About
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
History
Staff & Company
Board of Directors
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is a professional company of dance artists that creates, performs, teaches, and engages people in making art. Since its start in 1976, and in each encounter, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange asks four questions:
Who gets to dance?
Where is the dance happening?
What is it about?
Why does it matter?
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange answers these questions with a range of interrelated activities:
• Groundbreaking new dance works performed by a cross-generational company on major stages internationally, throughout the U.S., and at home in the communities of Maryland, Washington DC, and the Mid-Atlantic region.
• Classes, workshop, and institutes for people who dance to make a living, people who dance to make a better life, and people who have never danced before.
• Local and national projects that engage individuals, institutions and communities in making and performing dances.
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange pursues a broad definition of dance as a multi-disciplinary art form that encompasses movement, music, imagery, and the spoken word. Throughout its programs, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange builds an accessible body of knowledge and makes meaningful connections between people and art.
The
story of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange spans two decades, the creation of
over 50 innovative dance/theatre works, and thousands of performances
and community encounters. With these activities, the company has reached
cities, towns, and rural communities from Los Angeles, California to Lewiston,
Maine to Gdansk, Poland.
In 1975 Liz Lerman created Woman of the Clear Vision,a dance about her
mother's death featuring professional dancers and adults from a Washington,
DC senior center. Combining the creative and community aspects of this
project with the dance classes she was teaching throughout DC, Lerman
established the Dance Exchange, incorporated in 1976. Meanwhile, she pursued
a variety of choreographic projects that experimented with varied performing
forces, including her first full-evening work, Ms. Galaxy and Her Three
Raps with God(1977). After three years as a school for dancers including
"senior adults and special populations," the Dance Exchange
launched a 12-member performing/touring company. This company quickly
built a reputation for innovative performance, including Who's on First?(1979),
a playful meditation on the common ground between sports and art, Journey
(1980), an influential solo that combined a spoken text with movement
equivalents, and Fanfare(1980), which choreographed 800 professional and
community dancers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
By the mid 1980s the Company was touring extensively, sometimes with the
Dancers of the Third Age, an adjunct troupe of older dancers which also
performed on its own for many years. On the road, the Dance Exchange combined
performance with workshops and professional training, helping to pioneer
the community residency as a model for touring engagements by dance companies.
Prompted by the increasing demands of its work on the road, the company
closed its school to focus on creating new works and exploring new educational
approaches. The Dance Exchange made its New York debut in 1983 with performances
of Docudance: Nine Short Dances About the Defense Budget and Other Military
Matters, a work whose up-to-the-minute topicality landed Liz Lerman and
her company on the national media.
In 1985, the Dance Exchange made its European debut at "The Other
America" festival in Sweden. The following year, when it was one
of six international dance companies selected to perform at the centennial
of the Statue of Liberty, the company premiered the acclaimed Still Crossing.
In 1991, a remarkable national consortium of institutions joined forces
to commission Liz Lerman's The Good Jew?This complex work integrated dance
with a wide range of theatrical techniques to take an unflinching look
at issues of faith, ethnicity, and identity. Lauded by the Village Voice
as "engrossing and astutely theatrical," The Good Jew?marked
a new level in the Dance Exchange's reputation for innovation, emotional
power, and expressive physicality. Major works in the ensuing years included
Safe House: Still Looking(1994), a collaboration with singer/composer
Ysaye Barnwell that reflected the Underground Railroad in contemporary
searches for safety and shelter, and Shehechianu(1995-97) a full evening
work that explored the mingling of personal histories in three 20th Century
epochs. "Rare are the times," Dance Magazine wrote of Shehechianu,
"when an idea and its expression can move you so fiercely."
Coinciding with its 20th anniversary in 1996, the company (now renamed
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange) culminated a two-year residency under the auspices
of the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with a one-week festival.
The Music Hall's Shipyard Project included major public events, exhibits,
on-stage and site-specific performance, storytelling, new music commissioned
for local bands and choirs, and dance-mediated community forums, all exploring
the role of the city's 200-year-old Shipyard in its history, politics,
environment and culture. Widely regarded as a model for pervasive artistic
engagement, the project marked a high point in the Dance Exchange's development
of groundbreaking approaches to community-based art. During the same period,
the company established a long-term partnership with Poland's Center for
Theater Education, and in 1996 helped to launch the Center's annual Baltic
University of Dance Festival in Gdansk.
Concurrent with the demand for such significant national and international
engagements, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange was also feeling the call for deeper
involvement with its home community of greater Washington, DC. Starting
in 1993, with the support of a major grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's
Digest Fund, the company began to build its home presence with local partnerships,
engagement projects for the urban community, intensive movement institutes,
and self-produced seasons at the Lansburgh Theater. Encouraged by an avid
reception to these activities, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange acquired a former
U.S. post office in Takoma Park, Maryland, which it renovated into a three-studio
complex for rehearsal, educational and administrative activities. Burgeoning
community support enabled the Dance Exchange to purchase the building
in 1999, becoming one of the few contemporary dance companies in the United
States to own and operate its own facility.
Convenient to Washington's Metrorail system, this new headquarters now
serves as a community hub for a diverse neighborhood that straddles the
DC/Maryland border, and home-base for a nine-member touring company of
professional dancers. It is establishing itself as a national center by
serving as a control center for Hallelujah. Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
is coordinating this major initiative in performance, celebration, and
participatory artmaking at over 12 national sites between 1998 and 2002.
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Staff
Liz Lerman
, Founding Artistic Director
Peter DiMuro
, Producing Artistic Director
John Borstel
, Humanities Director
Jane Hirshberg
, Managing Director and CEO
Lee Woodman
, Director of External Relations
Elizabeth Johnson
, Associate Artistic Director and Teen Exchange Director
Nicole Salimbene
, Assistant to the Directors
Kimberly Quick
, Operations Manager
Hallie Stone
, Development Manager
Amelia Cox
, Production Manager
Susanne Larsen
, Projects Manager
The
Company Adjunct
Artists
Peter DiMuro
Thomas Dwyer
Elizabeth Johnson
Liz Lerman
Matt Mahaney
Cassie Meador
Martha Wittman
Sandra Burton
Teresa Chapman
Robbie Cook
Margot Greenlee
Ted Johnson
Karen Koyanagi
Dorothy Levy
Lesole Maine
Christopher Morgan
Eikazu Nakamura
Adam Scher
Vincent Thomas
Ben Wegman
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Elliot Rosen,
Chair,
BayFirst Solutions, LLC
Elliot E. Maxwell,
Secretary,
Emaxwell.Net
Lorraine Gallard,
Treasurer,
Bonness Enterprises, Inc.
Liz Lerman,
Founding Artistic Director
Ellen Bogage,
EB&A LLC
Darren Bowie,
AOL LLC
Cindy Hallberlin,
US Foodservice
Christopher Magee, MD,
Washington Adventist Hospital
Anne V. Maher,
Kleinfeld, Kaplan & Becker
Joan Marsh,
AT&T
John R. Urciolo,
Urciolo Properties, Inc.
Joseph E. Wnuk,
Wnuk/Spurlock Architects
