The Cutting Edge Is Enormous: Liz Lerman and Richard Owen Geer

Community-based art is changing the very definitions of art, artist and artmaking. Here we get some new points of view from two artists working out there. Choreographer Liz Lerman, director of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Washington, D.C., is determined to reorder the priorities laid down for her in art school. Richard Owen Geer had those priorities reordered for him by the citizens of a small town in south Georgia. —Eds.

Something is happening to artists. As more and more of them commit to community projects, their work is raising critical questions about the role of the artist in these projects and about the exact location of the artistic act. Depending on the political bent of the participants, sometimes the artist is restricted to the role of facilitator—apparently submerging his/her own identity, expertise, training and talent into the collaborative action of the group. As art swerves in new directions, the idea of the virtuoso is being challenged.

I have recently participated in intense discussions about the work of two artists now working in community settings: choreographer Liz Lerman and theater director Richard Owen Geer. Originally trained in different disciplines, but also versed in collaborative methods and the history of community-based work, they each wrestle with the question of identity as they strive to contribute to the new wave of thinking in the arts.

Collaboration is the key in this new work. Because one of the primary goals of most community-art projects is to address social questions, artists have found that the most successful strategy is to gather allies outside the art community. Tapping into resources from the fields of social work, health care, the law, community organizing, education and the clergy, they are no longer in the cradle of the art world.

Lerman and her D.C.-based company, The Dance Exchange, while doing workshops and projects with the elderly and the young, find themselves working with administrators of senior centers and physicians who treat terminally ill children. Geer just spent three years immersed in the social and political web of a small southern town as director of the folk-life play Swamp Gravy.

For both artists, the challenges of helping to organize a community project are enormous, and different each time. Sometimes it is even more challenging to find their own roles in the process—roles that may change as the project progresses, and continue to change even after it ends.

Liz Lerman emerges from the stratified and hierarchical world of dance, where virtuosity is the highest ideal, where the choreographer is raised to the level of a god, or at least a master puppeteer.

The Dance Exchange breaks the traditional dance mold every which way. The nine-member touring company ranges in age from 20 to 70, including some who began to dance only in their senior years, and the company repertoire is a product of their work together. In addition, unlike other dance companies, every member of The Dance Exchange is expected to teach.

Lerman, founder and artistic director of the company, is credited as the choreographer of the repertoire, and she sees this as an important contribution ("Dance is for everyone—Liz Lerman too," she says). To the concert stage she brings her technical expertise as a dancer and her artist's eye as the designer of ensemble performance.

But for Lerman, the job of choreography offers more than the opportunity to plot dance, call forth great performances from the company and dazzle the audience in a theater. In her search for personal and artistic growth, collaboration is bountiful. Everyone and everything involved with the work of The Dance Exchange—from structural organization and fundraising, through teaching, performance and critical theory—is a vital part of her work, and she of theirs. Attention to all the ways the company moves through the world is the art. This is the aesthetic that underlies the company's mission: "to make dance a real part of people's lives, to make dance matter again."

While in Raleigh, North Carolina, for a recent residency, Dance Exchange company members led workshops with dance students of all ages at North Carolina State University (NCSU), Meredith College, Enloe High School and Arts Together, a "community arts school." They held training sessions for public-school teachers and healthcare providers on integrating dance into their work. Lerman spoke on panels and facilitated a discussion with a group of local collaborators about presenting community art. The dancers even invaded a pediatric-clinic waiting room at a local hospital where they improvised a session of dance for kids. By the end of the week, teens had been recruited from Enloe High to appear in the company's concert at NCSU. All this work is choreography to Liz Lerman.

Dance has become so stripped of its community functions, says Lerman, that dancers are expected to care only about form. It wasn't always this way.

"I think there was a time when people danced and the crops grew," she told an arts conference a while back. "I think they danced and that is how they healed their children. They danced; that is how they prepared for war. Maybe they mainly danced because they could not understand the incomprehensible, and perhaps in a moment of becoming (not interpreting) the sun in a sun dance, they could understand the forces of nature."

Now, she says, if a dancer is interested in the healing aspects of dance, she is told to go into dance therapy. Spirituality? Try liturgical dance. Politics? You want to go to Latin America, they do that there. Work with old people? That's social work. Lerman said:

Now we have a world of dance specialists. But we've paid a price for this separation, an enormous price. In 15 years at the Dance Exchange, what we've really been about is trying to take these incredible functions of dance and reinterpret them into art. This is something we desperately need right now.

Lerman asserts that teaching dance in a nursing home is just as important as performing at the Kennedy Center. By capitulating to the dance world's hierarchical structures, she says, we lose a great opportunity.

"This hierarchy makes the cutting edge teeny, teeny tiny. Only a certain kind of something can be that. But, you know, when you do this," she says, moving her hands from a vertical alignment to the horizontal, "the cutting edge is enormous. There is this extraordinary spectrum of artistic activity that we can live along," stretching her arms as far apart as they will go.

Richard Owen Geer's theories about community performance have been published at length in High Performance, but until I traveled to Colquitt, Georgia, one spring weekend, and met his collaborators in Swamp Gravy, I didn't have the picture of what it's like to collaborate with a whole town.

In brief, the Chicago-based Geer met Colquitt's Joy Jinks at a workshop in the North in 1991, and together they decided to develop a play in Colquitt around the personal history of the town (pop. 2,000). Three years later, a cast of 70 Colquitt citizens, all nonactors, was playing to sold-out crowds in the town's old cotton warehouse, and Swamp Gravy had been officially recognized by the state legislature as Georgia's "folk-life play."

Light years beyond the traditional Southern historical drama, Swamp Gravy is a storytelling extravaganza touching on such inflammatory issues as racism and spousal abuse. The play operates on two distinct levels. Performed in historical costume, it contains much material that, in a contemporary frame, might be problematic—politically too sensitive. At historical remove, these tales resonate across time, deeply rooted in the particular character of the town. Still, stories that make entertaining drama to an outsider are the real stuff of local life, and they tug heavily at the heartstrings of the Colquitt native. The night I saw it, a scene remembering the dead brought tears from a man in his 50s sitting near me.

Swamp Gravy is a good example of a work that blurs the definition of ownership. Written by Tennessee playwright Jo Carson from the personal memories of the town, the script is massaged every time it is rehearsed. In transit back and forth from Chicago, Geer was in town for the first and last performances of the eleven-night spring run, and found much of it completely changed by the cast.

In talking with cast members, it is clear that the play belongs to them, not to Carson or Geer. The Colquitt folks are in control of the social and artistic life of the drama. They will tour it and they will answer requests to assist nearby towns in developing their own plays.

Carson's primary contribution was the organizing of the material and the selecting of language from people's memories. Geer's gift was the imaginative staging that moved the cast through the audience, had them telling stories simultaneously, turned a beauty-parlor scene into a dance, skillfully and delicately showcased racial issues and folded the observer into the history and relationships of the town. ("You never knew when the person next to you would burst out singing," said one audience member.)

The closing cast party was a real love-fest, with members honoring each other in the tenderest of ways. One performer, an outstanding African-American singer, thanked Geer and the entire cast by singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings." Members told me barriers of class and race had been brought down and Colquitt would never be the same. Clearly the show was a success and everything turned out better than anyone could have dreamed.

This, according to Geer, was a miracle. In late 1992, it looked like things were doomed, and the issue revolved around Geer and his role in the proceedings. Ten days before Swamp Gravy Sketches, an early production of parts of the piece, Geer did something most actors are used to witnessing: He threw a classic director's tantrum. Only half the cast had turned up for rehearsal and Geer was furious. He flew into a rage, finishing with "the F— word" at top decibels. In the atmosphere surrounding Swamp Gravy, which is subtitled acting together for a better community, this behavior was clearly unacceptable. Not only was his language offensive, he had betrayed a fundamentally hierarchical attitude.

"I turned around and saw everybody streaming out the doors," says Geer now, still astonished. "They told me they couldn't work with me and three of the men threatened to beat me up if I didn't get out of town!" In desperation, Geer tried apologizing to individuals, but to no avail. Finally, he appealed to the local minister, who called a meeting and explained to the cast that Geer was seeking forgiveness, and they had to give it to him or they couldn't call themselves Christians. After further discussion, they voted to forgive him and go on with the piece. Geer stayed and everyone is more than glad he did, but the auteur in him left town for good. This lesson remained with him through every moment of the process, and he says it altered his view of himself and his role as an artist. Far from squelching his ambition, the experience has left him firmly situated in the field of community performance and hungry for more.

Geer and Lerman are only two of the artists who are changing our ideas about the artist—stepping down from the pedestal, getting out of the way, as it were, and allowing us, perhaps, to draw nearer to the vital meaning of the presence of art in life. Both these people bring to their work the training and life experience of professionals, but for them, that was only the beginning of learning. They are letting their work teach them something new about human reality. Or maybe it's something old; something that predates or lies beneath choreography, theater and art itself.

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Summer 1994.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002