FEBRUARY 20 – MARCH 11, 2012
Residency # 144
Application Deadline: October 21, 2011

LIZ LERMAN, choreographer

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker. Described by the Washington Post as “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,” her dance/theater works have been seen throughout the United States and abroad. Her aesthetic approach spans the range from abstract to personal to political, while her working process emphasizes research, translation between artistic media and intensive collaboration with dancers, communities and thinkers from diverse disciplines. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance.  Recently, she handed the artistic leadership of the company over to the next generation of Dance Exchange artists and will be pursuing many new projects with fresh partnerships, the first of which is acting as artist-in-residence at Harvard University for Fall 2011.

Liz has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the American Choreographer Award, Washingtonian Magazine’s 1988 Washingtonian of the Year, and a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship. Liz’s work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, BalletMet, the Kennedy Center and Harvard Law School, among many others. From 1994 to 1996, in collaboration with the Music Hall of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Liz directed the Shipyard Project, which has been widely noted as an example of the power of art to enhance such values as social capital and civic dialogue. From 1999 to 2002 she led Hallelujah, which engaged people in 15 cities throughout the United States in the creation of a series of dances “in praise of ” topics vital to their communities. She created Ferocious Beauty: Genome, which premiered in 2006, with the participation of more than 30 scientists and has toured it to sites throughout North America, including the Mayo Clinic and the Ontario Genomics Institute. Co-commissioned by the University of Maryland and Montclair State University, her newest critically acclaimed work, The Matter of Origins, examines the question of beginnings through dance, media and innovative formats for conversation.

Liz addresses arts, community and business organizations both nationally and internationally. Sites of recent speaking engagements include the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Big Intensive at Sadler’s Wells in London, and Harvard University. Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, her new collection of essays, was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. She is also the author of Teaching Dance to Senior Adults (1983) and Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (2003), and has written articles and reviews for such publications as Faith and Form, Movement Research and Washington Post Book World.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Milwaukee, Liz attended Bennington College and Brandeis University, received her BA in dance from the University of Maryland, and an MA in dance from George Washington University. She is married to storyteller Jon Spelman.

Residency Statement
I make work driven by questions both personal and practical. I am interested in creating a residency experience based on exchanging the skill-sets and backgrounds both of actors who move and of dancers who wish to work in a subject-matter framework, through a process which allows both groups to access each other's knowledge and choices. Here, our subject matter will be the impact of wars on the field of medicine. The research material includes interviews with contemporary doctors and scientists, and diaries from both the current Iraq war and the American Civil War. If time allows, we may also address movement forms set against old war movies and determine which parts of which movies could work as part of an eventual "set” for the full work I am building towards. Our work together will be ensemble-based, so applicants need to be prepared to create both together and alone, and to share in consequences edited by the choreographer/director. We’ll spend time daily practicing my Critical Response Process as feedback for the work we’re making and as juice for the work ahead.

Application requirements:
I am looking for performers, from both dance and theater. Please send a professional resumé and a DVD footage of your own recent performance(s), up to 5 minutes of material. Indicate the origins and include a sentence about the process used to develop what you have sent. Also, since you will have time on your own to make work, explain in one paragraph what you are currently investigating, and in another paragraph what you bring to a residency of this nature.

FULL Scholarships to attend FREE are available for painters and sculptors (through The Joan Mitchell Foundation) and composers (through The Sally Mead Hands Foundation) for ALL accepted artists who submit ACA Financial Aid forms upon acceptance. Limited additional Financial Aid is available for writers through The Pabst Charitable Foundation for the Arts and the Atlantic Center for the Arts Advance an Artist Program.