Margaret Fuhrer:

Hi dance friends, and welcome to The Dance Edit podcast. I’m editor and producer Margaret Fuhrer, back with a new interview episode.

We’re getting a little witchy today, we’re having a very witchy holiday, with the renowned choreographer and performer and writer and teacher Liz Lerman. Over the past year Liz has been presenting her newest work, Wicked Bodies, at several venues around the country, most recently Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. You’ll hear from her about how this dance-theater piece explores the persistence of quote-unquote “witches” over time, and the power and harm of these ideas about women and their bodies and their knowledge.

She also talks about why those issues resonate so profoundly right now. Because, like all of Lerman’s work, Wicked Bodies is deeply engaged in the social and the political. Much of Lerman’s artistic life has been spent looking at how the creative process can help us better understand and respond to the world around us. She believes, with inspiring conviction, in the power of dance to make change—real change, in the studio and well beyond the studio.

Before beginning the interview, I also just wanted to note that Lerman will turn 75 in just a few days, on December 25th. So, wishing you a very happy birthday, Liz.

Here she is.

[pause]

Margaret Fuhrer:

Hi Liz, welcome. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

Liz Lerman:

Thanks for having me. Very glad to be here.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Your latest work, called Wicked Bodies, was first inspired by a visit to an exhibition at the Scottish National Museum called “Witches and Wicked Bodies,” which had all of these sometimes grotesque but often very powerful images spanning multiple eras of history. Every era has had its witches. What made you first think, “I have to make a dance about this”?

Liz Lerman:

Well, it’s nice to go back to that exhibit. Nice is a funny word to describe it, because that’s not how I felt while I was in it. But I was, I have to say, taken by surprise by, as you say, the power, the slyness, the pornography, the incredible amount of symbolism in all of these paintings, pictures that went on for 500 years. Mostly painted by men, but not entirely. Many of them by people of the church.

When I think back and reflect on it, I myself am older now and I’ve always been interested in bodies, women’s bodies, and aging, so none of that was new to me, but I hadn’t actually been very interested in witches, although I should have been. But by the time I exited that exhibit, I was totally fascinated and I think maybe driven by my own ignorance in part, recognizing that I was on a precipice of not understanding, “How is this even possible that I missed all this?” Or that this has sustained itself for so long. And the exhibit included one wall of just all the deaths, each country by country, how many people had been killed… Not by the witches. I mean burned at the stake because they were witches. And that was shocking, and also how close in time it was to our own time.

So I was moved, came outside, and you look out over this landscape and there’s some trees back behind this green rolling little meadow that’s right in front of the museum. It’s not like there were witches there, but honestly my imagination brought forward immediately witches of all ages just flitting among the trees and joined with this idea, which I often have when I think about making something, which is, I don’t know enough about this, but if I make something, I’ll know something. And that is exactly what happened that day. I was like, “I better look into this.”

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. It’s interesting too, this throughline of knowledge being at the center of this project, the idea of witches as women who know things. You’ve mentioned this in other interviews, that the piece explores what knowledge is celebrated, what knowledge is erased, what knowledge is criminalized. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Liz Lerman:

So sometimes I use as an example Ms. Blasey Ford, who came forward during the Supreme Court hearings for Mr. Kavanaugh. And if you recall, at noon, after she finished, she was a hero. The coverage was incredible about how brave she was. And by five o’clock she was a witch. And if you go back and look at this and just watch it, you’ll see the criminalization of who she is as a person, how she could possibly have thought this, how could she have possibly brought this to the public’s attention, and it couldn’t actually be him that was the problem. And that’s an interesting example of the nature of the criminalization and the nature of the power systems in place that support the criminalization, when in fact the knowledge could be seen as actually, as it was at noon, brave, courageous, calling forth something that we are afraid to talk about or we are afraid to bring into our midst. And often that has been the story.

So that’s an example. There are many, and like a lot of the work that I take on of this nature, where I know I’m going to be at something for a few years, there are a lot of tributaries and the research… You go off, you interview people, you think about things, you have rehearsals, you try stuff out. I’m constantly testing in rehearsal, “Does this thing have any potential?” It always has potential in my imagination and in the imagination of those that have gathered. But does it actually have any way to move forward in a stage sense or in a performance way?

And the criminalization question I looked at for quite a while, just the numbers of who is being incarcerated in our prisons right now at the most rate, who’s being held the most, and for what reasons. As it turned out, that idea of criminalization became a constant source, a kind of an engine, without necessarily going into deep detail. We did determine that we would do one story of one woman who was brought to trial and to see that all the way through… And who was killed for being a witch. But not all the rest of them. But it did sustain me for quite a while.

I will say I found over time talking to people it was always interesting to bring up the witches. For a while I was hoping that the witches… Part of the thesis of the piece is that the witches are having a big meeting. And I wanted them to meet inside one of these giant saguaros that I live near because I live in Arizona. And the saguaros hold… If you go inside a saguaro, it has ribs. It’s a body and many creatures live in there. And I thought, “This is great. The witches would shape shift.” So I went over to the Desert Botanical Garden to talk to the person who runs the big cacti. And we had one of the best conversations and he was just so excited about what it could imply. Because a lot of people see the witches as magical, healing, a little bit of outsiders, probably independent, and capable of power. I would say those would be some of the things that people tend to bring with them, without designating good witch, bad witch, and all that stuff, which I don’t adhere to.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Well, and as you’ve started to say, you worked on this piece for several years and as you were working, there was a lot happening in real time in the political arena in particular that must have felt eerily resonant. How did things like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the protest in Iran, the increasing violence against women during the pandemic… How did that all make its way into the work?

Liz Lerman:

Well, I have actually a few stories, starting with the things that you mentioned first. As to what was happening in Iran, we had already premiered the piece, and I have a former student with a master’s degree in design that took some of my courses on creativity. We’ve stayed very close. She’s Iranian. And she called me up and said, “Can you please put this in your piece Wicked Bodies? Bring this woman back to us.” And I went to rehearsal because we were already… We were in performance. So rehearsal meant that we had just gathered, we were going to get the piece back together again and we were going to perform. And we couldn’t actually change the piece. But what we could do, because we circle up before every performance, is we could hold and try to honor the memory of this incredibly brave woman and all the women there for a second, for a minute.

So what does that mean? Does it change our performance? I think so. I think it changes who we are when we go out. Does it change people’s relationship to the performance? I think so. Do I know? I don’t know. And I wanted to be able to report back to my friend that we had done that. So that’s a direct way.

Another way was after the ending of Roe v. Wade, we spent a little bit of time in rehearsal trying to decide again where in the piece either could we augment, change, shift… Because I think the whole piece addresses it. But there are places where there’s text, and we did address it directly in some text, where it started out crimes of the stepmother years ago, where we were looking at all the ways that different cultures use stepmothers as evil. You want to find the witches, start with stepmothers and you’re going to end up with the witches. And so we had made a list of things which eventually is stated out loud, and we did add “performing medicine in back alleys.” It’s a little subtle. I think we could even do more, but for now…

But finally really to the point of this was what it was like to be making this piece during the time of Trump. And I just feel this is a person of vast cruelty and domestic violence. When he got elected, I actually wrote an essay which I haven’t published and said, “Oh, the country’s now in a domestic abuse relationship for the next four years. This is what it’s going to be like.” And sure enough, you watch the press try to leave him and come back, leave him come back, leave him come back. It’s just over and over again.

So I had a lot of rage. And so we built what we called the witches’ alphabet of rage. And that was a direct thing based on how we were feeling, but we abstracted it through a series of processes that I’ve used around emotional stuff before. And that became… It’s not even that it’s much in the performance. It’s that it existed and that we could rely on it and that we could go back to it. It’s almost like it was default movement that you could throw in when you needed something when you were stuck and you had to get through something. And then later on we might have taken it… So that was something.

And then finally the decision to use James I, of the many, many people responsible for the murder of witches—I like to remind everybody, legally, all these murders were legal, the state is doing the killing. Which one should we choose? And I took James I in part because, well, it’s the James I Bible and I wanted people to know that that Bible is by the same guy who was also responsible for a lot of these deaths. But also the idea that a single person can create such havoc. One person can create international havoc.

That’s how the current, contemporary world played itself out in our rehearsals, not to mention then also the things that each of the performers were going through in their own lives and how those stories wrapped their way into whatever we’re making.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. I was wondering about that too, actually, because…and I guess it’s not surprising, as we’ve seen women’s bodies under attack by various political establishments, in pop culture today there’s a growing fascination with witches and witchcraft. Everybody’s doing tarot card readings and charting the planets. There’s WitchTok, this community on TikTok. Have you heard of WitchTok?

Liz Lerman:

Well, there’s so much. I laughed because when I started the project, if you went to a bookstore and looked on the witch shelf, there’d be like three books. Now there’s just so many. So I just think yes, it’s quite a moment. I can think of reasons why it’s happening and not the least of which is the political climate. Our young people are just so wonderfully dramatic as they step into the world and demand a better world and the resources on which they are drawing in order to help create a better world are not going to be limited by some of the rational forces that were when we were coming up.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. It seems like, and you’ve touched on this already too, but in these depictions of witches and other magical women, there’s often the tension between victimhood and power, in that we see them being tortured and killed, but then also the strength in their bodies is inspiring fear too. As you did all your research, did this scale seem to tip more in one direction or the other, toward victimhood, toward power?

Liz Lerman:

It’s such a really great question. I’m so glad you asked. When I was young, I used to make three or four dances a year. Now it’s three or four years to make a dance and some of that is the fact that I need more time. Some of it’s the economics and some of it is what I’m trying to understand. This particular case, I would’ve been happy to have taken the time, but then the pandemic stretched it out as well.

The reason I’m glad I took the time is that the first two gos of trying to get this piece together, the witches were victims. My construct was… So the first one was I thought someone was collecting witches because they wanted their knowledge, and I loved the idea of it. And we got into it and it was really interesting. We looked at collections. We talked to museums. We tried all this stuff. But the fact is that the witches were being collected. And even though I was designing this liberation scene where everything that had ever been pinned down or held in a cabinet was going to be freed, so there was a big liberation scene, the bulk of what we were doing was we were victims, and I didn’t like that. So I moved away from that.

And then I went through a period where the witches were witches because they had survived previous extinctions, and that’s how they had gotten their knowledge, which I don’t think is actually wrong. We know that we carry knowledge from creatures and some of that lives in the piece. We still have a section where each of us carries the movement of a now extinct creature as if that is one of our jobs. But it took me that long to move through the victim place and my rage and my grief.

And even up to the premiere… When we finally premiered, two years after we thought we were premiering, but the actual premiere, even then I was feeling that there was a missing section about the relationship between rage and grief. And particularly I feel for women that this is a place I see in myself the speed with which I might move between those two emotional states. But I actually tried to make it and I couldn’t and then I couldn’t figure out where to put it so I stopped trying to do it. And I felt like that was the last step into this power, because now the whole second act is just spectacularly about the power of the women and the witches. They’re not all women, but the power of these people and the stories they have to tell and the narration they want in the world. And anyway, it took me a while to get there.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. Actually, I was going to say your shows tend to elude direct description, like a lot of good art does. But for people who haven’t been able to see Wicked Bodies yet, what did all of this research, all of this inquiry, end up looking like in performance?

Liz Lerman:

Yeah. Well, first of all, everybody should imagine the most amazing cast. Just an incredible cast of characters and people who stayed with me all this time. And they come from really different dance backgrounds and different ages. And I really feel they came to love each other really. And we built quite an ensemble. And as Paloma McGregor said as we were in our last show in San Francisco, we’re a pickup company, but we’re behaving like we’re a company. And that was I think a certain truth.

Once we saw we were coming out of the pandemic or at least beginning to and that this piece would be part of the coming out of the pandemic, I did ask the question, “How can the witches help?” Was the way I thought about it. And what came to me is an idea that we want intimacy and that we want spectacle. And intimacy… Yes, we’ve been intimate with all the people that we’ve been staying close in, but now intimate with strangers in a way. And that we would want spectacle beyond our computers, because we’ve all been glued to our streaming services and all that.

So Wicked Bodies does both. It starts with… You walk into the theater. The lights are all on. The witches are all out in the audience, and so are the local dancers that we work with who are part of the beginning. And everybody’s just talking. You get to talk about what kind of witch are you and what do you think about… What’s it like to be back in the theater? All the witches, but you’re in little pods. And then all of a sudden, well, there’s a fantastic entrance and usually people shriek. There’s thunder and lightning and people actually applaud. It’s so much fun that there’s a lot of ruckus. Someone said to me it’s like a rock and roll show in the first half. It’s just really wild.

And then they dance in the aisles and we try to get… I just wanted that closeness, that idea that the person you just were talking to is actually somebody who’s right next to you moving. And then we have this conversation about extinction. The lights go back on. Everybody’s talking about loss, extinction. What would you like the witches to carry? And it takes a real turn and it’s beautiful. I think it’s a beautiful section. Again, they dance in the audience, but they eventually end up on stage. And then from then on we’re on the stage.

And what follows then is a bunch of spells, and you start to get to know the different witches and this idea that the witches are having an emergency meeting. You start to hear this. And that’s being called by the great Martha Whitman, who was originally in the piece. She was my teacher at Bennington, and she’s been in my company for years, and she’s now in her high eighties. And we decided to conjure her. And so she’s present on screen and it’s I think beautiful.

But she’s calling us to this meeting where it turns out the witches… One of their jobs is they choose a narrator of our stories every 500 years. And the narrator that’s been in place… A white guy. Good, perfectly good guy. New Shakespeare. Helped save his mom as a witch. But he’s kind of lost it. I think he’s a little unreliable. His description of how witches fly is absolutely ridiculous. It’s really fun.

And so begins in the second act, the idea that each witch has a way of seeing human nature, and now you just get a series of individual stories where the witches are matched both to the kind of witch they are, but also to a narrative. It’s not just the story. Ruby Morales says, “It’s not just trauma that travels through generations. So does love.” If we really believe that, if that was our actual narrative, if we had that as the bones by which we lived, we’d be different. We would be different. And each of those narratives comes forward in those stories. So that’s what it’s like.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Oh, that sounds… Intimacy and spectacle and mysticism and storytelling and it’s just… Yeah, it’s everything to fill your cup. Whatever you want in your cup, there’s something to fill it.

Liz Lerman:

The way we open that first 20 minutes… I know some people really don’t like that kind of thing. And we always say to them… They’ll sit there with their arms crossed. And I said to the witches, “Just say, ‘Good, you’re in the anarchist chair. You’re in just the right place. Go ahead. Just stay there. You’re great.'” And we’ve heard from audiences it just means so much to them and they’re in a completely different place by the time we unroll the rest of what it is, and so are we. The feeling in the theater is just wonderful, and by the end really shared between the audience and performers and that makes me happy.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah, everybody’s been invited in. Yeah.

Okay. So I also wanted to talk about your ongoing exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, because people can still see that—that’s still going on.

Liz Lerman:

Yes, they can!

Margaret Fuhrer:

And it’s a joint exhibition with the visual artist Brett Cook. It’s called Reflection and Action. And you were both senior fellows at YBCA for the past few years. The two of you… I don’t know Brett Cook’s work that well, but the two of you seem to have pretty different aesthetics. But where is your common ground, and how does the exhibition reference that or build on it?

Liz Lerman:

I wish everybody could see me right now because I’m just grinning ear to ear, because it’s just been one of the great gifts of YBCA and the pandemic was to get to be in relation with Brett Cook, a person I did not know before they asked each of us to come in and be senior fellows. I actually wanted to call the exhibit “Twins,” which is ridiculous if you see Brett, because I’m short, he’s tall, he’s Black, I’m white Jewish, we’re in the movement world, he is this brilliant portrait artist. But it turns out that we have a lot of kinship in relationship to why art matters, how we want our art to work in the world, how we make our art, who are our models for being in it or who is he painting? And what is the nature of community? So we shared way more than I ever thought possible with somebody whose work looks so entirely different when you see it.

And so the exhibit is framed with these conversations between the two of us. In each of the rooms there are a few of them where you can listen to us maybe talk about all the things that we like to think about, from spirit to people to process. So it has been a real gift to be with Brett. And YBC… They asked us in part because we are active artists making work and active in the world, but we also do work within institutions and organizations and try to think through how artistic practice can serve organizations to function better in a way. So we did a fair amount of that too while we were there.

Margaret Fuhrer:

That actually leads right into my next question, because you’re of course a professor at Arizona State University too, and it seems like your work there is often about cultivating exactly this kind of maybe unexpected common ground between dance and other areas of study and research. In one of the university’s promotional videos, you say, “Turn discomfort into inquiry.” Can you talk a little more about that? I thought that was so beautiful.

Liz Lerman:

That’s probably the first of many of these fragments of language that eventually I sort through and get to by the constancy of trying to either explain process or get people to engage in process or to get people to participate. I think for me personally was noticing that I had a lot of inner complaints and judgements, and that when I could move these to a place of, well, asking a question, first of all, I felt better, my mood lightened and I could actually approach it, do something.

Now I actually have a lot of artistic tools that actually help you move from discomfort to inquiry. But the simplest one… Let’s say you’re complaining about something. You just put the words, “I wonder why,” in front of the complaint and you turn it into inquiry. Like, “I’m really cold. I wonder why I’m cold. Oh, the weather changed or whatever.” But about more serious things too. “I’m wondering why I am so uncomfortable in this room right now. I wonder why.” And you can actually begin to think about it, dwell on it. And if you’re lucky enough to have movement practices, then it is not always the words that hold our ambiguity. The movement can hold it much better. And that’s why I do so much work with folks that… They don’t think of movement as a part of why they would problem solve or want to live in the world through their bodies other than maybe exercise. But that’s why giving them these skills and tools is so fabulous, because we know movement can hold ambiguity in ways that words just don’t.

Margaret Fuhrer:

“I wonder why.” I’m going to tape that on my fridge. And the whole idea of turning discomfort into inquiry also seems to connect to your critical response process method for giving feedback too, getting at why something in someone else’s work makes us uncomfortable, why we don’t understand or agree with that. And you’ve used that extensively with nondance artists as well. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Liz Lerman:

Critical response?

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yes. Yeah.

Liz Lerman:

I think the theater world is using it the most, and we’ve just learned that a lot of poets and writers are using it now in their creative workshops. Dance, yes. But I like to say you’re never a prophet in your own land. But a lot of people are finding reasons to use it. They’ve tried everything else and they need it. They’re just aggregating the steps. So even though there’s a sequence that I think can help when you’re doing a formal response to things, the values that lay inside each of the steps can be really effective on their own if you practice and play with them.

I was very reluctant to do much codification around critical response because I worried that people… It would get cemented. But what I have found is quite the opposite, that when people have a sense of the values that are within it, then they’ll be very bold and there’s all kinds of ways people are experimenting with it because it’s really… I mean, yes, it’s about feedback, but it’s really about your judgments. It’s really managing all the perceptions that we have all the time.

In fact, just recently working with a friend and colleague who’s trying to address some of the speed with which she states her opinion, I was telling her it’s a little bit like a deescalation technique. You can have your opinion. Fine. But using critical response will deescalate the need to have to say it exactly like it comes to you and maybe in that processing you might discover some things.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Deescalation techniques for judgment forming. That is… Yep, that’s what we all need right now. Yep.

Liz Lerman:

I use as an example my mom, who I love dearly and left this earth way too soon, but she did not like symmetry. I don’t know exactly why, but she really didn’t like it. So when we moved once she made my dad move the door to the house from the middle to the side. So if I see symmetry, I can sometimes get…

Margaret Fuhrer:

Itchy.

Liz Lerman:

The hair on my… Yeah! Or something like that. But if you’re looking at dance composition from young people, you can see a lot of symmetry. So what am I supposed to do? And who’s talking when I get itchy? It’s my mom. It’s not necessarily me looking at the work of this person in front of me. So critical response helps you get at that stuff that you may have been raised to believe or you may have been trained to believe.

And this is where I think we get into a lot of trouble in our profession, because we set these standards based on somebody’s aesthetics, but they’re not aesthetics for everybody. They’re not and they shouldn’t be. And so we need to really think about why this person is doing this thing in front of us and the manner in which they are and where do we want to go in thinking through what they’ve done with them.

Margaret Fuhrer:

It feels like in the past few years the wider dance world… Well, the world at large really, but the dance world especially, has started to slowly catch on to principles that have been central to your practice for a while now: this idea that dance can be a powerful catalyst for social change, the idea that dance should be fully democratic, both in terms of how organizations look and in terms of who is invited and welcomed and engaged, and then that related idea that we should break down boundaries between the stage and the audience and the theater and the community. Are you having a bit of an, “I told you so” moment? Or, what do you think has shifted in the social fabric recently that has led to these changes, rather?

Liz Lerman:

In the spirit of hoping that my early work won’t be erased, it’s nice to possibly see the threads, to be acknowledged for all that turning of the soil. I think of it often like that. People till the soil so that other things can grow. And I seem to be a person who likes to do the tilling, even though sometimes I’m frustrated because I’d like people to still keep seeing what’s also growing. And of course I’m not the only voice. There were many of us saying this and doing this and insisting on this, not necessarily central to the canon that was emerging out of certain parts of our field. But certainly Urban Bush Women and Jane Comfort, the work that Merián Soto, Joanna Haigood, Eiko… There’s a lot of people turning that soil over in different ways. So I love that people are thinking about it.

What is interesting to me right now is… Because I think of myself as sort of an obsessive tool maker. All these years I’ve documented these tools and they live in books and they live in the Atlas of Creative Tools and they live in the toolbox at the Dance Exchange and they live in… And I think they’re really useful. I think you can take a tool and it won’t make you look like me. It’ll make you look like you when you apply it. But what I really think is that people have their own tools and the steadiness and the persistence of understanding that your intuition is something that you can harvest and you can use over and over again. So, I don’t know though. Sometimes I think people think the tools are… Maybe they’re more like, “Oh, she’s giving advice again,” and nobody wants advice, but I’m hopeful that I can put these things forward.

In a way that’s what the exhibition is. When they asked me, “What did you want to do with this exhibition?” What I felt was… yes, I want people to see what we did. Yes, of course. I want you to see. Look, we were in the shipyard. Oh look, we did that during 9/11. Oh, look at this thing that we did around toxic waste in 1984. Look at this. It’s one of my favorite pieces. It’s way, way old, that piece, but it’s really good. But mostly I wanted people to come out and just feel bold, like, “Oh, it’s possible. Yes, this thing I’m thinking… I want to make this thing about… Oh, I don’t know, the oil spilled down the block.” Yeah, make it! Make it.

And also it’s not just the making. It’s creating the conditions for partnerships, for relationships, and for engagement so that it’s not just, “I’m going to make this thing and put it on the stage and it’s over.” It’s all the multiple ways that we can share… Well, we’re back to knowledge, aren’t we? The multiple ways in which we can share our knowledge.

Margaret Fuhrer:

And you’re essentially now answering my last question, which is the question, a big question, because at this moment of pretty great uncertainty and darkness in the wider world—not to be too gloom and doom, but it’s been feeling pretty dark out there some days—I think a lot of us in the arts community especially sometimes feel helpless that we’re just over here doing our little dances and writing our little stories. But you have often affirmed this belief that art makes a difference. So can you say more about how can art and dance art in particular make both meaning and change?

Liz Lerman:

I think that a lot of our artistic practices and processes are actually the capacities and skills that people need in order to live in a world that is in constant motion. So I’m actually working on a new book, An Insomniac’s Guide to a Restless World, and it has a lot to do with choreographic thinking, the way design thinking took over all those millions of years… A long time ago. It’s like, everything is in motion. Our institutions, our organizations, the buildings, the earth, the climate… It’s all in motion. So what do we know that actually can help people? And if they would be willing also to come along and have it too, which means our educational systems have to change. I always say to my school, “I know you’re happy I’m at the school, but you measure knowledge systems by how much money they bring in and mine doesn’t bring in very much, but I still know something.” So it’s like how do we get people to be more engaged in these skills that I think really, really matter?

One of my labs over the years has been my synagogue in Washington DC, even though I don’t live there anymore, but I go back, and we did participatory forms of worship for years there, which always surprised and shocked me. It was something I just did on the side. And a lot of them never came to see my shows, and it was just a world. But this year when I was there for Yom Kippur—I do something participatory in the afternoon. It’s a big holy day in the Jewish calendar and everybody dances. It’s a thing.

But just before it, the story of Jonah is told every year, and this year the rabbi tells this story of Jonah, and Jonah’s the one who gets swallowed by the whale. He’s the one who’s running away from things. And the rabbi says it this way. He says, “He’s running away. He doesn’t really want to face God. And he’s finally in the whale and he finds out that you just can’t escape God.” And then he turned it over to me. And I always say a little bit before we start doing all the moving and I said… Well, because the rabbi knows over these years that I actually have trouble understanding the idea of God, but I have come to think that the search for creativity is similar. Not the same, but similar. It’s magical… The more I understand it, the more I don’t understand how come it happens. The more I create the conditions for it to exist, the more surprising it is when it happens. And the more I teach all my students constantly how to harvest all this stuff they already know, it’s still…

So I turned to everybody and I said, “Well, you can’t escape your creativity. You can try. You can say you have two left feet. You can try. You can say you don’t have imagination. You can try. You can put a boulder in front of you just so you can’t escape this idea of God, but I’m telling you, you cannot.” And that’s kind of where I am right now on the question you pose, is that actually it is our honor, our job, our privilege to share this incredibly powerful thing we understand. And the art world needs to change the system so that more people can participate.

Margaret Fuhrer:

I love the idea, too, that as you realize the extent of your own creative mystery, your faith in it also deepens.

Liz Lerman:

And I’ve heard people who are mystics or people who are trying to understand meditation and that and almost everybody says the same thing. That’s why there’s so much rigor around doing it and why there’s so much… It’s so interesting to stay on the path and keep trying and keep trying and keep trying, because it’s believable and unbelievable, and I can feel like I have a hand in it. “I just made that thing.” And I can also stand back and say, “How did I make that thing?”

Margaret Fuhrer:

“Where did that come from?”

Liz Lerman:

“How did that even happen?”

Margaret Fuhrer:

Well, Liz, thank you so much for making the time today. Thank you for your generosity and the depth of thought that you always put into your answers. I sincerely appreciate it. Thanks.

Liz Lerman:

Thank you so much for having me and for this time of year when we can all be together. I hope everybody has some time with their loved ones and thank you.

[pause]

Margaret Fuhrer:

Another big thanks to Liz, who is—I know you just heard it yourself, but just the most giving and kind interview guest. In the show notes we have links to her website, lizlerman.com, and also to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts site, which has more information about that ongoing exhibition with Brett Cook. That exhibition runs through next June, by the way, so if you’re in or around San Francisco, you have lots of time to stop by and take it in.

And thanks to all of you for listening. We’ll be back next Thursday with a special holiday treat for you—stay tuned. Until then, keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing.