dancex2

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Arts Small Dances About Big Ideas by David Katz November 10, 2005 The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, one of the most inventive and original Modern Dance companies of our time (See Dance Exchange, August 2005), received a commission from Harvard Law School to explore the subject of genocide in the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials of 1946. Part of Harvard Law's conference commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the trials which brought Nazi officials responsible for war crimes and genocide to justice, the Dance Exchange program illuminated the successes and failures resulting from these trials. In a performance that was powerful, moving, and at times frightening, the Dance Exchange dancers and choreographers avoided the two pitfalls that would have trapped a lesser company: false hope and despair.

All Dance Exchange programs combine three elements: dance, sound and audience involvement. The sound element in this program combined music and voice-over narrative, and provided an effective counterpoint and clarification to the movement on stage.

The suite of short dance pieces that flowed one into the next without pause had three themes: the attempts of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish scholar who coined the word genocide, to make himself heard by the people and governments of the world; the acts of genocide that did not cease with the end of World War II and included the Holocaust, Bosnia and Rwanda; and the work of forensic anthropologists like Clea Koff to uncover the hidden victims and tell the story of their murders. Through it all, the Norns, who in Teutonic myth are the lawgivers to the gods and after whom Nuremburg is named, guide and comfort the victims and those who are attempting to bring justice.

Working with a minimal set that evokes a cellar shelter, a courtroom, an African village and the cave of the Norns, the company draws us into the chilling recital of murders, rapes, maimings and general savagery that makes up so much of human history. Beginning with a scene in which company members recount fragments of their stories, each in a different language to make clear the universality of genocide, the dance pieces use the language of the body to recount crimes against the body. One of the great strengths of Dance Exchange is that the dancers range in age from their twenties to their seventies; this makes possible a realism that would escape other companies, without compromising the dance and acrobatic skills needed to tell these stories. Despite the horrific theme of the evening, the performance was exhilarating.

At several junctures during the performance, Artistic Director Peter DiMuro opened a dialog with the audience, looking for direct or indirect memories of the Holocaust and the effect that parental or other experiences had on the lives of audience members. Working from this feedback, a series of gestures symbolic of these experiences was developed with the audience that became a small dance in itself. Repeated by the company at the end of the program as an exit piece, this audience-created dance provided emotional closure for the evening.

Most dance reviews include a sentence that begins “Especially (graceful, or effective, or spectacular, or athletic) are ...”. In the case of Dance Exchange, and particularly in the case of this program, in which the dancers were choreographers and the choreographers danced, any such sentence would have to include the names of the entire company. So here they are: Thomas Dwyer, Margot Greenlee, Elizabeth Johnson, Ted Johnson, Matt Mahaney, Kevin Malone, Cassie Meador, and Martha Wittman.

The ability of this group to create a fullfilling evening of dance out of the most unlikely themes is unsurpassed. Difficult as their subjects are, true dance emerges. We look forward to the premier in February of “Ferocious Beauty: Genome”, a full-evening work about the impact of developments in genetics.