These were the rules: one partner closes her eyes, the other keeps them open. Those with eyes open can take their partner around the studio in any direction, at any speed, by several means, until they feel done. Those with eyes closed simply follow. As a dancer and a Berkeley native, this was not my first time with such an exercise and, upon hearing the instructions, I confess I rolled my eyes a little. But then I closed them, and damn if there isn’t something profound about allowing complete strangers to lead you blindly.

This first activity of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Residency, part of their ongoing series of dances “613 Radical Acts of Prayer,” was in many ways indicative of the experience on the whole: a healthy dose of touchy-feeliness that led ultimately to genuine, valuable insights about dance, choreography and creativity. The company views residencies as exchanges in a very real sense, ones in which participants and company members learn from each other.  Over the course of the semester, everyone helped to create movements that will culminate in the final performance of the Brown Spring Festival of Dance (May 1–4). Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is founded on the principle of inclusivity, both in that it seeks to expand ideas about who can dance—embracing dancers from a six-decade age span—and in that it engages everyone in shaping the dance.

Creative process

Working not just as a performer but also a choreographer is one of the greatest challenges of the residency, but a useful one. This method demystifies the choreographic process as well as the creative process; it’s easy sometimes to imagine that good art is a matter of inspiration or talent, but it is as much a matter of craft. I learned this the hard way, trying to choreograph a piece for the fall dance concert. I would spend stretches of four to five hours alone in a studio, improvising, waiting for the Muse to strike, but emerging with nothing to show for myself but sweat. (This is one major difference between making text and making movement—when you write, the act itself leaves record. Not so for dance.)

After about a week of the Dance Exchange’s structured methods of generating and editing movement, it occurred to me that Muses are not how dance gets made. We turned gestures and images into movements—turned movement into new stories, turned rants into books and birds and duets—not by waking up one morning with answers, but through a dynamic process of inventing and manipulating material.

The major innovations of postmodern dance have been opening up new possibilities for how to make dance, enlarging the realm of what counts as such. As Jamie Jewett, founder of Providence-based Lostwax Multimedia Dance Theater and a PhD candidate at Brown, sees it, postmodern is often not postmodern in the theoretical sense, but in the sense that it is a rethinking of earlier modern dance ideas. This movement started in the classes that Robert Dunn—a student of John Cage—taught at Judson Memorial Church in New York. Starting with Judson in the early ’60s, postmodern choreographers began to depart from narrative and the virtuosic form of highly technical dancers, experimenting instead with more ordinary, pedestrian movement—task-based movement, structured improvisations—incorporating multimedia, text, as well as more experimental sound.

Jewett points out that one of the major postmodern developments was that “making the choreographic or improvisational structure itself became the creative act, even before movement invention.” Another way of putting this might be that the nature of the process became an element of expression; in this way, Dance Exchange’s process is a part of this general trend. But what is unique about the Dance Exchange is its central focus on narrative at a time when it is not as much in fashion and the way they draw communities into their choreographic process.

Dance as activism?

I think one of the reasons the Dance Exchange puts so much emphasis on community and on narrative is that one of the central questions they aim to tackle is why dance matters. As much as I want to believe that what I love can “save the world,” I’m not sure I’m really convinced that dance is it. And of course, using personal stories from a community comes with its own set of problems as well, questions of which stories get told and who gets to decide.

But what the Dance Exchange residency showed me was how dance can be a means of communication and working through ideas. I think it’s something about the physical immediacy of dance. Coming into the program, I wasn’t sure how an elderly person could contribute to dance, but watching septuagenarian company member Thomas Dwyer perform choreography I’m not sure I could pull off, the reality was self-evident. Anyone unsure about the notion that physical difference is not dis-ability, but different ability, should check out amputee Lisa Bufano’s choreography. Seeing her work makes me envious that I too can’t fashion my own limbs and change them as other people might change personal styles. At the end of our part in “613 Radical Acts of Prayer,” many of us are not sure that what we’ve created speaks to the idea of the radical, or  of prayer, but I hope that it can make people think.

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KATE GOODIN B’08 danced herself out of the womb.