This week we’re sharing tributes to all of the 2024 Dance Magazine Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, visit store.dancemedia.com.
For Liz Lerman, dance happens in a wide-open landscape. She’s made it her life’s work to “horizontalize the hierarchy,” as described in her 2011 book, Hiking the Horizontal: to ensure that her concert work exists on the same continuum as her community work, that older dancers can share the stage with younger dancers, and that no subject is off limits.
Lerman’s many titles—Dance Exchange founder, Arizona State University professor, choreographer, author, activist, speaker—reflect her unbounded curiosity. “I still use dancemaking as a way to understand what I just can’t quite grasp,” she says.
Her knowledge-gathering includes everyone. She collaborated with shipyard workers in The Music Hall’s Shipyard Project (1996), Harvard Law School faculty in Small Dances About Big Ideas (2005), scientists in Ferocious Beauty: Genome (2006) and The Matter of Origins (2010), and veterans for Healing Wars (2014). In 1975, she created one of the first professional companies of older adults, Dancers of the Third Age. A year later, she founded the multigenerational Dance Exchange (originally Liz Lerman Dance Exchange), a place where creative agency belongs to everyone. That approach has helped Dance Exchange continue to thrive following Lerman’s departure in 2011.
Lerman believes dance-based creativity can benefit anybody and everybody. She originally developed her Critical Response Process to help artists and audiences give and receive productive feedback, but it has been used in a variety of settings, from business offices to high school classrooms. Her Atlas of Creative Tools, a class and living archive that she’s now working to make widely available online, is designed to help anyone unlock new ideas and ways of learning. “Creativity is our birthright,” explains Lerman. “It can be used in every aspect of your life. Even more to the point is the act of realizing that you could be making your own tools.”
Lerman, who turns 77 this month, shows no signs of slowing down. Currently, she is at work on a new book, slated for publication in 2025, and a series of research-based performance events, called My Body is a Library. “I’m trying to understand how we want to put our work in order for other people to find us,” says Lerman. “We need to update the nomenclature.”
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