Emily Birzak, 9, came to the first Liz Lerman Dance Exchange workshop attached to her mother. Each a brown-haired, pony-tailed echo of the other, they paired off together for the first exercise.
It was simple: walking around with a partner, one with eyes open, the other with eyes closed. Communication was by touch and trust: By gentle pressure of a hand, a nudge from a shoulder, a slight push from a hip, the one who could see guided the direction and pace of the one who couldn't.
Then things went a step further. Whenever the time was right, the leader indicated a halt, and roles were reversed. The partner opened his or her eyes, found someone new with closed eyes and took charge.
Soon enough, Emily detached from her mother and put herself in the hands of complete strangers. Within a few minutes, the strangeness wore off. In the public performance, less than a week later, Emily flung herself into the arms of Carol Hayes-Gegner and gave her a hug "like falling into a feather pillow."
The process of awakening the dancer within is second nature to the Dance Exchange, which organized these workshops as part of last month's Columbia Festival of the Arts. Most of the 30-odd participants were not as initially shy as Emily. But by week's end, they had bared their souls as well as their feet in an exploratory process unique to the company.
The Dance Exchange, now 20 years old and recently resettled in Takoma Park after leaving Washington, operates on the principle that everyone can move and everyone has stories to tell.
Working with community groups on simultaneous tracks of movement and storytelling, the company generates raw material for its repertory -- based on real people and real experiences.
What it accomplishes for the "civilians" is less clear. Is it art? Therapy? Social work? All of the above?
"I don't think we're a crunchy granola company," says Peter DiMuro, the Dance Exchange member who led the Columbia workshops. "We're working with the community, for the community and for the Dance Exchange. We try to create a safe haven [for the community dancers], and then we challenge that."
A dance is born
The company members range from professionally trained dancers in their 20s -- Adrienne Clancy, Gesel Mason and Reginald Ellis Crump -- to dancers of an older generation -- Martha Wittman and Andy Torres, still fit at an age when most of their colleagues are rounding off careers. Judith Jourdin, 72, and Thomas Dwyer, 63, both came late to dance, after participating in Lerman workshops for seniors and retirees.
The latest work of the Dance Exchange is "The Hallelujah Project," a 3-year effort that will develop material in some 10 cities. Columbia is the first. In the fall, the company will begin similar workshops in Tucson, Ariz.; Lewiston, Maine; Pittsburgh; Los Angeles; Burlington, Vt.; and New London, Conn. Other sites are pending.
The company's last extended community-based work was "Shehecheyanu," a word from a Hebrew blessing that thanks God "who has kept us alive." To judge by the wracking soliloquy of racial memory performed by Mason in a piece called "Getting to Hallelujah," which used material from "Shehecheyanu" and laid the groundwork for "Hallelujah," it was a searing piece about grief and survival, anger and acceptance.
It grew out of "The Sustenance Project," an exploration of how people of many backgrounds sustain themselves on the journeys of their lives.
From the title, it's clear that "Hallelujah" is celebratory in nature. It seeks the moments that make survival worthwhile.
Participants were asked questions about turning points in their lives and the "little hallelujahs" of everyday, from the first cup of coffee in the morning to the flowers that grow around the back door.
Working with small groups, members of the Dance Exchange shaped the stories into gestures and movement "cells," which could then be combined into phrases.
Caitlyn Nuger, for instance, a 10-year-old who spoke of the funeral of her grandmother, showed her group the length of her dress, which came to just below the knee; and Mason turned this into a dance motive -- a slice of her hand across her bent leg -- that became one of the themes of the larger work being created. Alissa Zingman, 16, who had just taken her first driving lesson, made a comical picture of slamming on the brakes; and Clancy helped her turn it into a contraction of the whole body: an abrupt gesture of forward momentum forestalled.
Such materials, inflected by the standard artistic processes of repetition, variation and contrast, were the raw material of the initial "Hallelujah" performance, presented June 28 at the Jim Rouse Theater. For the 22 community dancers who stayed the course, it showed how far they had come in less than a week.
Not a cross-section
At the same time, it raised issues of community identity and artistic creation.
In preliminary sessions, held in the weeks just before the workshops, Columbia Festival staff tried to find groups that would form a composite picture of the community. Sites included Amerix Corp., a debt-consolidation service; Florence Bain Senior Center; and the Center for Health Policy Studies. The company tried to target mothers and daughters at one location and multigenerational black families at another.
The results were only partly successful, admits Darlene Miller of the festival staff, who coordinated the Dance Exchange residency. The black families, who brought gusto to their session, were too heavily involved in the festival's African art weekend to participate in this first "Hallelujah" but will be asked back, says Miller. Others couldn't join because the 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. sessions cut right across their busiest hours on the job.
As it turned out, the "community" was represented by three mother-daughter pairs; teen-age girls from a modern dance company called Dance Dimension; some women from Florence Bain; and an assortment of others. Despite all the outreach into Columbia's much-proclaimed ethnic diversity, the participants were entirely white and female. "We hope we'll find others as the project goes ahead," says Miller.
Another incipient problem was the quality of text generated by the participants. Perhaps the questions weren't pointed enough, or the examples of "little hallelujahs" not varied enough.
"It's just so early, and we're still searching for the questions," says DiMuro. "We need to find the subtle shadings in something that's otherwise all blue."
Whatever the cause, the responses were mostly lackluster. In some cases, only the company's expertise saved the process from becoming mired in sentiment or banality.
For example, dance therapist Sharon Chaiklin spoke in vague terms about her depression after her mother's and sister's deaths in the same year and how she was cured by a visit to the family's summer cottage on a lake. Clancy, working with her group, turned this into a breathtaking sequence in which dancers, lying on the floor, became a living stream that bore Emily Birzak atop their rolling surface.
As the Dance Exchange has proven over time, its technique of creating a gestural language out of a kaleidoscope of experience results in a richly complicated kind of dance in which literal and abstract images complement each other.
So, over the next three years, the company anticipates that "The Hallelujah Project" will change. The trust exercises will become more complex and extensive -- the questions, too, allowing the stories to become more three-dimensional. And as word circulates that the experience can be fun, perhaps a better cross-section of participants will result.
"After a while, if we're not merging what we love with the passions of the community, this won't work," says DiMuro. "What we try to find is where they intersect."
For information on participating in "The Hallelujah Project," call the Columbia Festival at 410-715-3044 or the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange at 301-270-6700.
Pub Date: 7/08/98