Residencies
Workshops
Institutes
School
Toolbox

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange conducts residencies throughout the United States and abroad. These residencies bring community groups together to experience the expressive power of dance and explore important issues through movement and story. Residencies are custom-designed in collaboration with local presenters.

Residencies usually include three components:
Public Performances: Formal concerts featuring award winning choreography in solo, ensemble, full company and community participation dances. Informal performances in varied settings include discussion and audience participation, exploring an array of subjects from the politics of art to the choreographic process as a window on personal identity.

Community Workshops: Workshop participants use dance and story to stretch the mind and body to share ideas, observations, and personal experiences. Classes are tailored to a wide variety of groups in such settings as schools, senior centers, hospitals, healthcare facilities, places of worship, prisons, community centers, and coporate and government offices.

Professional Training: Teachers, healthcare providers, community workers, dance professionals, and other artists apply the tools of storytelling, choreography and artistic process to their community
and creative needs.

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange can collaborate on a variety of events involving extensive community participation:

Site-Specific Performances, animate unusual spaces indoors and out, examining how individuals, institutions, and the public have interacted with these spaces over time.

Community-Wide Participatory Events develop new forms of expression to explore issues of concern, including violence, education, aging, healthcare, and understanding of community history.

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange residencies can be the vehicle for partnerships within local communities. The Dance Exchange has facilitated projects linking such partners as: a dance performance space and a prison; a civic center and a senior center; a dance festival and a hospital; a local community center, a local arts council, and a textile mill.

For information about engaging Liz Lerman Dance Exchange for performance and residency activity in your community, contact Jane Hirshberg at 301-270-6700, ext. 12 or janeh@danceexchange.org

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Based on the conviction that dance is a birthright, each Liz Lerman Dance Exchange community workshop starts with three simple propositions: 1) We all have knowledge about how to move; 2) We all have stories to tell; 3) We all can learn from witnessing each other’s movements and listening to each other’s stories.  Dance brings together physical and mental energies in unique ways.  It sparks fresh creativity for individuals and inspires new interactions within groups.  Typical class activities include: warming up; learning basic movements; experimenting with improvisational structures; developing movement ideas; dancing alone and with others; and exploring the relationship between movement, words, music, and personal experience.

Community Crossover

Participants in Community Crossover workshops stretch mind and body, share ideas, and build community in senior centers, hospitals, spiritual centers, corporations, and shipyards.  Workshops apply tools from the process of making dance to provide participants with the opportunity to explore the use of movement for creative and expressive purposes, as well as to understand that dance can be a means of sharing and communicating.

Artmaking, Interaction, and Dialogue: From the Dance Exchange Toolbox

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange has developed a unique practice for artmaking and community building across generations and abilities.  This experiential workshop for artists offers a window into this methodology through the sharing of tools that encompass movement, writing, interaction, and observation.    

Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process

Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process is a four-step method for getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert, through facilitated dialogue between the creator and a group of responders.  This workshop offers warm-up exercises, discussion of key concepts for critique, and a chance to experience the process in action.  Participants will also have the opportunity to purchase the book Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process by Liz Lerman and John Borstel.

Moving Jewish Communities

With a focus on Jewish spiritual themes, these workshops open with physical warm-up and mental focusing, sometimes linked to prayer.  After movement exercises in improvisation and choreographic skills, participants connect Torah readings or symbols from Jewish ritual to their own experience through personal exploration of this very particular branch of dance/performance art. These workshops may happen as part of a service or on their own.

Text & Movement

This workshop focuses on techniques and tools for creating spoken word and movement pieces. Participants work on writing, storytelling, movement and choreography for an in-depth exploration of this very particular branch of dance/performance art. 

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DESTINATION DANCE EXCHANGE

LIZ LERMAN DANCE EXCHANGE SUMMER INSTITUTES

JULY 2008

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange expands its offerings of week-long intensives this July at its studios in Takoma Park, MD and DC-area sites. The Dance Exchange presents three institutes with a choice of two tracks each to offer new movers, established dancers, choreographers, and video artists a wide range of movement experiences and performance opportunities. These unique experiences share the body of knowledge gained over the Dance Exchange’s 30-year history, including discoveries from such current projects as Ferocious Beauty: Genome, The Farthest Earth from Thee, and 613 Radical Acts of Prayer.

Destination Dance Exchange

July 2008

To register, call Kimberly Quick at 301-270-6700 ext. 24 or click here to register online

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For current Takoma Park course schedules, content and registration, please click here.

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The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Toolbox is designed for anyone seeking concrete techniques for choreography, community building, and constructive human interaction. That includes artists, educators, students, social service professionals, and practically anyone seeking creative ways to do their work.

This online Toolbox is an ongoing, expanding effort to share the body of knowledge developed by Liz Lerman Dance Exchange since its beginnings in 1976. It includes practice (how to do things), theory (why they work and what they mean) and history (where they came from and what happened when we did them).

To visit the Toolbox, please click here.

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