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of forcing shape on a student still in momentum; institutions often struggle to change because they’re overcommitted to outdated shapes—“policies, hierarchies, measuring systems.”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.