Report from Our Trip East

This is Corey writing again. In the previous post, we told you, among other things, about the origin of the Prayer Project, our collaboration with Liz Lerman (that’s her on the left) and her company, the Dance Exchange (D.E.). On November 12, Aaron, Naomi and I traveled to Washington D.C. to spend a week with Liz and members of her company learning more about the ways each group worked and planning the future development of the piece.

Our visit coincided with an “Institute” that the D. E. was conducting. We would participate in parts of it, joining the dozen or so other participants and three D.E. members Cassie Meador, Elizabeth Johnson and Matt Mahaney who were co-leading with Liz. The rest of the time we’d work in another studio with one or more of the leaders developing some material we had brought with us.

The Institute was close to what we might call a workshop. It combined instruction, research, improvisation and group process. For the D.E., institutes are an opportunity to begin exploring a new area – like prayer – and to teach the very special compositional tools they have developed as well as to bring in some needed income. The participants came from D.C. and elsewhere and included a couple of experienced young dancers, a retired school teacher who used a wheelchair, one of D.C.’s most respected actresses, an African-American museum curator, several students, an academic, a writer and a woman who created and taught Kabalistic chants. All of them had worked with Liz or her company members before and had a deep appreciation for Liz’s values and processes and for the D.E.’s performance work.

Someday I would love to sit at Liz’s feet and hear the story of how she came to know what she knows. In the meantime, I refer you to the Dance Exchange website where you’ll find one of several thought-provoking essays. (You'll need to register once you get there.)

In our first work session we showed a movement score that we had developed during the past two weeks of work back home. It was derived from the shapes of the Hebrew letters that make up the Sh’ma, one of Judaism’s central prayers, which says: “Listen, people of Israel (lit. those who struggle with God), God, your God is One.” The Sh’ma can be translated to emphasize either the monotheistic aspect of Judaism – “Listen, Israel, the Lord alone is our God” or the non-dual nature of divinity: “God is one.”

After running through our score, in unison, Elizabeth, Cassie and Matt began work with us to find ways of partnering each other and a greater dynamic range of movement. We were immediately stuck by the ease in which these three young artists were able to share the role of director, effortlessly passing the leadership between themselves, building on each other’s ideas with no sense of ownership of those ideas, no ego and no attachment. In the D.E.’s process, the work “belongs” to no one or to everyone. The creative space is a commons. After working for three hours or so we had evolved a much more complex and fugue-like score that included lifts and carries, surprising shifts in tempo and movements that were different from any we had ever done. Cassie, Elizabeth and Matt were able to work with each of us in ways that both supported our strengths and challenged us to stretch our individual, often self-imposed, limits.

The next day we worked with Liz on personal stories each of us had begun to develop in SF as short, solo hybrids of language, narrative and movement. Liz was incredibly quick to grasp the heart of each story and to build on what we had done. One of her principles became very clear: let the movement and the language each do something different; verbal and movement languages can each give different information and thus create a kind of tension that can open up a third space in the consciousness of the audience. For example, working with my story of the open-heart surgery I had two and on half years ago, she had me unhook my voice from any attempt to carry the emotion. Working with opposites: using a casual, unemotional voice while the movement became increasingly charged. (All this, of course, is much harder to “get” from a verbal description than it is from seeing it. For that, you’ll have to wait until spring, 2008, or until we have time to upload some video.)

Aaron and Naomi and I also had various experiences outside the studio that informed our work. At an exhibit at the Smithsonian, Aaron was deeply moved by a photograph of the Cambridge scholar of Judaica, Solomon Shechter, in the process of sorting through hundreds of thousands of scraps of damaged, flawed or superannuated Hebrew scriptures that had been acquired from the Cairo Genizah, the repository for sacred texts waiting to be buried in a special ritual for that purpose. He took that image of the bearded old man intensely absorbed by fragments of the sacred into the studio where Liz guided him into ways of connecting with the image in movement.

I had begun trying out a prayer practice suggested by Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav in the late eighteenth century. Simply talk directly to “God” (my strongly secular upbringing still has me putting that word in quotes) pour your heart out to him/her/it. This did not come easily to me, but when I really allowed myself to do it, I was invariably brought to tears. More from relief and release than from sadness. So I began to wonder if that phenomenon had something to do with a “God”-given faculty, perhaps a faculty of imagination, that allows us to create an inner space from which its possible to pray. When I related this to Liz, she asked me to imagine a beam of light emerging from the crown of my head and then moving that light to different spots of the walls and ceiling. Immediately, I felt my neck lengthen and soften. I experienced, in my body, that same sense of space I had been talking about.

Naomi had been concerned that as the oldest in the company, she might not be up to the physical demands of the work. She was perhaps a little reassured that, she could easily outlast me, stamina-wise even though I may be fourteen years younger. But she was still troubled by the issues of moving down to and up from the floor, of giving and taking a partner’s weight. After working with Matt, though, who is a master at helping people work with lifting, carrying and sharing each other’s weight, and the others, she gained a new confidence and ease in all those areas which we all celebrated. That’s how it was. Every time anyone made a discovery or moved someplace new the joy of it came to all of us.

During the times we participated in the larger Institute, we made duets and solos, told stories, improvised and explored exercises all somehow connected to the idea of prayer and, particularly in this Institute, prayer as radical action. Another of Liz’s core ideas emerged: “Turn discomfort in inquiry.” We began to learn to ask the questions that would help the work move where it needed to, Again, we were – it’s not too strong a word – awestruck by the profound attitude of service, the whole-hearted generosity that Liz, the D.E. members, and the work itself came from. I felt that I was part of an expedition to a remote territory where the weather was completely unpredictable. Its success depended on the ability to fully experience the other: to listen and sense, to respond and support.

So you see how intensely. we had all bonded by the end of our time in D.C. The planning session – which we had not exactly been looking forward to – went smoothly and gracefully. Peter Di Muro, the Producing Artistic Director of D.E. who quietly took care of us all week, and Jane Hirschberg, their Managing Director, joined the rest of us in mapping out the next year and a half of work. Liz, Cassie, Elizabeth and Matt will be making several trips to San Francisco starting in September 2007 and culminating with the work’s premiere in April, 2008. In one sense, we’ve hardly begun: we have no idea what form the finished work will take, what it will look like, we have only a few elements that might actually wind up in it, From another angle though, we’ve found new ways of working, of relating to language and movement and, most importantly I think, to each other. We have questions.

We took the train to New York, feeling very satisfied and very sore.

In New York, the highlights were our meetings with Isaiah Sheffer, (R) artistic director of Symphony Space (and producer of NPR’s Selected Shorts) and with Elise Bernhardt, the first new executive director in many years of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Isaiah regaled us with a number of stories from his unusual and colorful life. I was particularly knocked out by the one about his having been an understudy for the role of Happy in the legendary Yiddish translation of Death of a Salesman that I refer to extensively in the previous post (Why a Jewish Death of a Salesman?). He went on for several performances. Isaiah and his team have transformed the Symphony Space on Broadway and 96th from a derelict barn of a building into a beautiful and inviting performance space with two theatres and a café that is both a national and a community resource. We’re hoping that Isaiah will be able to present TJT’s Family Alchemy there in sometime in 2007.

Our meeting with Elise Bernhardt made us feel very hopeful about the future of the NFJC. She wants the foundation to focus less on producing conferences and other events and more on creating a meaningful source of financial support for Jewish artists. She also has a great sense of humor and a strong background in the performing arts.

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For my personal account of the New York portion of the trip, visit my blog at www.fromcorey.blogspot.com