Radical Prayer

Introduction

U.S. Premiere, New Jersey Performing Arts Center

About Radical Prayer

Radical Prayer 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 Radical Prayer, 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.

U.S. premiere, New Jersey Performing Arts Center

March 31 and April 1  

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

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

About Radical Prayer

Radical 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.

Radical Prayer 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, Radical Prayer workshops/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.

Radical Prayer in the News

Moving Prayers, Jewish Reporter