Laughing and Crying in An Age of Anxiety: An Interview with Liz Lerman

This interview with Liz Lerman, artistic director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, took place in Asheville, North Carolina, on April 14, 2002, during the last few residencies in the company’s nationwide "Hallelujah" community performance initiative. For the North Carolina residencies, Lerman turned over project direction to three of her company members. The program included a new piece by the Lerman company, "Anatomies and Epidemics." It was expanded from a portion of the Michigan "Hallelujah," created soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and Washington. The new work became part of the company repertory, and was performed in each North Carolina "Hallelujah" program (2002) and at the finale, "Hallelujah/USA," in Maryland in late summer 2002. "Anatomies" juxtaposes a lament set to music by Alan Hovahness with a section choreographed to a Spike Jones recording that consists only of laughing. — LB

Liz Lerman: When you go through something like "Hallelujah" — I’ve never been a soldier, but it feels like– …I did a piece about [Gen. William Tecumseh] Sherman, and you read all these things between him and his men and it feels like he’s been forged by so much experience. …

I was just so sure that we were onto something with the laughter material that we got at the Grantmakers [Grantmakers in the Arts, an organization of program officers from private foundations] meeting, which was a mini mini mini "Hallelujah." They had asked us to come and be in residence for three days. It was part of the renewal part of their conference. There was the idea that you would come and study with us every day and then some of them would perform with us in the concluding performance of the conference. But this conference took place in early November, so it was completely, totally colored by September 11.

Meanwhile the grantmakers were spending days trying to talk about it, so by the time they got to actually move or see their colleagues move … they were awash in feeling. … We had decided we’d start the morning with the inquiry of "How have you been human in the last six weeks?" We were testing it on a couple of our grantmaker friends, and one of them was Nick Rabkin, who was having breakfast with us, although he didn’t take the workshop. His response was, "I don’t know, but any time I have a chance to laugh, I’m so relieved."

So, I ran upstairs and got on the Internet immediately, because I just had this flash that I should find out what it’s like biologically for us to laugh. And when I did this, I encountered this story about a laughing epidemic. And then I went back downstairs and began working with the grantmakers, and at one point, we did a little ha-ha lying on the floor with them. So, all these grantmakers are lying on top of each others’ bellies going ha-ha-haaa-ha. And I had the company in the back doing it without sound. That’s when I noticed that laughing and crying were identical, you couldn’t tell them apart. It reminded me of the moments in my own life when laughing and crying were identical, I couldn’t tell them apart. It reminded me of the moments in my own life when they have been completely merged, specifically around my mother’s death and my father’s death, where you would be laughing one second and crying the next. I was so charged by that idea and feeling that the momentum we had made in Michigan had a lot of power that I felt convinced we should do this. It wasn’t like we were commissioned; there was no date for it. It was just like, "Okay, we have to make this." We made it at the same time we were making a piece focused on music by Leonard Bernstein.

LL: We tied it to the Bernstein work. For example, we had already hired Andy (Tierstein) to do the Bernstein work and he was very excited to work on this. The Bernstein commission was for the Leonard Bernstein Festival in Tampa Bay [Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center’s "American Music Festival 2002: Bernstein, Broadway, the Bomb — the Age of Anxiety" ]. They wanted us to do something about "The Age of the Anxiety," Bernstein in the ’50s. We made two sections for Tampa: one was his age of anxiety and one was our age of anxiety. That’s how I managed to pay for some of the costs of it. So, when we went to Tampa Bay we premiered both sections.

I feel that after a series of encounters like "Hallelujah," the time we get together as an ensemble is like sacred time. And the time in rehearsal around our own artistic edge is so sacred. Not to say that it is more or less, it’s just that you can’t go out and do all that work in communities if you don’t get that other time. They’re both incredibly intense and the value of the time that we have with ourselves after a series of these encounters is incredible. And I think that’s what helped us make what we just made.

LB: So, you’re spending all this time together, but you’re having to give it all away in the direction of the community. That must really hurt sometimes.

LL: You know, I feel like it’s a pleasure to watch us each interacting in the setting in which we find ourselves. That’s a pure delight. Like this week, to walk in and see what Peter and Michelle and Marvin [company members Peter DiMuro, Michelle Pearson and Marvin Webb, who led the N.C. residencies] have made, to observe Elizabeth [company member Elizabeth Johnson] in a support role, but then to have been in Boston and seen her in a lead role. To see how they sort out what they like and what they don’t like, how to use the rest time, how to motivate themselves.

LB: So, you think they’ve learned a lot about that in the last year-and-a-half.

LL: I do. I think it’s amazing. This morning, the whole N.C. "Hallelujah" was made and run by others. I made it clear when I got the booking that I would need to be less involved and it would be time for other people to step in and take it. And deal with it in whatever ways they can. And I’m thrilled to see that they could do that. They should be chomping at the bit and it’s wonderful.

LL: The way I perceive it may not be as you organized it in your mind. But after my solo, it opens with this kinds of introduction to the idea of heartache. Then it gets to Martha’s story [company member Martha Wittman], describing in her poetic form the experiences of 9/11 for her. The line that the showers of glass "looked like poured sugar" – pretty amazing. Then we go into this lament. For me — you know how grief can be beautiful? It can be really ugly, but grief can have a beautiful quality — I don’t mean the way it’s portrayed in 19th-century literature, but my own experience with grief is that there’s something of relief. Something where you can be really connected to the way autumn leaves break apart, but it can be really harsh, and what I’m trying to do in that is begin the lament with this sense of beauty and build it. There’s this one place where it really falls apart and they’re throwing themselves around. When I got the phone call that my father had actually died – meanwhile we had been hoping for him to die because it was so awful at the end – and then I just remember falling to the floor and having this feeling like if I’d known it was going to feel like this, I would have kept him alive forever. Because trying to get to that, in fact it’s not beautiful at all. The bottom drops out

So, we get to the end of the lament and Peter comes forward and starts to talk about the [laughing] epidemic and we set up the Spike Jones thing, which, to me, is four-and-a-half minutes of some of the best choreography we’ve done. I shouldn’t toot my own horn, but I really like that section. When I realized we were going to deal with laughter, I found this guy who had done the research on the Web, it turned out he’d written a book abut laughter. He had gone to opera and looked up all this operatic form of laughing and in the book is a list of records he listened to including one by Spike Jones. I knew Spike Jones, but I didn’t know this one. So, I listened to it and my assignment to the dancers was to do a visualization where they had to follow the line of the laughter precisely, but the movement couldn’t look like laughter. And they struggled, they really struggled. They all had tapes and took them home, and Martha came back and had figured it out. And once they saw Martha’s, they knew what to do. And it’s her musicality that allowed us to do this. And it was such fun because we were so disciplined. Partly with the community work, when you’re working fast, you’ve gotta do a big wash, you can’t always get down to the details. This was so detailed and we had so much fun.

Then I had given them a bunch of text about the biological part of how laughing works and I thought Marvin did a wonderful job and Elizabeth did, too. We ended up using Elizabeth’s movement but not her text. Meanwhile I had found the Hovahness and I knew that if we could find that last laughter movement and do it to the Hovahness that we would be in what to me was an incredible statement about the people in the World Trade Center buildings. For me it was about the office chairs: at the end of the dance we have the whole company on a diagonal line of chairs. I think it’s very epic in a way. The chair work comes from Martha’s phrase, reworked, a little more obsessive and shorter. Then I began to pull back other material and I left one section in. After the laughing section when Marvin tells how you laugh, It goes into this shaking thing and trying to comfort. It feels to me like that section is a crossover between laughing and crying. And there’s that section where Martha does that text that goes, "Your mouth was half-open, your tongue was hanging out, you were contorted, you were gasping for air." It’s actually a description of a laughing, but it could be a description of crying. And meanwhile while she’s doing that, Thomas and Ted [company member Thomas Dwyer and guest artist Ted Johnson] are reprising their duet from the lament, doing it against that text, which sets up the ending.

LL: Actually a lot of people have said that, and if it was there, it was unconscious.

LB: Talk a bit about the growth of the company and their growth as individuals. What do you think has happened? For one thing, everybody tells me how tired they are. How do you feel about that? Do you have to get exhausted to be this good?

LL: I think we’re exhausted because of the economics. In order to earn our way, we had to accept all this work. We didn’t need to do this many, but we cannot raise enough money to support the work we are doing. In fact, next year, when we have purposely taken time off in order to reflect, redefine, give ourselves a break, there’s less money because there’s less earned income. So, I think the exhaustion is budget-driven. Secondly, two things conflict: The presenters want to do the work on a large scale and they try, to the extent that they are able, but they have big eyes, small stomachs. And we also have too much potential, we are unable to cut ourselves off and say, "You know what, this one [residency] is only three days long, guess what? [The performance is] 12 minutes long." We can’t do that. That’s why we’re tired. Third: The dancers, as they take on more leadership, they want to push and experiment, and they deserve to, but we are tired..

LL: On one level, my biggest delight is watching the dancers. I honestly believe that people become better movers through a process like this. There are people who would challenge this: You know, "You need your daily technique classes." And we do get our technique classes when we have the pace to have them and they are all doing very god work, but I feel that you consistently strip away the veneer the more you are engaged this way. So, by the time you step on stage and you’re ready to perform, you are who you are, even when you’re being a character. And that’s been a search of mine from the beginning, which is to say, it matters who’s on stage. It’s not just an obscure anybody, it matters who the person is. Elizabeth has grown phenomenally, technically. She can do things now she couldn’t do before. We were talking the other day: She helps Margot [company member Margot Greenlee] on certain things and Margot helps her on certain things because they have vastly different backgrounds.

LB: I can see it in that little piece form "Fertile Fields." It’s just riveting now. It wasn’t the first time I saw it. There’s something extra. The way they snap into position. They’re so alive, they look like they’ve had 12 weeks of rest.

LL: There’s one woman in the community piece who teaches dance at the university and one of her comments to somebody, which I heard second-hand, was she loves the ensemble work of the company because everyone is so different and she can’t believe how they are working together. And again that’s one of my values, which is: Let’s have all these individuals with all these different backgrounds — the idea that the more you’re you, the more I can be me and the stronger our little group is. I think the company, for me, has been a microcosm of all the community work. It’s always been the source of my deepest understanding, and makes it possible to move out into the world, which is why I think pickup companies, which are the future, what everybody’s doing to survive, it’s a problem, because you see with the people who come in for only a little bit of time, it’s just not the same.

LL: Our plan right now is that we will hold it together for the core company for next year. that people who have made it this far, I have made a commitment to solving our financial.

LL: It’s Thomas, and Martha and Elizabeth and Marvin and Margot and Peter and Celeste [Miller] and me and it would be Kazu [Nakamura], but Kazu wants to move back to New York to be with his partner Dan, so he’ll be more part-time, but I consider him totally engaged. And then we have this new relationship with all these apprenticeships like Quincy [Northrup] and Peggy [Schaefer].

LL: They should go out on their own and they will. But the future of the Dance Exchange rests in the commitment of a core group of people of which their 100% full time is to the organization, but within that they can do their own projects, then we do some projects together.

LB: So, it is possible for you to personally get out and make the money [the company needs]?

LLL: Given what we’re going to earn and what we’ve been given, I think we’re short about $150,000.

LL: Yes , but they’re going to take on other responsibilities at home because we’re trying to figure out how to be home. Meanwhile, opportunities are always coming up for new directions. For instance, in Boston we did the animal piece ["In Praise of Animals and Their People"] and we had a bunch of kids in it and two of them were kind of large. The director of the obesity clinic for Children’ Hospital was in the audience, and he was blown away because he had not seen kids that big feel that at home in their bodies, look happy and be in public. So. he approached us about a pilot project and then a research study the next year. Of course, I have a million questions for him: Are you trying to get them to lose weight? Are you trying to get them to be happy in their bodies? Are you trying to affect their self-image? What are we looking for here? But I’m very excited about possibilities like this.

LB: Let’s talk about the finale. Are you going to try to subsidize travel and housing for participants in the finale?

LL: A lot of people have said they could get their travel, but we would have to pay for them when they get there, so that’s what we’re trying to raise the money for. We have to raise about another $75,000.

LL: It has not been easy. A few of the presenters have moved on to other projects and have been hard to reengage on the idea of sending people from their communities. I don’t begrudge them that. I understand that’s what they have to do. Although, I wish they could see how good it would be for their communities, for their participants, strengthening the ties they have with those people. I think it would be worth it.

LL: No. But my hopes for bringing the dancers from these different communities is that they would meet each other and they would find their own little allegiances. I think about the people who have sustained me for the long haul. When and where are our future young artists meeting each other? We could cement this at various conferences. I really believe that the teens meeting each other, these different levels of people meeting each other would have an effect.

LL: It’s Elizabeth’s baby; it will be teens and their leaders, some of the teachers and organizers who’ve been so helpful to us along the way. So many teens took part in the different "Hallelujahs." That will be simultaneous with the all-come group that will meet for two weeks. By Sunday, we’ll bring in the so-called cameos, the Card Ladies from Vermont, I’m hoping Daniel Preston [from Tucson], Reverend Ito from L.A. I’d love to get the group from Deer Isle. There was this group of men that retired there who had a breakfast club on Wednesday morning and got out and saluted a spot of Indescribable Beauty.

LB: Peter told me that the shortness of the time affected the way they teach about editing. Some people felt … well, I think everybody in Asheville thinks they’re an artist.

Here’s some new thinking about this nurturing environment. My daughter Anna is on a competitive basketball team, and I’m listening to the coach. The girls are 13-14 years old. He lambastes them. This is his form of motivation. I started thinking about — oh, this is a winning environment. The Dance Exchange mostly lives in a learning environment. They’re different. I actually think the Dance Exchange moves into a winning environment, and we could afford to move into a winning environment more often. I would like to figure out how to transition from learning to winning, which relates to excellence – it relates to saying that there’s a point at which you sacrifice the interests of the individual person for the sake of the thing that you’re making . And if it hurts, let’s learn from how it hurts. Let’s understand that there is pain involved, as there always is, but good things come from it. If you hang in there long enough, you will see that it’s better. I think I’m getting better at communicating to people when I’m shifting into that gear. I think where people get confused, it’s the same old nurture-rigor argument. They have mostly experienced nurturing in such a way that it doesn’t have rigor, and so if we stay in a learning environment and we apply rigor, people get confused.

LL: It is completely like parenting. So, I think the more we say it’s a spectrum, just like the coach needs some learning environment work and nurturing work, I suspect in another 20 years the way girls play basketball will be different. It’s not right. It’s as bad as being in an all nurturing environment, all one is stupid.

LB: But can you win against people who are trained that way if you’re not trained that way?

LL: Well, I think it relates to my saying that I think the dancers are better than if they just took technique classes every day and never went into the community. Not everybody sees the dancers that way because some of the veneer that I’ve removed is the very thing that other people measure good dancers by. But I find it distasteful, I find it hateful. So, the sooner I can get the veneer gone– But a lot of audiences and a lot of critics and a lot of professionals say it’s the veneer that counts. It’s not veneer to them. I think it was really helpful to watch the coach, I had such a flash. And to say the world needs both. It’s part of this flipping the hierarchy on its side and saying there’s a spectrum of things you want people to be able to have.

LL: Celeste’s work at [Jacob’s] Pillow has really blossomed. The stuff she’s doing in the high school there. The Pillow and Celeste are putting together a touring program of living curriculum, which Dance Exchange is involved in and that will be one other future project. There’s a lot of curriculum-based work happening around the country but what Celeste is doing is making it all choreographic. Of course, that means that the level that the kids are talking at and participating at is just great.

LL: I could tell you the questions I have right now about this work. I have questions about the nature of how long it really takes to recruit and build the relationships you need to build so that people who are really far removed from this will participate. I think about the Shipyard [a Dance Exchange project in New Hampshire 1994-96], I think about Burlington [Vermont’s "Hallelujah"] – we went back and forth to Burlington for four years, we went to the shipyard for two years. We did lose some people on this project here, and I think it has a little bit to do with the speed with which we had to move from workshop mode to concert mode. There’s not enough time to build those relationships up. One way to circumvent that is to come in and do a "Still Crossing" first [a Dance Exchange rep piece about immigration and other passages that includes community members]. Because the choreography is set in advance, "Still Crossing" doesn't take much time and people have an intense experience and then they're ready to commit the time it takes.

LB: You could see that with the Hannan House ladies [in Detroit, who went through the process of being in "Still Crossing"].

LL: Exactly. So, that’s a question. And I just continue to think about the finances and how you can afford to do that work, and yet it has to be done. I’m not sure that local artists who do (or maybe don’t do) this work understand that. It just takes time. So, that’s a question.

I’m wondering about – the people here [Asheville] say you’re asking for such a big commitment from people. I don’t know how easy you want to make it for people so they think making art is simple. I made that point again, I said "Still Crossing" gets you someplace fast, but working from nothing like we do in "Hallelujah" and going from nothing to something, it has to include, if it’s to be worthwhile, the bad side, not just the good side of making art. So, we have to help our presenter understand there’s going to be some trauma, they might hear from people who were unhappy. Some of this is about managing expectations; some of it is about balancing our own roles in the collaboration. We learned a lot about this along the way. I think of Bates [Dance Festival] in particular.

LL: I think we will. Laura [Faure, the director] really believes in our work and she’s very interested in what we are doing in Japan.

Incidentally, let me finish with Japan. What are they interested in in Japan? Everybody I’m meeting with in Japan in the contemporary dance world? How do you work with older people? What are we going to do about the fact that our older people and younger people don’t talk to each other? How do you work in communities? How do you recruit? That’s what they want to know. That’s why they’re going to bring us over.

LL: The initial part of this is NJPAC, New Jersey Performing Arts Center. They did this Africa exchange, which was very successful. And they asked me to be in this Asia exchange and I said, great I’d love to, but I’d like to try to work – usually what they do is they give you some collaborating artists in the other country and you just work – but I suggested that we try to do it more like a "Hallelujah" in the sense that we go and explore for a while, discover what the issues are, find out what kind of partnerships would make sense. It requires a longer time frame. But if they said to me we have to know now, I’d say we found some really interesting partners in Kyoto and Osaka, that teaching should be a big part of it and that we should make a piece based on something about the nature of cultural influence by looking at 20th-century Japanese visual art.

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Laughing and Crying in An Age of Anxiety: An Interview with Liz Lerman

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