TCG National Conference 2003

LIZ LERMAN
TCG National Conference, June 13, 2003

LIZ LERMAN: Thank you. Thanks to all of you for giving a little time to some of the ideas I'd like to share with you. Recently, I shared the platform with a kumu hula, that's a hula master. Her name is Raylene Lancaster. She is maybe—it's hard to tell how old she is, but maybe 60, maybe 80. The form is so incredibly beautiful and includes these chants. Raylene chants and then she has a way of translating this incredible language into words that we could understand—or I could understand. She says through the chant, "Bring your ancestors into the room. Bring them all here." (You can choose which ones you want to bring.) And then she says, "You're not alone. You never were." I think that is part of what happened to me these last two days, being in your midst and feeling so thrilled by the intellectual passion and questioning you have been doing and the incredible fervor bubbling up from the young people—it's just fantastic.

Ancestors are on my mind also because I grew up in Milwaukee. In fact, my dad's tire store is just a couple blocks away from here. On Saturday mornings, my father would go open the store and then he would call the house and wake us up and tell us everything was okay. This was at six a.m. So I was thinking…when the Lermans get together, on Saturday morning all the Lerman kids are up at six and all the spouses and partners are asleep upstairs. But I was tempted to call you all and tell you it was going to be okay because, really, that was his message.

So, bring your ancestors in. Let's have a big crowd of people thinking about these issues—I cannot believe how much politics has been coming up these last few days and I find it like a giant spiral of thinking that's thrilling to me.

If I can indulge in just one more personal story of ancestors: Now, my dad was born here. I was born in Watts. My dad came back from the war and then I was born—and he couldn't get a job because he'd briefly been a communist, for about six months. You know, Wisconsin's a very progressive state, but he got out of the party when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler. This is an example of my father's integrity, which is just incredible. He lived his politics. So, we moved to Washington, then eventually moved back here to be in the business.

My dad is just an incredibly ecstatic Jew, making sure that his faith participated in his politics. When my mother died, he married an incredible woman named Sarah Dean, who was a former nun, and she's been a part of our family now for over 25 years. She had a mom named Kathryn, who came to live here, and Kathryn has been dying for the last few months and we've been hoping for this. Those of you who've been around death know this incredible complication of living in life and grasping with these last days when you can touch the skin of people, knowing that, really and truly, it's time for them to go.

I was hoping Kathryn would wait long enough for me to get here, so I could be with my stepmother. Sure enough, on Wednesday night—I got here Wednesday during the day—in the middle of the night, the phone call came. Sarah and I went to the nursing home and I thought, probably, it was going to be a little bit of a vigil. And Kathryn, Kathryn is one of these great women raised in such hardship—you know, alcoholic father, mother dead at a young age, raised two kids alone, went to Johns Hopkins at night because she couldn't go during the day because girls couldn't go during the day, got her degree and all that. There she is breathing her last breaths, this strong woman.

I don't have the capacity to give you the sound of the breath, but the sound of the breath was like a thousand brooks going and she stopped breathing; she sort of practiced a little bit. You know, she stops breathing, then she starts up again. It's amazing how people rehearse, isn't it? It's just incredible, the tool we have in rehearsals to practice. And then, she died—but I was thinking the incredible obstacle her strength was. Like, I'm sitting there thinking, "Let go." Right? "Stop." And all the strength that kept her alive and kept her the person she was, was the very obstacle in her path to her dying, which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately: how our strengths are also our weaknesses, how the very thing that gets us to the place we can be is also the very thing that is in the way of our change.

For example, will. You know, all of you who both direct and make art, you know what will does. Will gets us up in the morning; will makes us see we are praying that what we're trying to make happen on the stage is actually happening. You know? And then, when you try to fix your own work, will is exactly what's in the way. You can't fix it. Will keeps you from seeing it.

So, this has sort of been a meditation for me these last few days. I've been thinking so much about how we might talk about change and thinking two other thoughts about this idea of strengths and weaknesses and things being in our way. As Abel [Lopez] mentioned, I've been spending some time in the classical music world, which is really interesting. It's very interesting to switch gene pools because you learn so much—I mean, partly because you see other people's dilemmas and it's always fun to see other people's problems, but it's also that you get mirrored back and see your own thinking in different ways.

I was asked to do some work with chamber music students. Well, it turns out that chamber music students have absolutely no time in their training when they're taught how to talk to each other. They don't have directors, they don't have conductors, but they also don't have any training in communicating with each other. So, they thought maybe our collaborative tools would be of use. So, I'm doing this—my next piece is going to be about genetics and genomes, so I've been doing some very interesting research and there's a very wonderful book called Genome, if you decide to read one book on genetics, by Matt Ridley. It's very good and he has a chapter on intelligence in which he describes another author talking about multiple kinds of intelligence.

He says this author lists three kinds: creative, practical and analytic. Now, analytic intelligence is this: There's only one right answer and the problems usually have nothing to do with life. For example, classical musicians training in their technique need analytic intelligence. I mean, for them, it's a matter of artistic life and death, but for most of the world, it's not about living and there's only one right answer. Practical intelligence is the kind of intelligence that comes out of life and there are thousands of answers. For example, if you had overslept this morning—which I wouldn't have let you do, but if you had—there would be thousands of solutions to the problem. It's a life problem. That's practical.

So, I'm getting ready to work with these Juilliard students and what I encourage them to do in the moment is to accept the fact that they had a highly refined analytic intelligence, serving them very well in their training—but not useful, if we were going to discuss collaboration. It's in the way because there cannot be one right answer when you're collaborating. Out of the question. We discussed how to honor that place in themselves, for a moment, and then put it away and use this other intelligence. Like I say about my own training—you know, the dancer in me loves my classical ballet training, but the choreographer is me has been fighting it for years. Which of our strengths are we drawing on at any given moment?

Secondly, I've been having a meditation about thinking about change and also about something that's grown out of my conversations with the Jewish world and the music world, which is the possibility that we, just for a moment, substitute the word "convention" for the word "tradition." If we say, for example, that we're going to change a convention and not change a tradition, it's a whole lot easier to do. I found this out working on a piece called "The Good Jew?" in which I was on trial for whether I was Jewish enough. It was really an interesting piece to do. I had a wonderful time, speaking of ancestors, because I brought in the Baal Shem Tov as one of the characters and he was on my side because he's a dancer and I'm a dancer, so it was really nice to have his support. But I was struggling with the end of the piece and I had a wonderful mentor in this rabbi and I went to him and I said, "Okay, here's the idea: All the dancers are going on a diagonal and, every now and then, one of the dancers goes off the diagonal and they're far away from the group, but they're still going in that direction."

And he says, "Well, Liz, that might be very nice art, but that suggests that there's a norm in Jewish life. There isn't any norm in Jewish life." He said, "As a matter of fact, 'Ein Kelohenu'"—which, if you grew up in a Reform synagogue, like I did, is the most important hymn—"'Ein Kelohenu' is a 19th-century German drinking song." [laughter] It's a convention. It has nothing to do with tradition. It's much easier to change when you know things like that.

One last comment: My last conversation with large institutions was a group of 20 symphonies. There are two different conversations going around the country between these symphony orchestras—talk about groups with problems and with issues around change—and I was asked to talk to them at the end of their three days. I had been listening to them for three days—and, again, I'm really big on this genetics stuff right now—and I was explaining to them that the idea is that the DNA replicates and replicates and replicates and replicates and, then, every now and then, it makes a mistake and, when there's a mistake, you get a mutation. Well, it's a good thing that we get that mistake because otherwise we wouldn't be here. There would be no evolution without these so-called mistakes. It is critical that we goof. You know how they say the Eskimo have 20 different words for white, which I recently read is bunk, but, with that idea in mind, I wish we had 20 different ways to think about the word "mistake," because we are desperate for them. Mistakes are essential to who we are, how we grow, how we change. And yet, the longer any of our institutions are in existence, the harder it is to make mistakes. The longer I am who I am, unless I create an environment that allows me to make mistakes, encourages me to make mistakes, finds it thrilling to make mistakes, nothing's going to happen. So, in this context, we continue our conversation today. I'd love for everybody to just kind of meditate about that. I feel it is incumbent upon us to teach this to our boards, our audiences, our writers, everybody in our universe and to remind ourselves daily. And I don't mean risk. I'm talking about stupid mistakes. Okay?

When TCG was kind enough to ask me to come, we thought that maybe I could bring some company members with me and we might perform a little bit and we also talked about getting some folks from the conference to participate too. I want to thank all the people who came to the workshops; we had some wonderful time making stuff—in one hour. And then I want to thank all the wonderful people who took one extra hour to make something more with us because they joined us. And we're going to break up this talk with a little performing here and there.

At Dance Exchange, we talk about our own DNA as being four questions: Who gets to dance? What are we dancing about? Where is the dancing happening? And why does it matter? So, you might think a little bit about that while we show you this first little thing. What we're going to give you is a couple of excerpts from our repertory, interrupted in the middle with a group section from some of our guests. And I don't want to tell you too much more than that right now, and I'll see you in a few minutes.

[dance break]

So, fabulous, you guys did a great job. Didn't they? That was great. You saw Thomas Dwyer and Marvin Webb in this first duet, which is an excerpt from a Bebe Miller work called "Blessed." In the last piece, Marvin Webb and Martha Wittman performed work choreographed by Peter DiMuro, one of the artistic directors of Dance Exchange. It's part of a project he's doing nationwide, looking intergenerationally at gay, lesbian and bi- and transgendered community life and it's quite particular to each community they're touring to. I can't tell you the names of the people who also joined us, for which I am really sorry so, before we close out, I will have them say their names. I only saw them with their tags.

I want to spend a little bit of time on this part. If you've heard me talk before, you know this part; in fact, I think some of you could give the talk. It's really my piece of repertory I think I've been doing for over 25 years now, trying to understand a way to have a philosophy to underpin the work that I'm doing both on stage and in community life and how to make that work.

I usually start with a little short history lesson that goes like this: I think there was a time when people danced and the crops grew. They danced as a way to heal their children. They danced to prepare for war. They danced as a way to understand what they could not understand in any other way. And, when they were doing that dancing, they weren't pretending. So, for example, if they were going to do a hunt and they decided to do a lion dance, I don't think it was exactly an interpretive dance about lions. I think they became the lion in order to really understand. That's the problem with interpretive dance, actually: the pretense, not the notion that we can put into our bodies things that matter.

I love to think about this time and picture what it was like and, then, because I'm a performer, I start asking questions like, "Okay, who got the best parts?"

How did they decide? I mean, your whole life, the rain, everything depends on it. Who do you trust? This is the question: Who does the dancing? Well, I like to think maybe they gave it to the fattest person, the person who had the most weight—or, maybe, the oldest person, the wisest person. I don't know, maybe the baby. But I do like to think that there were values that helped people understand who was who and what was what and why it was happening.

And I like to imagine, even though my guess is that the work was highly abstract, that everybody understood what was happening. I don't think they had to read it in the paper the next day. I think they knew. And why did they know? Because, probably, they knew the dance or they had been somehow led to understand through some process that, when this happens, that's going to mean the sun and we're going to agree that that's the sun. Of course, what's happened now is some artist one morning woke up and said, "You know what? This is not really a really good sun. That's a better sun." And this probably would have shocked the community terribly. They probably would have had to work it out. And, like "Ein Kelohenu," it would turn into tradition. I do have a sense that it was critical, that the art was critical.

This is so apocryphal, I know, but when I contrast that to my own upbringing as a dancer, and I think it's probably translatable to almost any profession in the country, the dance world that I grew up into was something like this: modern dance, postmodern dance, downtown postmodern dance, uptown postmodern dance. And there was ballet, there was the Russian Ballet, the Italian Ballet, the English Ballet, the Balanchine Ballet—and, of course, each of these little boxes formulated some incredible distinctions, but also made a little case for themselves. There was also, of course, the incredible ethnic forms. The question within the ethnic forms was whether they were going to preserve or make the culture move forward. But each time these distinctions were made, it became a matter of encircling it into a little cement box. Literally, for me to study modern dance and ballet dance, when I was growing up, was so radical. Nobody did that and you were made to feel terrible if you crossed over.

It's only critical when you start looking at what's not in the boxes. So, for example, my mother dies of cancer when I'm really just starting to choreograph and I'm thinking, "Okay, the only thing I can do is make a dance about my mother's death." But you know what? When I go to my little postmodern dance box of all the things I was trained to do, there's nothing in the box about healing. If you're interested, they go, "Oh, you mean dance therapy, Liz? That's over there. Go study that." There's nothing in my box about the politics of dying. "Politics? In art?"—and remember, this was a long time ago, in 1975. They said, "Go to Latin America, that's where you might find it, but you're not going to find any politics in art in this country." Not in my box.

And here's a really stupid one: I had discovered, actually by working with Twyla at a young age, that teaching helps you get to be a better dancer. I was really interested in that idea, but, in this country, still, to this day, if you want to study education and choreography in an institute of higher learning, you have to choose. There are probably only about two campuses in the country that will let you study those two things together. You have to choose. You're going to be the artist or you're going to be the educator, right? To me—well, it's a disaster. It was a disaster because I couldn't make the dance. I didn't have the tools. So, what I began to do was to fight my way out of this postmodern box, which, incidentally, is still home and which I love. I love my postmodern nest. But what I have done is to turn these cement walls into permeable membranes and make it much easier to move between them, which is essential. And I know you are all doing this. We're all very busy crossing over between these things. At the time, when I began to do this, it was really, really very difficult to do—and I was made to feel terrible for it, in some ways.

Which brings me to the second problem about these little boxes: Of course, they're not nicely laid out this way [horizontally], they're nicely laid out this way [vertically]. This is the really good box up here, let's say the work my company does in a concert hall, and here's the really not-so-good box down here, the work we might do in a nursing home. Or, depending on who you're talking to: [top to bottom shifts]. It's actually this, right? This is the really important work, the work we're doing in the company. "Forget that stuff you're doing on stage, Liz. It's just elitist, leisure time." This is a terrible way to live.

First of all, when you live in this universe [community at the top], the cutting edge is tiny, tiny, tiny. And when you live in this universe [concert hall at the top], the best you can do for the people down here is have pity. In that world, this universe up here always knows what's right and they never have to explain it. And these people [at the bottom] can do nothing but explain themselves over and over again. So, the world I wanted to live in was like this [horizontal]. Just that, just that much.

I really think it's what much of the culture wars are about. Because this is already happening, whether you're talking about women in Jewish life who have totally altered the Jewish community, for example, or the Internet—there are tons of things that are making this happen. But there are also many forces that make this very scary. I'd love to point out to you that, you know, if you've lived in this [vertical] world, particularly if you've been up here [at the top], all you can imagine is this [the poles reversing], that's because it's all you've experienced. You don't know it's going to end up here [with the poles horizontal]. Why would you think it would? So, it is terrifying because, what? You're losing your place.

I think a key to this is that this [vertical] world suggests that people have a particular place and people who like to know their place are really happy here, even if they're down here [at the bottom]. They at least know their place. You start doing this [revolving the axis] and those of us who like slippery slopes are really happy. This is curious, interesting; every day is "Whoa, isn't that interesting, oops, oops…" Also, imagine if you've been down here [at the bottom] and this [revolving] is starting to happen. Why would you stop here [horizontal]? It's your turn, right? It's your turn.

So, we at the Dance Exchange have been using this construct to help us understand any number of evolutions inside our artistic practice. For example, there's the shift in the word from "outreach" to "engagement." Right? This [vertical world] is an outreach model: "I know, you don't, I'll come to your community, I'll help you out." This [horizontal world] is a very different model and then the energy really starts in. In fact, what we've discovered is that almost anything you can put in this construct serves some interesting ways of thinking. For example, nurture and rigor. Nurture and rigor: My daughter's on one of these competitive basketball teams—ridiculous. It is so over-competitive, it is so stupid. There's nothing in that environment about learning and I was thinking they wouldn't just want to be in a learning environment; they want to be in a learning and a winning environment—and then they actually could win some games, I think. So, it's kind of a fun exercise to play with. Every time you find yourself at an either/or moment to flip it on its side and say, "What's at the other end of that spectrum that I might be investigating?" But here's the trick: You have to actually ask yourself, "What can I respect at the other side?" So, if it's nurture/rigor or it's, say, spiritual/unbeliever or if it's political/art or just voting for a change in office, you have to look and see what is there to respect on that side and see what there is for you and then start seeing how you can realign that and personally I find that really thrilling.

So, these are two ideas: this notion of permeable membranes—and I forgot to say one thing I want to just go back to. This idea of making distinctions and making these little boxes—I mean, I do think it's a very, very, very creative act. I am not you. The Dance Exchange is not a theatre company. It's not even another dance company. Let me tell you all the ways I am not like a dance company. In fact, I like to think about—when you first meet God in the Hebrew Bible, God is creating, right, but how is God creating? God is creating by making separations, right? Day is not night; man is not woman; animals aren't fish, whatever. Very creative. It's just the fact that I think our culture has gotten to the place where we've pushed this separation and specialization to an extreme.

In the genetics research I'm doing right now, you see it played out over and over again, like the nurture/nature argument, for example. Turns out our scientific community, about 50 years ago, split on this subject a little bit with the discovery of the structure of DNA. Those who believed in nurture and those who believed in nature began to study different creatures. They set up different laboratories. They learned completely different processes. Their universities set up completely different buildings. They were not talking to each other—at all—which is dumb because both things go together. I think one aspect of "The Genome" is going to be to talk about that. And one of our jobs, I think, is, yes, to continue to make these distinctions and separations and understand that that's creative, but also understand that part of our job is to reconnect and help people find those connections and understand what those connections can be.

A quick example of that: I was recently asked, by the great Ari Roth from Theater J, to co-direct with Nick Olcott. Some of you know Nick. It was my first time ever directing a play. Now, I thought that we had a lot in common, the theatre community and the dance community. I said, sure. And, just so you understand, I had a really great time and I had a really miserable time. Okay? And when you decide to tell someone, "Oh, Liz did this," don't tell them I had a bad time only, just because I may tell you about some bad times. I had a great time. I loved how crazy it was for me, how difficult it was for me. We have a thing at the Dance Exchange: Turn discomfort into inquiry. And this was the most uncomfortable. Three and a half weeks to make a piece of work? How do you do that, you guys? That was the biggest shock, that there was no time. And the second shock was that all of the skills of the people in the room seemed to have been built on the fact that there's only three and a half weeks of time and all my skills were built on—it may take me, if I'm lucky, three months to four years to make something. I mean, my skills weren't useless—a lot of good things happened, wonderful things happened in the process—but Nick and I had to learn a lot about collaborating.

I ended up thinking with Nick that when two people who are really different have to make something together, and their asses are on the line, then that's when you start to understand what compromise is. And no matter how great our aesthetics were—and we agree a lot on our aesthetics—the learning moments for us were when we were not in agreement.

I'll leave it with this: Collaborate across differences, make sure people's asses are on the line and amazing things come of it. And it turns out that no matter how strongly I feel about my aesthetics, I have to give some things up.

One of the tools we use in our community life and, actually, in the studio too, we call "big story, little story"—looking for the smaller stories inside the bigger histories. I turned 50 the same year that Israel turned 50 and so I made a series of dances called "50 Modest Reflections on Turning 50" and this is one little section from that.

[dance break]

Thank you. So, now we're going to show you this other section. The first is a solo for Thomas from a group of pieces called "Nocturnes." I was thinking a lot about the men of Thomas's generation. Thomas joined the company when he was 54 and he's been with us for 15 years. He never performed before that. He is an example that people will retire and become dancers, artists. I do think this is a future. But I was interested in men, somewhat like Thomas, who had committed their lives to corporations who downsized them, men who thought that the world was a certain way in terms of their relationships with women to discover that women had changed and they didn't understand that. Anyway, they woke up one day and the world was not what they thought it was. So, again, a little solo for Thomas. Then you'll see, again, a group of people that worked with us yesterday. And we'll finish with a little section from a piece about Leonard Bernstein we were commissioned to do and we were really thinking about this question about our institutions, this pressure we all feel right now, this sort of falling apart, maybe, and how we're going to rebuild ourselves—and that's somewhat the context.

[dance break]

All right, we're down to the wire here. I'm just going to say a couple more things and then we have a few minutes for questions. I wanted to turn the part of this just to thinking a little bit more about our institutions, the long row to hoe of just keeping our institutions alive and living. I'll just say, for me, keeping the Dance Exchange the lively and amoeba-like thing it is resides in our reliance on artistic process leading the way to our management choices. Can I say that again? Let me just say that again so you understand. Inherent in our artistic process is all the information—not quite all—most of the information we need for good management practices. Let's start just with this idea about rehearsing. Just a few years ago I was asked by Bob Putnam, of Bowling Alone fame, to come and spend some time at a seminar for six weekends looking at issues of social capital. He did a cross thing of different religious and political persuasions and different backgrounds of people. Ralph Reed was there and so was Stephanopoulos. It was interesting. The divide in the group was not a divide about ideology. The divide in the group was between practitioners and academics—a much bigger divide. And that's when I really started to think about what we had going for us and one of the things is our relationship to theory and practice. Every rehearsal is theory and practice at work and they're exactly next to each other. Everybody in our organization—most people—understand that.

That's an incredible tool. What does it mean? How can we use it? We began to examine all kinds of things and I, for example, like to think of meetings as rehearsals—very interesting. You know how you can rehearse for awhile and nothing happens and then one day everything happens? That's like meetings, right? Nothing happens, nothing happens and then, boom, it all happens. But, for us, right now, this is key because we're in the midst of a founder transition. I had a great talk with Michael Rohd this morning. I said, "You know, we're in a founder transition." He said, "You mean, you're leaving?" I said, "No, I'm not." I'm not leaving. That's the thing about our founder transition. I'm staying. I don't want to leave the Dance Exchange. I just don't want to do what I was doing and it's not healthy for the Dance Exchange to think that I could continue to do what I was doing because I stopped doing it very well.

But there are other people at the Dance Exchange for whom doing some of that is cutting edge, and that's exactly what they should be doing. I should be figuring out what I should do next, but it doesn't mean I have to leave. And, if we look back through our processes, we see that we have so many collaborative processes through our art-making to help us through this struggle—the egos, the bruising, whatever goes on with three artistic directors, Peter DiMuro, Celeste Miller and I; with dancers who dance, teach, choreograph, perform and do projects—how we manage all of that, how we keep that going. Of course, you know, not every day is a good day at the Dance Exchange, but I am heartily encouraged to think that we can manage this change. Who's to say, since most of the transitions we've talked about come from institutions that are built on this [vertical] model and, in that model, probably the artistic director has to go. But I don't think that in this [horizontal] model, that's the case at all.

Now, one of things I've noticed just about big institutions I've worked with—and I'll just talk about Jewish synagogues for a minute because they're really interesting and they're not unlike some of our large classical institutions. I'm part of something that's trying to make synagogues move from corporate structures to spiritual structures. [laughter] Sound familiar? So there's a lot of interesting change work going on all over the place and one of the ways the synagogues are handling this, it seems, is that they're breaking up into small little groups. They have people who like to pray with dancing meet in this room over here and people who like to do this other thing go over here. They have these little sub things; perhaps it's a little bit like having a complex with three theatres, maybe. I don't know, since I don't have that.

I don't think it's exactly the way to go. I mean, it's a step, but one of my frustrations around this is that, when people break up into their little groups like that, a little bit like here, actually, there is still a hierarchy of venue. There still is an expectation that the big service is where the action is and those little things that are happening don't count quite as much. Here's the thing that bothers me even more: The people who would be made uncomfortable by those little things never have to face it because they don't come to those things. They just go back home. So the question of how do we mix it up for our audiences and our people as we make these changes I think is critical. And I really think that an answer lies in this [horizontal] model. You can't let your little outreach education programs live completely separate from your best actors and stuff like that. You can't do that. You've got to mix it up a little bit more so that the audiences will follow and I think you'll see some amazing things. That's an opinion, of course.

One last comment and then we will have a little bit of time for some questions—and it relates to this question of transition. I've thought a lot about the Dutch and what it was like for them to be a world empire. Weren't they the biggest for awhile? And look at them now and how happy they are right now. You know, how did they do that? It's interesting because I do think there's something about gracious contraction that is in order here, for us.

I don't have this story quite right. Usually when I talk to Jewish audiences I always say, "I'm going to make a mistake and you can correct me later." In fact, I had once, in "The Good Jew?" a line that says, somebody says the word shmada and someone else says, "No, no. It's pronounced shmada." [laughter] That's why I need critical response—the Jewish world. So, I don't think I quite have this story right, but it's something like this. God filled the world and, I don't know why, but perhaps God was lonely, but God decided God needed more than just God in the world, but the problem is that there was no room because God is everywhere. So, God had to contract to make room. That has a word and it's called simsung, which I always thought sounded Chinese, which I loved. I think it's Hebrew, but I loved that it sounded Chinese. So, God does this simsung and contracts in order to make room for the creation. I think understanding not just how we get bigger and larger and better, but understanding how we get smaller and smaller is really a useful way to think right now and to understand that as we make room for each other. New kinds of work, new kinds of institutions—our own institutions, too, could get smaller.

So, I'm going to stop and, maybe, if you have some questions or reflections or things you would like to—we have a few minutes, we can do that. Contrary things, whatever. Yes?

MARK MCKENNA: Hi. I'm Mark McKenna from Touchstone Theatre. Thank you so much. We had a breakout two days ago and we were in the midst of defining our audience here in this community and a very clear, not perfect distinction was defining ourselves as canon-based theatres, community-based theatres and new work-based theatres. And a few of us, who kind of do both, were at a conundrum. Where do I go? And I made my decision based on the fact that more and more the audience has become very important to our work. So, it occurs to me, watching you guys, that maybe a way to define ourselves is in our relationship to our audience. How much do they participate? Do they attend? Do they help select? Do they create with us and to what scale? And so forth. It takes the focus off the art and about the relationship. At the conference we've been having form and content discussions and you people just came in to show what you do, giving ownership of the work to the performer, to the community, taking the hierarchy and putting it on a level playing field that is so important and such a beautiful way to see the company. I want to go back and start a creative retirement program at Touchstone and get some more ensemble members.

LERMAN: Good…thank you. I just want to say two things about this. One, a Dance Exchange sport is re-categorizing ourselves. We always laugh about that. There's a point you have to line it up with the budget or whatever and there's a thousand ways we keep redefining ourselves and it is a sort of sport-like process. And I forget the other thing that I was going to say to what you just responded, but it will occur to me as we listen to others and I will come back, but thank you. Maybe it was about an investment, but…. Questions or comments or reactions or things on your mind? I know you're hungry.

TRAZANA BEVERLEY: My name in Trazana Beverley and I'm an actress and a director. I've been in residence at PlayMakers theatre doing a production of Salome. And I've always had a great love of dance and, given the background that I came from, which had a lot to do with the avant-garde theatre back in the '70s from NYU School of the Arts, I have been working on a genre of performance called "dance-acting." And I appreciate so much what you've done today because reflects so very much the work that I'm now doing—and also with the age range of your participants. I asked the question: Why can't the dancer act and the actor dance? So, I have been working in bringing the two together. And in my need to move forward with this process, I went to certain theatre people who knew me because the dance world did not know me. And I believe that, given the state of our theatre, and where we must go and grow, I just want to encourage those people who are artistic directors here—and there are a lot of you—to also expand your programs and expand your seasons to embrace the work that Liz and people like myself are doing because we are now bringing together more of these forms. They are beginning to mesh more and I can tell you it's very, very exciting what is happening with movement and text. Thank you.

LERMAN: Thank you. And if I could just say about that—in my early incarnation, I used to talk about how we were reintegrating the powerful functions of art and it used to make me think I was looking for some kind of universal middle, which, partly because I'm almost past middle age now, I realize is really dumb to think about: a universal middle, but also, it is a mushy middle. The distinctions continue to be extremely useful and nuanced. What is interesting is to operate at the far extremes, the more extreme the better. And then we sometimes say, if you do this, of course, it's a circle and they're right next door to each other. It is sometimes a really permeable meld, but sometimes really distinct.

Anybody else? Anything quick before we end our time? So, I'll leave you with this last thought: When we work in communities, we can be incredibly subversive. And one of the reasons that we get resistance, particularly from the institutions we spend time in, is because they know we are boring these little, tiny holes into the very essence of the institutional structure. Think, for example, some of the art in schools, in prisons, in senior centers and synagogues. I find resistance highly interesting. Sometimes I just say resistance is information. It teaches me something. I can think about it. But, when you're busy boring holes into institutions, it can hurt a lot. And, sometimes, after you've spent time in those institutions and you come back into your own world, they're just as frustrated with you for having spent your time doing that. So, I thought about myself as being a messenger because I used to do a lot of talking in the non-arts world and I would be talking about the power of arts, but then, when I was in the arts world, I would be talking about the power of community and I always felt like I was a little busy bee, a little messenger. I was interested to find out recently that the Hebrew root word for messenger is also the same word for angel—which is very handy because it doesn't hurt as much and they can't kill you again. So, if that's of use to you in your work as you think about what kind of courageous steps you're going to be taking after you leave this place and all the messages you're going to be leaving and the variety of places you will be leaving them—if it starts hurting, just shape shift for a second it'll be fine. Everything will be fine. Thank you.