Liz Lerman’s Legacy

Sprinkled throughout Liz Lerman’s most recent book, Shape and Momentum, are references to witches. They are our companions and guides, and they come bearing spells and poetry culled from Lerman’s 10-year choreographic project, “Wicked Bodies.”

This might feel like a forced motif in another creative’s work, but it’s oddly fitting for Lerman. Often photographed in loose black clothing with curly grey hair piled in a top knot, the choreographer has a casually witchy aura—and I mean this as a compliment. Like the witches she honors, Lerman has spent her life defending the value of embodied, alternative forms of knowledge and breaking the rules of her chosen medium.

Paloma McGregor in “Wicked Bodies” by Liz Lerman. Photograph by Scott Chernis

Even if you aren’t familiar with Lerman’s work, you’ve likely enjoyed the more expansive and inclusive dance world she’s helped create. The choreographer is best known for founding and leading the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, a contemporary dance company that welcomes multigenerational movers, from 1976 until 2011, when she transitioned out of leadership. She’s made dances about the American Civil War and the Big Bang, asked audience members to talk to each other mid-show (quelle horreur!), and filmed dancers in a particle accelerator. A lot of what we take for granted in contemporary dance today—that it can be immersive, that it’s often multidisciplinary, that it stems from research and experimentation—can be traced back to Lerman and her contemporaries.

With each decade, Lerman has found new and interesting ways to reimagine what dance can look like, who it’s for, and how it can be experienced. Shape and Momentum similarly reconceptualizes what an essay collection can look like and accomplish, albeit with less success.

Like Lerman’s dances, her book refuses generic distinctions: it’s part memoir, part self-help, part spellbook, and part choreographic manifesto. Divided into four “literary containers”—Living and Experience, Shape and Momentum, Rejection and Reflection, and her trademarked Atlas of Creative Tools®—Lerman’s meditations vary widely in length and subject: there are ruminations on caretaking and odes to longstanding collaborators, paragraph reflections on nature and a series of anecdotes about shame. Flipping through it feels less like reading essays than sifting through the ingredients in a witch’s brew—a little bit of this, a little bit of that. The essays are neither chronologically nor argumentatively organized, but if they could be united under a thesis, it might be that “those of us living with our bodies and dependent on that relationship have something to offer…people dedicated to traditionally dominant forms of knowledge”—that the lessons of dance are not just relevant but essential to leading a grounded, holistic life.

Shape and Momentum by Liz Lerman, published by Wesleyan University Press

The book takes its title from one of these lessons: in movement as in life, “we need both shape and momentum.” Inspired by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—“that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle”—Lerman is interested in how we can balance form and dynamism. Watching her dancers alternate between stillness and sudden velocity, Lerman wonders if “understanding this more clearly would help people…live with change.”

This might be Lerman’s greatest strength as a writer: taking an overused concept, and by superimposing it onto the dance world, defamiliarizing it. I’ve heard that “the only constant in life is change” so many times that it hardly resonates, but thinking of this change in physical terms—running then stopping on one leg, spinning rapidly then pausing—opens up new ways to think about and even practice life’s balancing act. It’s a playful idea that translates easily into different contexts. Grades, Lerman writes, are a way of forcing shape on a student still in momentum; institutions often struggle to change because they’re overcommitted to outdated shapes—“policies, hierarchies, measuring systems.”

Yet many of Lerman’s essays stop short of delivering these insights. In high school, my English teacher encouraged us to end each essay, paragraph, and even sentence by asking ourselves a question: so what? Inside the snarky “so what” is a cluster of deeper questions about the relevance and meaning of your ideas. Is this detail essential? What am I really trying to say here? Is it self-explanatory? A lot of Lerman’s writing fails the “so what” test.

“An ode to a rubber band” describes a rubber band’s flexibility and various uses—securing a coffee bag, holding miscellaneous objects together—but Lerman fails to extend her reflection beyond the obvious. Another essay on place and memory abandons its initial inquiry and segues abruptly into a three-page bullet point list on what embodied knowledge can teach us. The subtitle of the book is “an insomniac’s guide to a life in motion” and the essays follow the associative, zig-zagging logic of a sleepless night, skipping to the next idea before fleshing out the former.

Often, it feels like Lerman is more concerned with documenting her influence than with exploring the questions she puts forth. “Changing the Shape of the Audience” begins with an interesting series of questions: “What are the processes for guiding the audience’s experience? Where might their voices live?” In response, Lerman offers pages-long summaries of ten different shows where she’s experimented with the audience’s form. By the essay’s conclusion, I felt quite versed on Lerman’s choreographic history. But I failed to extract any meaningful insights about the evolving role of the audience in dance.

Liz Lerman with the perpetual flame at the Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Norway, north of the Arctic Circle (2023). Photograph by Anna Spelman

In other words, Lerman is not just pondering the benefits of a life in motion. She’s thinking about its precarious afterlife. Every mention of her Critical Response Process®—a method for giving and receiving feedback—and the Atlas of Creative Tools®—a collection of Lerman’s eclectic strategies—comes with a trademark symbol attached, indicating that she holds exclusive ownership of the phrase and brand. Lerman insists that this isn’t about corporate privatization; she’s only “trying to evolve a system for maintaining the integrity of the origin of my work.” It’s true that embodied knowledge is difficult to preserve, but there’s something ironic about applying corporate labels to systems Lerman herself describes as deriving from “the suggestion, inquiry, mistakes, and influence of others.” These tools extend the longer-undervalued wisdom of the dance world to new stakeholders, but they also set a new, more self-interested precedent for knowledge-sharing in a community known for collaboration.

Lerman’s privatizing impulse speaks less to her own proclivities than to an artistic landscape that asks choreographers to justify their existence in monetary terms. Precarious conditions force artists to become entrepreneurs: measuring, branding, and commodifying every aspect of their work and seeking revenue streams in previously informal practices. Often, this means presenting dance not as artistic expression—an end in itself—but a usable set of tools, yet another route to personal and professional advancement.

Concerns around longevity are understandable in an impermanent medium, yet there is a unique tension between Lerman’s commitment to radical fluidity and her insistence on controlling her own narrative. Even as Lerman’s essays strive to elevate the profile of alternative, embodied knowledge—knowledge that is shared, unstable, in flux—they are laced with anxiety about her capacity to claim ownership over that knowledge and cement her legacy for generations to come.

The tension between shape and momentum might be redescribed as clinging hard and letting go. Like anything in life, it is an ongoing practice, an impossible balance.

Audrey Pettit

Audrey Pettit is a critic and writer passionate about making dance accessible to new audiences and highlighting the artists reshaping the dance ecosystem. A lifelong ballet dancer and current PhD student in English, Audrey has written for Jacobin, Fjord, BroadwayWorld, and several local publications.

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