S4; EP. 1 -- Liz Lerman: Critical Response Process®

“It’s not a given that you will be applauded for what you are doing.” - Liz Lerman Welcome to the first episode of Dear Multi-Hyphenate, Season Four!  Let's dive in with an amazing episode featuring the brilliant Liz Lerman! In this episode we discuss movement, creative tools, choreography and storytelling, Critical Response Process®, and Liz's upcoming new book Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide to a World in Constant Motion.  Lerman is a choreographer, writer, educator, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2014 Dance/USA Award, and the 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Award. Beginning her choreographic career in 1974, she has spent the past five 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 various publics, from librarians to physicists, rabbis to bharatanatyam dancers, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. Recently, Liz and her team of witches toured the dance theatre piece Wicked Bodies (2022) investigating the attempted erasure of embodied knowledge. Current projects include building the Atlas of Creative Tools®, an online resource and archive, and Legacy Unboxed™ that involves a series of site-specific research performance events called My Body is a Library™. Lerman’s upcoming book, Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide to a World in Constant Motion, is a collection of personal essays set to be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2026. Liz continues to evolve the Critical Response Process® through the Certification program, Fundamentals cohorts, and Essentials online course. Liz founded and led the Dance Exchange from 1976 until 2011, where she cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance, including its residency at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Lerman’s community-based practices have included residencies at Children’s National Hospital, Roosevelt Hotel for Senior Citizens, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Harvard ArtLab. Her work has been commissioned by numerous presenters, including Arena Stage, The Kennedy Center, Harvard Law School, and Portsmouth Music Hall. She is the author of Teaching Dance to Senior Adults (1984), Hiking the Horizontal (2014), and co-author of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (2003) and Critique Is Creative (2022) with John Borstel. Liz’s retrospective titled Brett Cook & Liz Lerman: Reflection & Action was featured at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from October 2022 until June 2023. She is currently an Institute Professor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Milwaukee, Liz attended Bennington College and Brandeis University, received her BA in dance from the University of Maryland, and an MA in dance from George Washington University. She is married to storyteller Jon Spelman. Their daughter, Anna Clare Spelman, is a documentary filmmaker. www.https://lizlerman.com/