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I'll never forget watching a clip of Liz Lerman talking about her piece Hallelujah — she described it as "wrestling with the question of whether doubt can be holy." That's not what choreographers usually say. Most talk about technique, about the work's "exploration of movement vocabulary." Lerman talked about wrestling.
That's the difference.
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Back in 1976, Lerman founded what would become the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Washington, D.C. — but calling it just a dance company undersells what it actually was. It was a laboratory for the question: What is dance actually for? She pulled in people who had never trained professionally. She pulled in seniors. She pulled in kids. She pulled in people with disabilities. The mainstream dance world looked at her sideways, and honestly, she looked back with what I imagine was a pretty amused expression.
Because the work kept winning. Not just audiences — awards, critical acclaim, commissions from the Kennedy Center, from cities, from universities. Her pieces tackled things most choreographers wouldn't touch with a ten-foot arabesque: aging parents, Israel-Palestine, the nuclear question, systemic injustice. She didn't soften it for comfort. She used movement the way a novelist uses language — precisely, sometimes brutally, always with intent.
Hallelujah remains one of the most discussed contemporary dance works of the last two decades, and it's about faith and doubt coexisting in the same body at the same time. Watching it, you don't think "oh this is a metaphor for something." You feel the contradiction in your chest. That's the Lerman gift: intellectual rigor wearing the skin of physical sensation.
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Here's what the dance establishment eventually had to accept: Lerman was right about who dance belongs to. Her Exchange became a model for community-engaged choreography worldwide. Artists traveled from other countries just to study her process — how she ran rehearsals, how she invited non-dancers into creative decision-making, how she got a room full of completely different people to build something cohesive without crushing their individual voices.
When Dance Magazine gave her their award, it wasn't a legacy honor given out of obligation. It was overdue recognition for someone who had spent forty years refusing to let dance become an elite art form that only talked to itself.
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I think about this a lot, honestly. Dance — especially contemporary dance — has a tendency toward navel-gazing. We choreograph for each other, we perform for critics, we use language so insular that a new audience walks in and feels immediately excluded. Lerman built the opposite. Her work invites. It asks something of you, but it doesn't punish you for not knowing the answer.
The dance world is different because she was in it. Not just because of the pieces — though those are substantial — but because she proved you could be serious and generous at the same time. You could chase deep questions through your body and still hold the door open for someone who has never seen contemporary dance before.
That combination is rarer than it should be.
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If you haven't seen Hallelujah, find it. Watch it with someone who thinks they don't like dance. See what happens.
That's the Lerman test: does the work reach beyond the room it was made in?
Most of it doesn't. Hers always has.
