This week we’re sharing tributes to the entire 2024 Dance Journal Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, go to retailer.dancemedia.com.
For Liz Lerman, dance occurs in a wide-open panorama. She’s made it her life’s work to “horizontalize the hierarchy,” as described in her 2011 ebook, Mountain climbing the Horizontal: to make sure that her live performance work exists on the identical continuum as her group work, that older dancers can share the stage with youthful dancers, and that no topic is off limits.
Lerman’s many titles—Dance Trade founder, Arizona State College professor, choreographer, creator, activist, speaker—mirror her unbounded curiosity. “I nonetheless use dancemaking as a method to perceive what I simply can’t fairly grasp,” she says.
Her knowledge-gathering contains everybody. She collaborated with shipyard staff in The Music Corridor’s Shipyard Mission (1996), Harvard Regulation Faculty school in Small Dances About Huge Concepts (2005), scientists in Ferocious Magnificence: Genome (2006) and The Matter of Origins (2010), and veterans for Therapeutic Wars (2014). In 1975, she created one of many first skilled firms of older adults, Dancers of the Third Age. A 12 months later, she based the multigenerational Dance Trade (initially Liz Lerman Dance Trade), a spot the place inventive company belongs to everybody. That method has helped Dance Trade proceed to thrive following Lerman’s departure in 2011.
Lerman believes dance-based creativity can profit anyone and everyone. She initially developed her Vital Response Course of to assist artists and audiences give and obtain productive suggestions, but it surely has been utilized in a wide range of settings, from enterprise places of work to highschool school rooms. Her Atlas of Artistic Instruments, a category and dwelling archive that she’s now working to make broadly obtainable on-line, is designed to assist anybody unlock new concepts and methods of studying. “Creativity is our birthright,” explains Lerman. “It may be utilized in each side of your life. Much more to the purpose is the act of realizing that you would be making your individual instruments.”
Lerman, who turns 77 this month, exhibits no indicators of slowing down. At present, she is at work on a brand new ebook, slated for publication in 2025, and a sequence of research-based efficiency occasions, referred to as My Physique is a Library. “I’m attempting to know how we need to put our work to ensure that different individuals to seek out us,” says Lerman. “We have to replace the nomenclature.”