What follows is the transcript of Liz Lerman's keynote address at the Network of Ensemble Theater's (NET) symposium Intersection: Ensembles + Universities, at The New School University in New York City, November 1, 2014. Thanks to NET for permission to include it here.

Thanks so much for having me. [. . .] Sometimes I think gatherings like this are really a time to make friendships that take you through life. People you come to know through the good times and the bad times and the hard times, the intellectual times, the conceptual times, the downtimes. I wish for you that you find these kin, as I have had the good fortune to do over the years.

I hope what I have to say today is of use. Here are two things you can do to occupy yourself as we move along. First is just a quick way to turn discomfort to inquiry. I hope I provoke you a little bit. If that should happen, try putting the words "I wonder why" in front of your complaint. It really turns it into a nice little inquiry for your mind. The other thing you could do if you are interested—it's kind of a small artistic assignment—is to try paying attention to the pictures that come into your imagination while I am talking. It's a little tricky to try to catch the picture at the same time as you are listening. But when I am able to harvest such images, I find that I have a more specific and personal relationship to the ideas that are being addressed. And if you can capture the picture, you can ask yourself, "why that image?" If we have time, maybe we can share some of that. It often yields deeper discussion.

This relates to some ideas I am going to present about artistic practices and the way that they can be of particular use on campuses. We have so many tools that can yield so much. I am asking us to think about how we develop them and share them. I think it is an important faculty to employ in our work on campuses as well as our work with our audiences and participants in our communities.

I'd like to begin with some discussion about a stage piece I am working on right now called Healing Wars ( https://vimeo.com/143045332). The characters migrate between the American Civil War and the recent war in Iraq. They are healers, mostly doctors and nurses, all based to some degree on real people, except for one character, Spirit, that we invented.

We also have an Iraq war veteran who's in the piece with us.

As a consequence of our research, we spent a lot of time with veterans, in many conversations.

As I listened to their stories, I began to recognize that many of them are really sad to be home. So I started asking what it was they were missing about being in a war. This is my language, not theirs, but from the conversations, I concluded that they missed risk. They loved the risk. They missed purpose. They had a lot of purpose when they were over there. Every second of every day is filled with purpose. And they miss love. They might not use the word love; they would say brotherhood or comradeship perhaps. But, they don't sign up again because of public policy or the nature of a cause that's being fought. They sign up again because they love each other, and because they miss the risk and purpose. I started to use the phrase, "They're addicted." And then, I looked at myself and said, "Wait a minute, I'm addicted to those things, too." I'm addicted to risk: Why is it that after I finish a project, I immediately have another one starting, even when we don't know where the money is going to come from, or who will present it, or what the newspaper is going to say. We don't know anything.

Then there's purpose. I feel so purposeful in my life because I get to be an artist. Granted, I built purposefulness into my definition of art-making, by the way I've chosen to live my life and do my work. Oddly, one of the key purposes is my own inquiry, as a result of which I can say to you, "Look at what I just discovered about the Civil War!" That enthusiasm and delight in gaining insight is an engine of purpose and becomes a guiding principle of the devised work that emerges from the investigation. In crafting work, how do I set up the trail so that the audiences in the theater or in the workshops can also find that kind of discovery? I could also talk about the purpose of our ensemble and what happened between us, among us, as we made this thing. What did we learn about ourselves? I could talk about the purpose of working in our collaborations with all of the people who are going to come see it, et cetera: concentric circles of purposefulness.

And then there is the love part. I realized, for me, I conflate the words "love" and "learning" a lot. For instance, I noticed, as long as I am learning something about a piece, we keep it in repertory. But, as soon as I am done learning, it's over for me. We don't do it anymore. I love the learning part. And there is that particular form of love we have within our ensembles, a kind of deep feeling that arises from the shared work. So I think that, on a big scale, risk, purpose, and love fill our lives. These three forces are critically important when we think about what we are sharing with the world, what we are standing up for, what we are claiming when we want to survive, what we want to have in the future.

For the rest of this talk, I am going to start coming in a little bit smaller, acknowledging that I find immense value in going from the very small to the very big and back again. The ability to view things in the tiniest detail and frame things large is one of the great skills that we have among us in our work as artists.

In order to address the rest of what I want to talk about, which is creative research and the tools that are the engine inside creative research, I just want to set up one thing for you. You may have heard me say this already if you've encountered me before, but I am going to repeat it because it helps me frame the conversation.

Early in my life as an artist, when I began working in all of those senior centers, people would say, in effect, "Okay, the work you do at the Kennedy Center and when you tour to beautiful stages, that's up here, at the top of a vertical line, and the stuff you do in communities, that's down here at the bottom." Or people would flip the line 180 degrees to put the senior centers at the top and say, "Okay, it's the community that matters. I don't know why you are still bothering with that stuff on the stage. It's old. It's white. It's elitist. It's male. Why are you doing that?" Either way, that impulse to build a hierarchy on a vertical line is such an impoverished way to think. So, of course, you know what I do, which is easy to do when I'm just gesturing with my hands: I turn the line horizontal, so that it's a spectrum of equal values, where the Kennedy Center and the senior center are at the same level. I know and you know that this is the world that we are heading for—we are living in it now. And we're encountering resistance because if you're at the top of the vertical, and feel the shift happening, you can only imagine a huge loss if you end up anywhere else. Disaster is all you can imagine because the vertical is where you've spent all your life and learned all of your behaviors. That's the resistance we encounter as we try to swing our behaviors to the horizontal. Much of the work of ensembles is the work of learning and navigating what actually goes on when we live in the world without those kind of hierarchies every single second, without the better-than/worse-than distinctions every second.

I am raising these points because as we start talking about creative research, we are going to see that we can get hung up on the old idea of process versus product. If we value an aspect of process, it's assumed to be at the detriment of the product. But if you take the horizontal spectrum and make it a circle, you'll see that those things are next-door neighbors: that is actually what is going on most of the time in the process/product discussion. We all know that when we are in rehearsals we can be deep in process one minute, the next minute in the product, then back into the process. It's like that. And that ability to move back and forth so nimbly is one of our skills. Think about the behaviors we employ that let a group of people make those nimble moves, because, I am telling you, most people can't switch that fast. They don't know how to do it. And I am begging you now—this is the first begging, I am going to do it again—to understand what tools you are using to accomplish that. You think it's nothing, but actually it is a lot.

I am going to come back to why I feel so strongly about comprehending our own tools in a minute. But, if you'll allow me now, I want to focus on the notion of creative research, which is a term that I started to use about a decade ago when I was spending more time on university campuses. I'm going to do a little reading from my book of essays, Hiking the Horizontal (2011). The paperback came out in 2014, and improves on the original by adding some writing on this subject, creative research.

When did my interest in creative research begin to take shape? It might have been in 1975 when I applied my personal experience with the death of my mother to the choreographic challenge of making a dance about it, deriving insights from the doctors, the medicine, and the spiritual conflict among the rabbis that accompanied her illness. It might have been a year later when I began to notice that teaching dance to the elderly required me to know something about them before I initiated the movement classes. For example, they knew more than I did about their own bodies, and I had to learn various ways of interviewing them to uncover this knowledge so that we could work with it openly (Lerman 2014, 307).

I know that sounds like nothing. But I grew up in a culture in which I, the teacher, knew everything. That's what dance technique is. One teacher, 50 students. With that background, seeking information from the seniors was radical.

My interest was strengthened in the 1980s with dances about the Civil War re-enactors, the defense budget, and the history of Russia. By the 1990s, I was engaged in large-scale community projects in which the archives of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, as well as its contemporary workforce, became the focus of our work. So did the story of the anthropologists at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, who hoped that setting up an exhibition to display indigenous tribes would help the American public understand the enlightened civilization we were becoming (Lerman 2014, 307).

The St. Louis World's Fair was a very interesting moment in history if you want to read about it. It was while we were researching that piece at the Smithsonian that we found an old film from 1904 of a World's Fair midway dancer called the Palestinian Jewess. We "sampled" the dance in the stage piece, taking the movement directly from the old film. It was really fun for the dancers to be able to recreate that kind of artifact, since we don't have much dance documentation that is that old.

By the turn of the millennium I had refocused my attention on a series of community engagements around the country in which cities and rural towns alike responded to the question "What are you in praise of?" with dances made from their own stories and self-images. And then I went into the science labs. First, with biologists and geneticists, then with physicists, and then with the neuroscientists, psychologists, and others engaged with PTSD, TBI, and other acronym-injuries of our returning veterans (Lerman, 2014, 308).

This collaboration with scientists in the last decade has placed much of my work on university campuses. Before that, we weren't doing that much work on campuses, at least not much beyond the orbit of performing arts departments.

I have begun to see the particular value of creative research as a vehicle for change in higher education, its use as an engine of learning, and its potential as a source of deep pleasure and influence in the world of the mind (Lerman 2014, 308).

(I know you all know this because you are working on campuses yourselves.)

[This kind of collaborative work between artists and other fields] has also brought to light a side of the artistic process that has been disguised as less important and, because of the individual nature of its practice, hidden from critical discussion and shared interpretation (Lerman, 2014, 308).

I don't know if you agree with that last point, but it's what I perceive when I talk to artists about the fact that we need to understand what it is that we do when we research. What happens when we translate research into the form that it takes on stage? So much important information is being exchanged, so much learning is going on, so much is being discovered, and it gets lost in the ether. What I find interesting is that very often, if I ask artists how they do it, I'll get a pushback: "Wait a minute, I don't have any methods, I don't have any techniques," as if somehow we would be diminishing some aspect of our practice. But what? Diminishing our intuitive selves? Diminishing our mystery? What is the problem with understanding that we've actually evolved some amazing tools and skills that would be of use to people if we were willing to gather them as a resource? I see universities struggling with their vision of the future as more and more education goes online. It's a little facetious, but I like to say that what's going to end up lasting on campuses is anything with a laboratory, a body, or dirt. The rest will go somewhere else. And who has laboratories and bodies and even (I'd advocate) a certain amount of dirt? We do. But, it's incumbent upon us to figure out the methods we're employing as we use them.

If you get the book [Hiking the Horizontal], the essay goes on to talk more about what actually happens on campuses, where you see it, and why I think this phenomenon is emerging. But now I'd like to bring the focus down even smaller than the idea of creative research, to the idea of individual tools. You could tell from what I read to you that I think one of the impacts of creative research is its vastness and its uniqueness. Maybe in contrast to science, where they tend to speak of "the scientific method" as a singular thing, we have so many approaches, which gives us the opportunity to put forward creative research methods as a plural. Everything about us is plural and everything about the emergence of creative research is about plurality. But we live in a singular world: "This is good, this is not good. This is the best, nothing else can be close to it."

That singular orientation leads to an idea like "best practices," which simplifies what we know is really complex. And that is a problem, because it codifies practice into a series of prescriptive methods. I am, in fact, saying something else when I identify tools. First is the idea that you can break down your knowledge into the smallest possible pieces. Then each of those units gets to be tried and tested. And those of us working in communities, in classrooms, those of us working in multiple settings, find that when we switch up our audience, we retest the tool. I think working with different audiences in different settings is one reason that I developed my orientation to tools: if I'd had a conventional dance company with dancers who were 18 to 24 years old, and we always performed in the same theater, and never moved beyond the rehearsal studio and the stage, I wouldn't have been testing the tools. I would have gone into some kind of coded language that nobody outside a limited circle could comprehend, and it would have been enough. But, since my audiences were in hospitals and synagogues, my platforms were both indoors and outdoors, my dances were sometimes five minutes long and sometimes 30 minutes long, since all of that kept changing, we got to keep testing the tools. So each tool is like a jewel, with many facets, each one a surface that can connect to other surfaces.

Here's a story. With the Dance Exchange, the company I founded and led for 34 years [video: Liz Asks Four Questions], I once facilitated a retreat for the US Department of Justice. It was for a division that prosecutes local politicians for minor transgressions. They needed a day off, and the woman who had organized it got on the phone with me and said, "So, Liz, tell me again what are we going to do." I said, "Well, we are going to start in a circle." And she said, "Oh, stop right there. Our professional staff is white male, our support staff is black female, we don't do circles." Okay, there were many troubling things about that sentence, but most immediately it made me realize that I was wrong to assume that everyone used circles or understood their value. It took her resistance for me to understand it as a tool. This is what I mean by breaking down your knowledge into small pieces: it's a tool. Well, we did many circles that day.

Let's think about this idea of a circle. I know a lot of ensembles, mine included, that start each rehearsal by standing in a circle, right? We might do "weather reports," where each person speaks briefly about something on their mind. Or if there is an issue or something going on in the world, a chance for each person to say something about it. Everybody gets a turn. Okay, it might seem fine to say it's "best practice" to stand in a circle. But it doesn't do any good to merely stand in a circle, if, let's say, you are in a university and you have graduate students and undergrads in the same classroom, and graduate students won't listen to the undergraduate students, it doesn't do any good. Or the seniors won't listen to the freshman. Or the theater people won't listen to that odd scientist who is taking class. Right? So, the tool alone isn't enough to achieve the outcome. It's the behaviors that fill the thing: How you focus and listen, how you give space, how you understand that it's your turn to speak. Those behaviors are some of the things we understand, because we work with them constantly, both in rehearsal and as a vehicle for what we are trying to express. So it isn't enough to say, "A circle is a good practice." It's a matter of understanding how and why it functions, how you use it, what even smaller units of information are inside it.

After I left the Dance Exchange in 2011, I was artist-in-residence for one semester at Harvard. It's a very interesting institution. Having once done a big project in a working shipyard, I just want to say, Harvard University is the most like a shipyard of any other institution I've been in. I taught one class, on partnership and collaboration, with undergraduates and graduates from different divisions all over the university. So, speaking of circles, what struck me in the classroom was what I'd call a fragmented wagon-wheel. That is, every student in that room wanted to come directly to me, like spokes of the wheel to the hub, only valuing the dialogue that they could have with me. They had no perception of this as problematic. If I pushed them on it, they would say, "Class discussion is just a bullshit session." So, what are the tools that we could employ to get them to see how brilliant everybody in that room was? What are our tools for listening? How do we make that happen? In fact, this little problem at Harvard filled the whole university. On the one occasion when I got a little time with the president, I said, "You need to build an ensemble university because the departments have no sense of ensemble." If you say "ensemble," people will say, "Oh it's a hundred percent collaborative, everything is equal, everybody talks." But you who work in ensembles know that it's much more nuanced. There is so much structure to sustain our ensembles and so many ways that we make collaboration work, and function as individuals within the structure. I'm advocating that we really try to understand the tools we use to support these structures and functions. They are part of the unique knowledge that we can offer to people in other fields.

I want to close with a couple of thoughts. What I have found in trying to evolve an articulation of these tools is that it requires a little extra step on our part, which is to ask, "Why did I do what I just did? Why did I see what I just saw? What was it that caused me to notice the urgency of this particular problem, whether it is in rehearsal or in a community, and why did that thing happen?" What I've begun to see, if you take the time to do it, is that first of all, really interesting language ensues that may be helpful. Sometimes it's language that becomes the title of the piece you're working on, or helps you talk to a collaborator. There's new knowledge in the room as a result of asking these questions. I think of it as "harvesting intuition." Intuition is our knowledge, really fast. It's what we know, but it happens so fast that we aren't aware we know it. If we take time to say, "Wait, what just happened?" and try to catch the pictures in our minds, it's incredible. We become aware of knowledge that's more than a recipe or mere technique, knowledge that stays in the plural in both its sources and its outcomes.

So, Healing Wars goes to the University of Iowa next. Then it will be at Virginia Tech in March. I was just in Iowa, and one of the things I did there was have lunch with about 35 veterans. Most of the campuses now have veteran centers, and the universities are doing a lot to bring in veterans. So when you are on a campus, you might go wander over there and spend some time with them. I think the vets could really use the risk, purpose, and love you know about because they are really having a hard time on campuses. In a typical university community, it's just hard for them to actively belong.

At any rate, when I met with the vets in Iowa they had already eaten lunch when I arrived. I went around and said hello to each person and, as I often do if I can, I shook each hand. This is something I started doing when I was first teaching old people early in my career, as I realized that I actually needed to touch their bodies, because otherwise I just couldn't tell what was going on with them. I was only in my 20s. I'm now older than many of the old people I taught. But, that time, I hadn't felt very many old bodies, and I literally needed to get my hands on their bones. In the process I realized that so many connections get made when you shake hands, so that then when you actually have a conversation, you are going to have a meaningful one. And that's what it was like going around the table with the vets, because some of them are so guarded, while others, maybe because of their training, just really want to connect with you. Later, when we were talking, one of the women said, "You know what drives me crazy? People who just don't look you in the eye when you shake their hand." And I thought, "Oh, now there is a tool." That eye contact is an expression of something so powerful, not just for that community, but also for what it means to be human. It communicates a way of listening and connecting that I'm really excited for us to try to collect.

To that end, the Surdna Foundation has very kindly given a generous planning grant for me to begin working on what I am thinking of as a digital, online, interactive space for the sharing of these artistic tools. I am working with the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, hoping that digital technology will provide an architecture that allows for the complexity that we've been describing. Perhaps there could be a living, breathing way that you could actually get online for a chat with a source of knowledge like Bob Leonard. I would like that to be part of it. Maybe there is a way people could post their own work. Once the chapters are built, everybody could load in. If these ideas are of interest to you, I would love to hear from you. You can just find me at liz@lizlerman.com.

I don't want us to lose this knowledge. Thank you.

Postscript: Preparing this essay for publication two years after I gave the keynote, I have since been named the first institute professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. I am there to build a new ensemble lab in collaboration with Michael Rohd, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and others. We will be making space at the University for creative research, new curriculums, advancing the role of art and artists in civic life, and developing a platform for the Critical Response Process under the direction of John Borstel.

 

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