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Flash View, 10-16: Exchange Sans
Exchange
Lerman's Lockstep Healing: Disempowered at the Power Center
By Tara Zahra
Copyright 2001 Tara Zahra
ANN ARBOR, Michigan -- Before the
performance here two Saturdays ago of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Lerman appeared
on stage and told the audience that she and company members had done some soul-searching
since September 11. "We asked ourselves, what do people want to do when they go
to the theater these days?" The answer that they finally settled on, it seems,
is "go to Church." And so the Power Center was transformed into a house of religious
and nationalist worship, an experience that left me with unsettling questions
about what precisely it means to make political art, to "explore the connections
between art-making and community life," as the Exchange defines its mission.
The works performed, "Hallelujah:
The Gates of Praise," choreographed by Lerman, and "Blessed," by Bebe Miller,
were already based on deeply religious themes, representing the possibility of
redemption in moments of darkness and the story of Adam and Eve. These works were
beautifully and provocatively performed by Lerman's dancers, the Rudy Hawkins
singers, and community members with whom the company had worked collaboratively
over the past several months. Differences in age, in training, and in dance styles
were used to evoke relationships (father and son, mother and daughter) which are
rarely at the forefront of the youth-obsessed dance world.
But there is a difference between
representing forms of spirituality or religious themes on stage and asking the
audience to participate in these stories, to embrace them as a therapeutic balm
for deeply political wounds. An "Invocation" between the two pieces brought nine
"spiritual leaders" from Ann Arbor onto the stage. Each delivered a two-minute
speech on what the September 11 attacks meant to them and members of their faith
-- effectively, mini-sermons. Lerman and associate artistic director Peter DiMuro
then choreographed a "dance" that could be performed by members of the audience
in unison, to represent the words of these spiritual leaders, and their understanding
of the September 11 attacks.
By including representatives from
nine different faiths, Lerman surely thought the company was teaching us all a
valuable lesson in pluralism, in the strength in diversity. Yet the experience
effectively universalized spirituality itself: there was no one on stage to represent
non-religious ways of understanding or coping with the September 11 attacks. We
heard about good versus evil, about the meek inheriting the Earth, about praying
for the victims, the redemptive possibilities of unity, the greatness of America,
God's love for us all, including our enemies, and various theological views on
revenge and its pitfalls. But by offering only religion, the "Invocation" universalized
and depoliticized the profoundly political moment we find ourselves in. This was
art which reinforced the sentiments we have seen on talk shows and talk radio
and on the Internet, the stuff we can all supposedly "agree" upon and share --
rather than art that might challenge us to think about the events of recent weeks
in new ways.
Community-oriented dance companies
need to think hard about what it means to ask for "audience participation" in
a moment when calls for "unity" threaten to spill into a gross chauvinistic nationalism.
The dance we were asked to perform as an audience had a logic: It linked grief
with spirituality with unity with patriotism with participation. It left me with
a hard choice. I feel that discussion, debate, and disagreement is more important
than unity when lives are at stake, in matters of politics. I feel that the events
of September 11 must be understood politically and not simply spiritually, that
patriotism is too easily the source of hatred and over-simplification, that there
are many ways of grieving and coping, only some of which are religious. But to
opt out of the dance, to opt out of participating, seemed almost impossible in
the midst of Saturday night's pious mobilization of sentiment. Thanks to the strength
of the logic that Lerman chose to reinforce, a logic that is already overwhelming
in popular politics and culture, opting out felt like an act of treason. Opting
out was a forbidden expression of cynicism, a failure to grieve. People danced
in the audience Saturday night. Not an unremarkable occurrence, given the general
reluctance of tired and self-conscious audiences to cross the line from spectator
to participant. But it was not because they were discovering the power and magic
of dance, because they were being provoked to interpret their own communities
or the world at large in new ways. They participated, they danced, in a nationalist
and religious ritual. Is this the best the dance world has to offer?
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