Introduction

Upcoming Performances and Ticket Information

About 613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts

613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts in the News

What is prayer? Where is it happening? Is it action or contemplation?

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange has a long history of making dances that address questions of faith. In a new suite of dances tentatively titled 613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts, Liz and collaborators – such as Japan’s Kyoto Contemporary Dance Center – will utilize both ancient and contemporary concepts of prayer. The piece explores the intersection of ritual and social action, of faith and restless questioning.

Upcoming Performances

March 31 and April 1

Premiere

Tickets: New Jersey Performing Arts Center

Newark, New Jersey

New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) will host the premiere of 613 Acts of Radical Prayer: Opening Acts on March 31 and April 1. The program includes Small Dances About Big Ideas, which premiered at Harvard Law School November, 2005.

613 Acts of Radical Prayer: Opening Acts was commissioned by NJPAC’s Alternate Routes and its Global Exchange residency program and funded by grants from the NYC’s Asian Cultural Council.

April 17

Animated keynote

Children of Abraham: Festival of Interfaith Arts

Tickets: Georgetown University

About 613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts

613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Actsadical Prayer will evolve through ongoing collaborations and performances.  The first sections will be developed in Japan, where a residency in early 2007 brings elders and poets to the piece for performances in three cities. The piece then unfolds through partnerships around this country with clergy, artists, lay leaders, social activists, teens, teachers, youth workers and more. Liturgy, scripture and tradition will combine with contemporary human stories to explore such possibilities as:

• Seeking connections across cultures in a “dinner dance,” based on a tea room near the Los Alamos National Laboratory where American Indians and nuclear scientists gathered.      
• Sustaining a Sri Lankan prayer dance that is disappearing from its culture.
• Reviving -- in our own time of war -- the spirit of the senninbari, belts that were created during WWII for Japanese GIs by gathering one stitch at a time from community members.
• Exploring the spirituality of endurance sports, with the stage as the finish line for a long-distance run.
• Going down to the river: nature as purification and the need to purify nature.

613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts will offer a dance/theater piece where the body is a landscape for exploring divisions, and perhaps even healing the divisions found when we seek different paths to purpose and the divine. In some cases, 613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts workshops and rehearsals will result in dances that can be performed by the participants with the Dance Exchange company on stage.  In other instances, these experiences will inform our own dancing or become distinct movements in the suite.

613 Radical Acts of Prayer: Opening Acts in the News

Goings on About Town, The New Yorker

Dance of the Lord, New Jersey Jewish News

Moving Prayers, Jewish Reporter
The Dance Exchange Crosses Cultures, News From the Consolate

Dance in the U.S., Embassy of the United States, Japan