An Artist’s Life at the Border

Liz Lerman, choreographer, performer, writer and educator

What happens to our various fields of study and action when we collaborate across disciplines and domains? What research methods do we employ in concert and separately that lead to problem solving? How does sharing these creative research ideas sustain inquiry, innovation, and the emergence of new knowledge? In this talk, MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow choreographer, performer, writer, and educator Liz Lerman will investigate her partnerships with collaborators across disciplines and around the world. She will explore the ways these collaborations build productive new models for creative research, and discuss uses of the feedback process she calls “Critical Response.”

Bio:

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur Genius Grant Fellowship and a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance. A key aspect of Lerman’s artistry is opening her process to various publics from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company's unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011. She was an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University in fall of 2011, and continues to teach nationally and internationally. Current projects involveHealing Wars, an investigation of the impact of war on medicine set to premiere at Arena Stage in 2014, the genre-twisting work Blood Muscle Bone with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women, work in London with Sadler’s Wells Theatre and the London Sinfonietta, comic book structures as applied to narration in performance, and an online project called “The Treadmill Tapes: Ideas on the Move.” Her collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and in paperback in 2014.