[ WEEKEND ]
GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STAR-BULLETIN.COM
Forty-five dancers rehearse at the Paliku Theatre on the grounds of Windward Community College.
Lerman’s ‘docudances’ Liz Lerman is all about breaking down barriers. The renowned choreographer, who made a name for herself as the leader of the crossgenerational Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, also incorporates everyday people -- old and young, most with little or no dance experience -- into what she calls her "docudances."
break down barriers
She uses everyday
Where and when
people, old and youngGary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.comAnd on this particular Monday evening at the Paliku Theatre on the grounds of Windward Community College, she, associate artistic director Peter DiMuro and veteran company dancer and teacher Martha Wittman are working with 45 people from the Oahu community who answered an open call and are meeting for the first time. By tomorrow, they will be transformed into a troupe helping to present a dance about immigrants coming to America.
It's all part of a whirlwind nine-day residency for Lerman and her company. Last weekend, the choreographer said she was blown away upon meeting with kumu hula Raylene Ha'alea Lancaster and her halau in Kohala on the Big Island. On her first-time visit to Hawaii, Lerman also gave an interactive public performance at Salt Lake-Moanalua Library yesterday, and will be the keynote speaker at tomorrow's State Foundation on Culture and the Arts' 2003 Conference on Arts Education, before her two Saturday evening and Sunday performances.
BEFORE THE BULK of the local community members arrived for their first rehearsal, DiMuro was working with a small group of men and young girls -- some of them fathers and their daughters -- in the theater lobby. They were rehearsing one of a series of dances from Lerman's "Hallelujah" project called "In Praise of Animals and Their People."
COURTESY AUBREY HAWK
Martha Wittman and members of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.
DiMuro offered supporting words while guiding his charges through slow, deliberate movements, the men sometimes carrying the youngsters while they walked in a circle. Afterward, before breaking for pizza, one of the men said that moving as a group helped him remember the steps.
One of the local presenters, Tim Slaughter of the University of Hawaii Presents group, will be dancing with his daughter in the piece. Another participant, Karen Masaki of the sponsoring Hawaii Community Foundation, will be part of the piece "Still Crossing."
"Tim sent out flyers," she said, "and also contacted UH, community colleges and Castle High School to look for people, and had some newspaper notices." The former dancer first met Lerman at a two-week grantmakers' conference at the University of Maryland and said, "She's very much from the heart.
"The Foundation is a public-supported charity ... and we support human services as well as culture and the arts," Masaki said. "This is the first time the foundation's the sole sponsor of such an event, and my experience with Liz, with the wonderful and beautiful work she does, fits around our mission of community building, and is a good example of how it and the arts can work together."
WITH THE community dance pieces being featured in the first half of the weekend program, Lerman said the second half will comprise two company dances -- a solo piece she created, entitled "Body Map," and "Anatomies and Epidemics" from "Uneasy Dances."
GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STAR-BULLETIN.COM
Dancers rehearse at the Paliku Theatre.
Lerman and her company have toured the mainland extensively over its 26-year existence. Lerman received a MacArthur Foundation grant -- dubbed the "genius grant" -- last year, and she said getting it, "relies on people, who know of your work, nominating you for it. The money is $500,000 total, $100,000 a year and taxable."
The "no-strings attached" grant has been a great help to Lerman. "Dance has always been the poorest of all the arts," she said, "because it's so ephemeral and it's about the body, so there are conflicting ideas about the art form, because you can't own it like a painting.
"On one level, it provides an amount of security for me and my family. It'll help with my daughter's college tuition, my own retirement and I also donate to my own organization," which operates like a charity.
"My friends said it's like getting well-deserved backpay. I say it's not backpay, it's reparations," she said with a laugh.
She also said that the MacArthur money will help fund her next project, this time about the human genome, as she'll work with an advisory group of scientists and bioethicists in translating their disciplines into dance.
And that's been Lerman's modus operandi throughout her career -- ever since she choreographed "Woman of the Clear Vision" in 1975, about her mother's death. The work featured professional dancers and adults from a Washington, D.C., senior center.
She established the Dance Exchange the following year and, after three years of running a school for dancers that included "senior adults and special populations," the Exchange launched a performing/touring company and made its reputation for innovative performance pieces over the years.
The company made its New York debut in 1983 with the first of Lerman's "docudances," entitled "Nine Short Dances About the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters."
TWO OF THE EXCHANGE'S most notable works have involved public spaces not usually considered to be performance venues. "Still Crossing" was first performed in 1986 at the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. It marked the culmination of a two-year residency in Portsmouth, NH, called the Shipyard Project, in which dockworkers were recruited to dance.
GEORGE F. LEE / GLEE@STAR-BULLETIN.COM
Liz Lerman discusses dance moves with local performers.
"They were dances basically about labor," Lerman said, "and we would talk with the community how they felt about the shipyard, addressing such issues as reconciliation, effects on the environment, job loss, secrecy."
As for the local performance of "Still Crossing," Martha Wittman was slowly easing in some of the choreography of the piece as part of the warmup exercises for the still-new group.
People of all ages, shapes, sizes and ethnicities were slowly rocking side to side, forward and back, breathing to the stately Mark Isham soundtrack, and hopefully starting to feel comfortable as a group.
Their movements were akin to swaying back and forth on the dock of an immigrant ship on its way to America.
Lerman said in a quiet aside as the rehearsal went on that the piece was "originally done with old people, but we've done it in so many communities since then, and though this particular group is a large one, the sheer mass of people on stage can be quite beautiful.
"But it's a mysterious and tricky process to teach movement and choreography to community people. They're learning to work in unison and to push themselves in that effort. While it's important to create within a nurturing environment, these people want to be challenged by their very participation in this dance."
Much as DiMuro did in the early rehearsal with the men and the kids, Wittman speaks and moves in gentle, measured beats as she took the group through the flowing, if complex, choreography.
"Martha was my teacher in college," Lerman said, "and danced with Doris Humphrey in the Juilliard Dance Theatre. After she left her teaching post at Bennington College, I asked her to join the company, and now she's part of our core of seven dancers."
(Wittman also has local connections, having worked as an associate choreographer with Betty Jones and Fritz Ludin's Dances We Dance Company from 1968 to 1996. Jones and Ludin, who have been full-time residents here since '79, were greeted warmly by Lerman when they joined the rehearsal in progress.)
"This is an opportunity to discover yourself in the story and the movement," Lerman said in comments to the group after the night's rehearsal. "I admit we've thrown a lot of movement at you," but one could tell that, as the rehearsals progressed, something magical would happen, a prediction made manifest when a final pose is struck, right arms held aloft, mirroring the Statue of Liberty holding her beckoning flame on high.
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Where: Paliku Theatre, Windward Community College, 45-720 Keaahala Road Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
When: 7:30 p.m. tomorrow and 2 p.m. Sunday
Tickets: $20, $15 for students, seniors, military and UH faculty and staff
Call: 956-6878
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
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