Liz Lerman: Bridging Divides & Building Meaning Through Dance

Podcast Interview with Liz Lerman In this episode, Liz Lerman talks about how she conceptualizes of dance, artistry, and social change. She digs into how her practice and understanding of the work she does has developed over time. She discusses how she has developed deep relationships with diverse communities in a number of domains while bridging the divide between the "usefulness" of dance and pure artistry. Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. Liz has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. Her choreography has examined everything from her days as a go-go dancer in 1974 to investigating the matters of our origins by putting dancers in the tunnels of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. 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. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011, when she handed the artistic leadership of the company over to the next generation of Dance Exchange artists. Interviewers: Sarah Halverson-Fried, Master's student in Urban and Regional Planning; Sara Lyon-Hill, Ph.D. student in Planning, Governance, & Globalization; Max Stephenson, Director of the Institute for Policy and Governance