From a piece about her days as a go-go dancer in 1974 to a recent investigation of origins that included putting dancers in the tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, she has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her 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.
Liz lerman an artist s life at the border
Career
Lerman founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman passed the leadership of her company to Cassie Meador,; the company is now called simply Dance Exchange. .
Lerman's early work was strongly associated with the inclusion of older people alongside more traditional young performers, and with the use of personal narrative (citation required). Her later-career work has focused on questions of science from genomics to high-energy physics to the physical and psychic wounds of war.
In addition to her work as a choreographer, Lerman created the Critical Response Process, a method for giving and receiving feedback. Lerman developed the Process (or CRP) in 1990 and formalized it through the publication of the book "Critical Response Process: getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert" in 2003 which Lerman wrote with co-author John Borstel. Critical Response Process has a significant international presence, with institutional hosts including the Innovative Conservatoire, the Federation of Scottish Theatres, the London Sinfonietta, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Yorkshire Dance in addition to US hosts such as the Yale School of Drama and the Tisch School for the Arts. CRP facilitator-cohorts are in development in Scotland and in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2014 Yorkshire Dance developed a beta-version of an online-adaptation of CRP, called "_respond."
Lerman conducts residencies on the Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance performance at such institutions as Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the National Theatre Studio among many others.
613 Radical Acts of Prayer (collaboration with Cassie Meador), New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark, NJ
2009
Darwin's Wife, Center for Education and Culture, Sapporo, Japan
2010
The Matter of Origins, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
2012
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
2014
Healing Wars, Arena Stage, Washington D.C.
Publications
Teaching Dance to Senior Adults, 1984
Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process: A method for getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert (co-author with John Borstel), 2003
Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, Wesleyan Press, 2011