal in a dance studio at the University of Minnesota. There I met a guest from England who bore some interesting information about the field of community-based dance, which in his country is called "community dance," and has been around for several decades. James Brown is a dancer who works for the Bristol Area Dance agency and was in the U.S. for seven weeks to visit community-arts organizations, including the Dance Exchange, Elders Share the Arts and Massachusetts Elder Arts, to learn more about activity in the U.S.

Brown trained as a dancer and a dance therapist in the U.K., and worked full-time for three years with ten different groups a week in preschools, mental-health facilities and special schools. He termed his work "sessional," that is, he had a long-term relationship with these groups.

According to Brown, "community dance" is not social dancing, like salsa, nor what goes on in private dance schools. It is participatory dance in hospitals, prisons, schools, colleges, community centers and senior centers. In the 1970s, the field was driven by "individual motivators," artists working with spaces like Jubilee Arts or Chisenhale Dance Space. The movement, said Brown, "galvanized in the U.K. in the early 1980s, replacing ‘community animateurs’ with agencies like Bristol Community Dance Center, who contract with freelancers. They have a development role, more than just teaching, which includes forging links with groups for long-term projects, 18 months to two years."

"Community dance" is a term now disappearing in the U.K., said Brown, and its delineation as an identified group is being challenged. "‘Participatory arts’ is a relationship that has more bite."

Brown said he perceives a debate between art and art therapy in both countries. "As dance therapists, we didn’t create new work," he said. "The movement process is about the person you’re working with — guiding, reflecting, holding the space. It changes when you teach them your routines. It becomes art, your education." He said he was interested in the Dance Exchange’s commitment not only to community work, but to their own development as artists, and to the collaborative style of the company, which includes many choreographers besides Liz Lerman. "I’ve never seen dancers acknowledged for their individual skills, or even self-individuated. Now in Britain, contemporary dancers are not clones, but come in a range of body sizes and shapes. But the choreography still comes from one person." Regarding "Hallelujah," Brown said, "There’s a can-do atmosphere in this country. Twelve community groups in a three-week project — we’d never try that in the U.K."

Brown referred me to some sources on community dance: in England, Ken Bartlett with the Foundation for Community Dance and Fergus Early with Green Candle Dance Company; in Ireland, Firkin Crane.

A big issue for presenters, funders and artists these days is "the legacy piece": How will the project continue in the community after the performance is over and the company leaves town? The legacy depends on the presenter and the partnership team, their commitment to the legacy and their relationships with each other. Everyone I spoke with gave kudos to the Walker.

"I loved the Walker," said Margot Greenlee. "I have never met such a happy and passionate tech crew. Philip was a great presenter. It’s great that he kept all the other stuff away from us. We’re always hearing how hard the rest of their life is. How can we accomplish together if you feel like you’re pulled?"

"The presenter didn’t treat us like second-class citizens, " agreed Jane Hirshberg, "they kept coming forth."

It is unusual for a presenter to be so forthcoming with a community performance project. "I tell them I am going to keep inventing all the way," said Lerman of her many presenters. "You don’t have to say yes, but say no before you explode. They are all-embracing of art enterprise, and then they say no. It’s a 100% spectrum. ‘The artist as god’ vs. ‘the artist as baby.’ Some get their kicks out of taking care of the baby, or you’re so incompetent they’ll ignore you without batting an eye." No so the Walker.

"Our department says yes first to artists’ needs," said Julie Voigt, program administrator for the Walker’s performing arts department and the overall coordinator of the project. "We try to make their dreams become a reality while understanding our own capacity at the same time. It’s difficult once in a while, but we’ve never had a horrible experience. This large a residency is overwhelmingly time-consumptive, especially when you’re also focusing on other programs within our department. To do it well, you almost need to give up your personal life. What I learned with the ambassadors idea is that it’s truly a great model. It’s really about how we sustain residencies, give artists voice." Lerman was particularly delighted that the Walker sad yes to the table leaning out of the roof of the building. "The table?" said Voigt. "By that day, I was used to many ideas coming out of Liz’s mouth. This project was one that was actually possible to do within our limited time and resources."

Sheridan’s Roberta Carvalho-Puzon reported, "The Walker seems to have become even more special to me after the performance, almost with the intimacy of a studio or a living room. It seems like our partnership went beyond my expectations. Today my fourth-grade students received an invitation to perform on December 1 with a writer and musicians from a fabulous project with the Minnesota Science Museum. The boys and girls are helping on the composition process of a piece that will be premiered at the Minnesota orchestra next year."

Kiyoko Motoyama Sims cited the inclusive process of the residency as its legacy. "Sometimes in an art residency, the artist has set up a curriculum and a workshop already formed, and they present the same thing each time. This time, the Dance Exchange took time to explore who the partners were and their interests, and they created the artistic work together. All the community partners truly felt they were part of the art process. When this happens — second-graders to 80-year-olds — it’s a great accomplishment. Now the Walker has a place in their lives. Southwest Senior Center had no idea they could be part of a performance, or the JCCC Writers Group. When you see that kind of leap, you are opening up certain doors in their lives. I’d love to see them spend more time at the Walker, but if they just spend more time with the arts, I’d be so happy for them."

Martha Wittman agreed. "Each ‘Hallelujah’ strengthens for me the awareness that all of us grow through the art-process experience," she said. "We are able to be more who we are, we are able to develop in ways that surprise us. For a child, this might mean a discovery of something they really love and want to do, like choreography. A sense of identity for all ages can emerge, interest in and cooperation with others, finding courage; meeting new people and being in new places, buildings, neighborhoods. Observing people of all ages participating, having fun, being serious, disciplined, about art-making."

Said Julie Voigt: "The legacy is important for all of us. Trying to have something continue on after the artist leaves is a high priority for us. We don’t want to build relationships between our local community and artists and then drop the community connections once the project is over. This project helped to create new art-and-religion and senior networks, while strengthening existing networks. We’ll certainly continue to invite all of our community partners to participate in programs we do in the future." June Wilson also said the Minnesota Dance Alliance will go on working with the ambassadors.

The project’s benefit to the community was abundant, said Intermedia’s Sandy Agustin. "It was a fruitful experience. We learned a lot. The partnership was egalitarian and very respectful. Even though the Walker spent the big dollars, we were treated like everyone was really needed. It made Intermedia’s connection to the Southwest Senior Center stronger. We will stay in touch with Jeremiah. Community Education and Performing Arts have it down over there [at the Walker]. The learning experience was within the organizing team. The effort over there helped us all."

In terms of what the legacy piece is so far: Lerman, who had well-developed relationships with many organizations involved in the Minneapolis residency, has returned to lead partnership workshops at Intermedia and talk about a long-term project on anti-Semitism with the Basilica.

David Harris reported that he and another participant, writer Sima Rabinowitz, have approached the St. Paul Jewish Community Center with a proposal to build a piece of theater around the lives and writings of the seniors in the Rimon group. The theme will be "how the story of a life is narrated, how memories are created or recreated in nonfiction, what problems and emotional resonances live inside these stories." They hope to title it "The Book of Our Days."

The most concrete "legacy piece" so far has been a part of the Greenway Parade of Arts, July 4, 2001, sponsored by Intermedia and the Midtown Community Association. The Greenway is a 100-year-old former railway corridor being redesigned into a public space and transportation path stretching citywide from the Mississippi River to the Chain of Lakes.

"Hallelujah moved on in the Greenway project." reported Wendy Morris. "About ten of us from the cast adapted sections from ‘Hallelujah’ and performed them in the Greenway Parade of Arts. It was fun because it wasn't 'my piece' so I was less attached to the way things had been originally done. Before we performed we taught phrases from the work to the audience, including stories of how the phrases were created. At a cue, the audience crossed the Greenway to enter the field where we were performing and they joined us in the movement phrases. We took elements from ‘Hallelujah’ and used them in new ways. For example, the ground was gritty so we introduced beach towels, which became a strong visual element. We did the Holzer section, but since we had no sculptural benches we used each other’s bodies as benches. The china plates became knee pads.

"Adapting ‘Hallelujah’ to the Greenway was a way of digesting the ‘Hallelujah’ experience and integrating what we had learned as a collective. When I saw how easily we worked together, I realized that ‘Hallelujah’ had really been a training process for collaborative activism. The Greenway was an opportunity for us to activate what we had learned from working with the Dance Exchange. It was one of my most satisfying and successful experiences of 'art by committee.'"

It’s likely that the energy of "In Praise of Beauty and Disorder" will echo in Minnesota for a while, considering how many "funnels" were opened. Myself, I was struck by the serendipity of a number of quotations from late-20^th Century artists and writers that were installed on the walls of the Walker’s galleries during "Hallelujah." They were part of "Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present," an exhibition of works from the Walker’s permanent collection.

There was Yves Klein’s inspiring statement in 1961, when he published a photo depicting himself leaping from his dealer’s second-story window into the air:

"Today anyone who paints space must actually go into space to paint, but he must go there without any faking, and neither in an aeroplane, a parachute nor a rocket. He must go there by his own means, by an autonomous, individual force."

And I found myself standing for a long time in front of a quote from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s "Coney Island of the Mind," something I quoted in my first editorial in High Performance magazine, way back in 1978, when I was just beginning to wander among artists. It seemed appropriate still, considering the ground being broken across the street in the sculpture garden by some 100 people from the Twin Cities:

Writer’s note: The title of this article, "Dancing to the Music of Time," is a tip of the hat to a remarkable series of novels, "A Dance to the Music of Time," by Anthony Powell.

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Everybody Say Hallelujah: the Minneapolis, Minnesota, residency

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