danceviewtimes

“Small Dances About Big Ideas”: Choreographer’s Commentary Version
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Dance New Amsterdam (co-produced with Culture Project)
New York, NY
October 8, 2006

by Susan Reiter
copyright 2006 by Susan Reiter

Liz Lerman’s longstanding engagement with the events of the world around her, and the historical precedents that have brought us there, is admirable — and rare, amid the frequent navel-gazing one encounters. The “big ideas” referenced in the title of this work, which originated as a commission by Harvard Law School for a conference marking the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, have never scared her off. During the time this piece has been evolving through performances (it premiered November 2005), she has also been developing a new dance work dealing with the issues raised by the human genome project and one exploring contemporary issues of faith and prayer.

The edition of the piece that her ensemble brought to New York incorporates her own reflections and recollections of the issues and questions that arose during the making of the work. She reads e-mails between herself and Martha Minow, a Harvard Lew School professor who initiated the commission. Confronting the vastness and horror that the subject of the Holocaust — and, by extension, the subsequent genocidal rampages that have marked too many conflicts — was necessarily daunting. Lerman explained that the project was aimed to help conferees connect with the subject matter on a more physical, instinctive level than hours of verbiage could inspire — to remind them that issues of the human body are at stake.

This hour-long edition was thus a cross between performance and lecture-demonstration; it featured a slightly reduced cast and made utilitarian use of chairs and a desk, rather than the full stage set. Earnest and sometimes gripping, it avoided any sensationalizing. Lerman managed to suggest moments of desperation and crisis without ever resorting to histrionics.

At the start, she stood center and outlined the work’s origin and intention. Although most of the performers were seated anonymously upstage, facing away from the audience, the wonderfully evocative Martha Wittman — one of several more mature members of the troupe — rolled and lurked around and near Lerman, suggesting a vaguely timeless fate figure with her loose hair and filmy, layered dark dress.

Lerman’s businesslike introduction was cut off by the sound of explosions, as one by one bodies spiraled and crumpled to the ground. They tumbled randomly to the floor, then arranged themselves in a line, over and through which Lerman — with her alarmingly high spike heels seemingly like incongruous weapons — picked her way, with Wittman as her guide.

A black man whose fatigues set him apart from the soberly dressed group peeled them off to reveal his own neat shirt and tie, and at times during the piece appeared to represent the horrific conflict in Rwanda. Lerman’s spoken interjections — which were interspersed with a sounds collage featuring elegiac string music and official-sounding pronouncements about and from the Nuremberg trials. Lines such as “four great nations, flush with victory” resonated with the disparity between whatever lofty intentions existed for the trials and the immensity of thegruesome realities for which they were trying to seek justice.

The sober, unvarnished movement sequences served the exploratory, even humble tone of the piece. The impersonal, officious nature of a tribunal was evoked, then contrasted with the fierce, defiant dance in which Elizabeth Johnson flung herself against a table to embody the experience of rape victims.

Midway through, Peter Munro, who served as a low-keyed, officious narrator during the piece, led the audience into a participatory section that, however well-intentioned, stopped things dead. Acknowledging the discomfort of crossing the boundary between performers and audience, he had the house lights brought up and encouraged audience members to discuss their memories of when and how they first heard the term “genocide.” Cast members went into the audience — which happened to be quite small at this matinee — and engaged people in sotto voce conversations on the subject.

Munro then brought them back to the stage to report on what various individuals had said about their awareness of genocide, while also including gestures they had observed. Munro fielded these and maneuvered them into a movement phrase, which he then led the audience members in performing, several times over. One movement was included because an audience member had referred to the book “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” a much-read 1970 book dealing with the treatment of Native Americans; for this, Munro added a gentle touch of the knee. While clearly well-intentioned, and aimed at having the audience feel a personal connection to the piece — as opposed to be presented with something they absorb passively — this portion of the piece had an overly previous, somewhat manipulative tone.

But the tone overall had a certain unevenness, and the program seemed to progress choppily. Still, even in this reduced version, it did manage to summon up the enormity and vast cruelty of genocidal tactics, using an economy of means. And the scenes evoking judicial responses, as men in suits attempt to apportion blame and punishment in the aftermath, it suggested the emptiness and futility of such official, well-intentioned — at least far as the victimized ones are concerned. It comes across as a neat, businesslike response to something unimaginably ugly. Nuremberg tried to locate the blame, and exact punishment, for Germany’s genocide. But what did that do to prevent later horrors in Bosnia or Rwanda? Lerman is asking many questions about what we can, or should, do with our awareness, and whether any lessons have been learned.

The “original formal version” (as Lerman refers to it in a program note for this performance) of “Small Dances about Big Ideas” will be performed at University of Martyland, College Park on November 2 & 3.

Volume 4, No. 37
October 16, 2006
copyright ©2006 Susan Reiter
www.danceviewtimes.com