64: Witches Are Not Victims: Liz Lerman on Power, Performance & Cultural Legacy – Part 2

In Episode 63 of Change the Story / Change the World, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer, teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. In this Episode, (64) we hear about Wicked Bodies, her latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches. Special Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for their support of Liz Lerman's work and the use of an excerpt from the Wicked Bodies trailer. BIOLiz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others.Called by the Washington Post “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,”[4] she and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers.[5] In 2002 she won the MacArthur Genius Grant;[6] in 2009, the Jack P. Blaney Award in Dialogue acknowledged her outstanding leadership, creativity, and dedication to melding dialogue with dance, and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.[7]She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman passed the leadership of her company to Cassie Meador;[8] the company is now called simply Dance Exchange.[9] .[10]Under Lerman's leadership Dance Exchange appeared across the U.S. in locations as various as the National Cathedral,[11] Kennedy Center Opera House,[12] and Millennium Stage,[13] Lansburgh Theatre,[14] Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center,[14][15] Harvard University,[16] and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.[17][18]Lerman's early work was strongly associated with the inclusion of older people alongside more traditional young performers,[19] and with the use of personal narrative.[4] Notable MentionsLiz Lerman: I help others when they come to me and ask. I work in this country and abroad in settings that continue to forge my thinking, make me bolder, and let me interrogate the next generations of artists. It is wide open at the moment. I am a little frightened, a lot more curious, and full of wonder and grief as I gaze around me.”– Liz LermanChange the Story / Change the World EP: 63, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. She also talked about hiking, the horizontal, the critical response process, challenging the Canon, the Heisenberg Uncertainty and how dance can help make the world a better place.Heisenberg Uncertainty: n quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities[1] asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position, x, and momentum, p, can be predicted from initial conditions.Wicked Bodies, Liz Lerman’s latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts YBCA was founded in 1963, as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. YBCA’s work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the community it serves.Christine Blasey Ford: is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine.[4] She specializes in designing statistical models for research projects.[5] During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.[6]In September...