Ferocious Beauty: Genome Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Liz Lerman, founding artistic director Elizabeth Johnson, associate artistic director
The Company Thomas Dwyer, Elizabeth Johnson, Liz Lerman, Cassie Meador, Shula Strassfeld, Benjamin Wegman, Martha Wittman The dances for this performance are the result of collaborative processes developed at Liz Lerman Dance Exchange during a span of more than three decades. The artistic directors would like to acknowledge that company members, as well as artistic collaborators, both past and present, contribute greatly to the creation of these works.
Ferocious Beauty: Genome Liz Lerman, direction/conception Michael Mazzola, lighting designer Darron L West, soundscape John Boesche, projection designer Logan Kibens, video and effects editing Kathleen Geldard, costume consultant Amelia Cox, production stage manager M. Florian Staab, sound engineer Jesse Muench, lighting supervisor Meg Kelly, video and production assistant Jori Ketten, production assistant
Cast Thomas Dwyer Elizabeth Johnson Ted Johnson Matt Mahaney Gesel Mason Cassie Meador Suzanne Richard Shula Strassfeld Benjamin Wegman Martha Wittman
With Video Appearances By Laurel Appel, Bonnie Bassler, Howard Bilofsky, Anna DiRienzo, Georgia Dunston, Irene Eckstrand, Claire Fraser, Marti Head, Manju Hingorani, Eric Jakobsson, Elke Jordan, Laura Grabel, Lori Gruen, Harris Lewin, Chip Lovett, Sayan Mukherjee, Uwe Ohler, Gary Olsen, Steve Palumbi, Aaron Turkewitz Special Thanks Eugene Ahn, Ronnie Cavaluzzi, Teresa Chapman, Margot Greenlee, Elizabeth Johnson, Karen Masaki, Gesel Mason, Kevin Malone, Keith Thompson, Elaine Wang, Marvin Webb and Nicole Williams also contributed to the development of Ferocious Beauty: Genome. Ferocious Beauty: Genome’s lead commissioners are The Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University and The Flint Cultural Center Corporation. Ferocious Beauty: Genome has received leadership support from the Nathan L. Cummings Foundation, the Dallas Morse Coors Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding has come from the Doris Duke Fund for Dance of the National Dance Project, a program administered by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation, and from Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC). Additional developmental partners are the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Duke Performances at Duke University, Workspace for Choreographers, Maryland Institute College of Art and the Applewood Estate of the Ruth Mott Foundation. The Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University provided essential support and guidance.
Ferocious Beauty: Genome Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
NONFICTION DANCING
Choreographer Liz Lerman on Ferocious Beauty: Genome Ferocious Beauty: Genome was built through a remarkable partnership between dancers, media artists and a generous group of scientists. In three years of performing the piece in cities across North America, we’ve observed how the understanding we gained through that collaboration translates to an audience. But I hope that your experience will be about more than just understanding. With that in mind, here are a few things you might want to know: First, we didn’t do it all. While Ferocious Beauty touches on a few of the many topics encountered in the big frontier of genetic discovery, the piece is ultimately about some particular sparks of interest we unearthed in our explorations. Act One takes us into the laboratories of scientists, and offers a fantasia on some genetically-related themes from history and folklore. For Act Two, I selected three ideas I was interested in exploring away from the science laboratory: long life, selection and perfection, and the nature of ancestry. In choosing the subjects and sections that you see gathered in this work tonight, we employed an idea that I have come to call nonfiction dancing. This is a way of developing and presenting content for a dance that emphasizes the same things a reader can gain from nonfiction: amazing stories, details, specificity and the benefits of research that someone else has done for us. In addition, we took some new approaches. We spent many hours with scientists, on their turf and on ours. We used movement to form a language, making a direct translation of what we were hearing and reading. We asked the scientists to watch us for a while and do their own translating back to us. Just as the author of a nonfiction book decides on what to include, how to sequence and how to interpret, we reached beyond the facts—central though they are—to present a journey that combines fact, fiction, curiosity and subjectivity. I hope that you will enjoy it. Liz Lerman Founding Artistic Director For more information on the development of Ferocious Beauty: Genome, including scientific and artistic collaborators, a research bibliography and more from Liz Lerman, please visit www.danceexchange.org and www.danceexchange.org/performance/ferociousbeautygenome.html.
Company Profiles Liz Lerman (founding artistic director, direction/conception) is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker. Described by The Washington Post as “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,” her dance/theater works have been seen throughout the United States and abroad. Her aesthetic approach spans the range from abstract to personal to political, while her working process emphasizes research, translation between artistic media and intensive collaboration with dancers and communities. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and has cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble—with dancers ranging in ages spanning six decades—into a leading force in contemporary dance. Lerman has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the American Choreographer Award, the American Jewish Congress “Golda” Award, an honorary doctorate from Williams College and Wash-
ingtonian Magazine’s 1988 Washingtonian of the Year. In 2002 her work was recognized with a MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, and she was recently honored at the Jewish Cultural Achievement Awards and inducted into the University of Maryland’s Alumni Hall of Fame. Liz’s work has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, American Dance Festival, BalletMet and the Kennedy Center, among many others. From 1994 to 1996, in collaboration with the Music Hall of Portsmouth, N.H., Liz directed Shipyard Project, which has been widely noted as an example of the power of art to enhance values such as social capital and civic dialogue. From 1999 to 2002 she led Hallelujah, which engaged people in 15 cities throughout the U.S. in the creation of a series of dances “in praise of” topics vital to their communities. In addition to Ferocious Beauty: Genome, her recent projects include Man/Chair Dances and Small Dances About Big Ideas, the latter commissioned
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by the Harvard Law School to help observe the human rights legacy of the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials. As a frequent keynote speaker and panelist, Lerman addresses arts, community and business organizations both nationally and internationally. She consults regularly with the Mellon Orchestra Forum and Synagogue 3000, and participated in Harvard University’s Saguaro Seminar, which gathered thinkers to promote the growth of civic connectedness in the U.S. She is the author of Teaching Dance to Senior Adults (1983), the co-author of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (2003) and has written articles and essays for publications including Reconstructionism Today, Faith and Form, Movement Research, The Washington Post Book World and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Community, Culture and Globalization. Current artistic projects and professional consultations encompass diverse topics including nuclear physics, prayer, sustainability, art/ science collaboration and the nature of beginnings. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Milwaukee, Lerman attended Bennington College and Brandeis University, received her Bachelor of Arts in dance from the University of Maryland, and a Master of Arts in dance from George Washington University. She is married to storyteller Jon Spelman. Their daughter, Anna, is in her fourth year of college. Elizabeth Johnson (associate artistic director) is a choreographer, dancer, educator and director of the Dance Exchange’s Teen Exchange program. In 10 years with the Dance Exchange, Johnson has collaboratively created community dances in Maine, California, Japan and Canada. She works with youth, seniors, religious communities, teachers, lawyers, scientists and professional dancers, with a particular focus on teens and embodied learning. Her work has been featured both across the country and locally in Washington, D.C. Her choreographic work is driven by athleticism, physiology and the desire to connect movement with meaning. Johnson graduated magna cum laude from Connecticut College with a Bachelor of Arts in dance, a minor in theatre and studied at London Contemporary Dance School. Recently, Johnson was the artistic lead on the multimedia exhibit Cells: The Universe Inside Us at the Maryland Science Center which opened in March 2009. She also taught this spring at Arizona State University as faculty associate for the Herberger College Department of Dance. There, she created a site-specific performance connecting dance students and communities with ideas inspired by, and in collaboration with, the Global Institute of Sustainability.
John Boesche (projection designer) has designed projections and scenery for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Goodman Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre, Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre and Steppenwolf Theatre. Broadway credits include The Glass Menagerie at Roundabout Theatre, directed by Frank Galati. Regionally, his work has been seen at Arizona Theatre Company, Asolo Theatre, Denver Center Theatre Company, McCarter Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, New York Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare at the Folger, South Coast Repertory and the Theater On The Square, among others. His designs for opera have been seen at Austin Lyric Opera, Barbican Theatre Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Canadian Opera Company, Dallas Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Lyon, Opera Pacifica, Portland Opera, Salt Lake Opera, San Francisco Opera, Theatre de la Monnaie, Washington National Opera and Vancouver Opera, among others. He received a Joseph Jefferson Special Award for projection design in 2005. Thomas Dwyer (company member) began a dance career with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange after retiring from the U.S. government service in June 1988. His choreography, known for employing community-based seniors, has been presented at Dance Place, the Church Street Theatre in Washington, D.C. and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland. Kathleen Geldard (costume consultant) recently designed costumes for autobahn at Studio Theatre. Other Washington, D.C. design credits include Terrorism, A Clockwork Orange at Studio Theatre Secondstage; The Disputation, There Are No Strangers and A Bad Friend at Theater J. The Comedy of Errors and All’s Well That Ends Well at Folger Theatre, A Clearing in the Woods at Rorschach Theatre, Metamorphosis at Catalyst Theatre Company, Scaramouche at Washington Shakespeare Company and By Tooth or By Tongue, A Life in the Theatre at Source Theatre Company. Baltimore-based productions include The Cripple of Inishmaan, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Yellowman and Uncle Vanya at Everyman Theatre. She has also designed costumes for productions at the Olney Theatre Center, Imagination Stage and Rep Stage. Ted Johnson (adjunct artist) was a member of Bebe Miller Company for eight years and Ralph Lemon Company for two. He has worked with chore-
Ferocious Beauty: Genome Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
ographers Amy Sue Rosen, David Alan Harris, Sarah Pogostin, Li Chiao-Ping, Eun Me Ahn, Stephan Koplowitz, Charles Wright and Cheng-Chieh Yu. Johnson has a background in visual arts (drawing, painting and design), theatre and voice. He has been a student of Klein Technique with Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein for more than a decade, and continues to practice contact/improvisation in play and performance. His experience with the transformational process of The Work of Byron Katie has become a radical catalyst in his life.
Michael Mazzola (lighting designer) has designed lighting in venues across the U.S. and Europe, ranging from opera houses to circus tents to outdoor amphitheaters. Twice a New York Dance and Performance Award winner, Michael has recently designed lighting for the Bebe Miller Company, David Parsons Dance Company, Stuttgart Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Royal Ballet of Flanders, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and Easai Pharmaceutical Company in addition to several works with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.
Logan Kibens (video and effects editing) is a Chicago-based film and video artist whose work has screened at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, among others. She has designed video projections for theatre and dance companies like Steppenwolf, About Face, The Neo-Futurists, Roadworks, Lucky Plush, Mordine and Co. and worked as a video editor with The Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Lookingglass Theatre, Royal George Theatre and Washington National Opera and more.
Cassie Meador (company member) is a choreographer, performer and teacher from Georgia, based in Washington, D.C. She has created dances in communities throughout the U.S. and in Japan, Canada, Ireland and Guyana. As an educator, she has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Dance Center at Columbia College, American University, Wesleyan University, Kyoto Arts Center, American Dance Festival and the Bealtaine Festival. Meador received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance from The Ohio State University, where she was awarded a scholarship in choreography. Meador currently serves as a project director at the Dance Exchange and makes her own work within it. In 2006 she co-directed the premiere of 613 Acts of Radical Prayer: Opening Acts with Liz Lerman at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and went on to create new versions of the work at Brown University and the Bealtaine Festival in Ireland. In 2008, Meador received a John F. Kennedy Center Local Dance Commissioning Project grant. She presented her work, Drift, on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in September 2008. In 2009, Meador was part of the Feet to the Fire project at Wesleyan University, where she co-taught a course on tropical ecology with Matt Mahaney and Barry Chernoff. The team traveled to Guyana and worked with science and art students to bring both artistic and scientific tools to bare on ecology and global warming. She joined the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 2002.
Matt Mahaney (adjunct artist) graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts and has performed works by Brenda Daniels, Sean Sullivan, Trish Casey, Diane Markham, Scott Rink and Alberto (Tito) Delsaz and his mentor, David Beadle. Mahaney also produces his own work which includes, but is not limited to, digital video, music, choreography and sculpture. Gesel Mason (adjunct artist) is co-founder and artistic director of Mason/Rhynes Productions and artistic director for Gesel Mason Performance Projects. She has performed with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, the Repertory Dance Theatre of Utah and the Silesian Dance Theatre. She was a Liz Lerman Dance Exchange company member from 1996 to 2000. Mason has been artist-in-residence at schools across the country and was granted numerous awards including Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards in 2001, 2004 and 2005, and an Arts Council of Montgomery County Artist Fellowship in 1999 and 2005. Mason was selected as emerging choreographer by the Bates Dance Festival in 2000. Her work has been presented by the Walker Arts Center, Diverse Works, Museum of Contemporary Art, Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, DanceAfrica and the International Association of Blacks in Dance.
Jesse Muench (lighting supervisor) has been touring with Ferocious Beauty: Genome since 2006. She toured nationally and internationally with Aspen Santa Fe Ballet for five years as the lighting supervisor. She was also lighting supervisor for the Aspen Dance Festival where she worked with companies like Hubbard Street Dance, Paul Taylor Dance Co., Washington Ballet, Pilobolus, Momix and Parsons Dance Co. Most recently she has toured to Australia with Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Muench has a Bachelor of Science in biology from Colorado State University and resides in Santa Fe, N.M.
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Suzanne Richard (adjunct artist) is artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s Open Circle Theatre. Her acting credits include work with The Folger Theater, Washington Shakespeare Company, Studio Secondstage, Project Y, Imagination Stage, Kaiser Permanente Educational Theatre Program, Seize the Day, Venus Theatre and the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. Her film credits include The Snowflake Crusade, Focus on Me and The Bland Pitch Project. Richard has worked as an accessibility specialist with the National Endowment for the Arts and is the author of the chapter Dealing with Being Different for the Osteogenesis Foundation’s book on growing up with Osteogenisis Imperfecta. She is also a speaker on genetics and disabilities in the arts. M. Florian Staab (sound engineer) is a recording, sound engineer and lighting designer currently based in Chicago. His recent design credits include Tina Girlstar (New York Stage and Film), Blueprints of Relentless Nature and Darwin’s Wife (in Japan with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange), Orpheus & Euridice (Chicago Opera Vanguard), How Can You Run with a Shell on Your Back? and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Northwestern University). Other design credits include Jesus Christ Superstar, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (New Line Theatre, St. Louis) and the world premiere of To Save Him (Hatch Theatre Chicago). Staab holds a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. Shula Strassfeld (company member) trained in New York with members of the Jose Limon Company, Collette Barry and Susan Klein, and then spent two years in Boston studying with Amy Ellsworth, Susan Rose and Joy Kelman. While living in Israel, Strassfeld taught at the Bat Dor Studios and The Rubin Academy of Hebrew University. She also taught and choreographed for the Apprentice Company of the Kibbutz Dance Company. For five years she was a soloist with the Mirali Sharon Dance Company performing throughout Israel, in Europe and the U.S. Returning to North America, she danced with South Street Dance Company, Sybil Dance Company in Philadelphia and with choreographers Jan Van Dyke and Sandra Neels in North Carolina. While living in Toronto, Strassfeld spent six years as artistic director of Me’irim Dance Company at the Toronto Jewish Community Centre. Her work was presented in the Toronto Fringe Dance Festival, in Ballet Creole and Dancemakers. Strassfeld has a Master of Arts in dance from Columbia University and was artist-in-
residence at York University dance department. She taught at the School of Canadian Dance Theatre and in the professional program at Ballet Creole. She joined Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 2007. Benjamin Wegman (company member) is a native Midwesterner who received his early training at the Joffrey Ballet School and Point Park University. He has performed with numerous companies including Jeanne Ruddy Dance, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, Keith Thompson’s danceTactics, Headlong Dance Theater, CityDance Ensemble, SCRAP Performance Group and Troika Ranch. Wegman enjoys Mexican food, napping with his cat and arguing politics in the District. He joined the company in 2007. Darron L. West (soundscape) is a member of Anne Bogart’s SITI Company. His soundscapes have been heard in more than 380 productions nationally and internationally. As director, his credits include Kid Simple for the 2004 Humana New Play Festival, Big Love for Austin’s Rude Mechs (Austin Critics Table Award Best Director), Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse and Eurydice for Children’s Theater Company Minneapolis, and SITI’s War of the Worlds Radio Play, the National Tour. West’s awards include the 2004 and 2005 Henry Hewes Design Award, the Princess Grace Award, The Village Voice OBIE Award and the Entertainment Design Magazine EDDY Award. Martha Wittman (company member) has been teaching, dancing and choreographing for more than 50 years. As a young performer she danced with the Juilliard Dance Theatre under the direction of Doris Humphrey and in the companies of Ruth Currier, Joseph Gifford and Anna Sokolow. For many years she was an associate choreographer with the Dances We Dance Company directed by Betty Jones and Fritz Ludin. Her awards include three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Doris Humphrey Fellowship from the American Dance Festival, Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland Council on the Arts and two awards from Dance/USA’s National College Choreography Initiative. She was a long-term member of the Bennington College dance faculty in Vermont and has been a guest artist, teacher and choreographer in numerous colleges, universities and summer dance programs around the country. Wittman joined the Dance Exchange in 1996 and has been happily working with it ever since.
Ferocious Beauty: Genome Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
LIZ LERMAN DANCE EXCHANGE Liz Lerman founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976. Its unique brand of dance/theatre breaks boundaries between stage and audience, theater and community, movement and language, tradition and the unexplored. Through explosive dancing, personal stories, humor and a company of performers whose ages span six decades, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange stretches the expressive range of contemporary dance. Its work consists of formal concerts, interactive performances, specialized community residencies, and professional training in the art of community-based dance. An artist-driven organization, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange employs a collaborative approach to dance making, administration and implementation. Representing the multiple artistic voices of Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, current choreographic projects include explorations of coal mining, sustainable energy, genetic research, radical prayer, human rights, particle physics and geology. More information is available at www.danceexchange.org. The Staff Liz Lerman, founding artistic director Jane Hirshberg, managing director John Borstel, humanities director Elizabeth Johnson, associate artistic director Amelia Cox, creative producer
Ben Eiserike, communications manager Susanne Larsen, projects manager Dorothy Williams, partnerships manager Meg Kelly, production coordinator Nicole Salimbene, assistant to the directors
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange gratefully acknowledges support from the following major funders: Americans for the Arts – The Exemplar Program, Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Diane & Norman Bernstein Foundation, The Boeing Company, The Covenant Foundation, Dallas Morse Coors Foundation for the Performing Arts, Drescher Foundation, Donors InVesting in Arts (DIVAs) of the Montgomery County Community Foundation, Meyer S. Frucher, Lorraine Gallard & Samuel Levy, Martha S. Head, Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MetLife Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, AJ Pietrantone, Raymond Family Foundation, Reinisch Family Foundation, and Elliot Rosen & Sharon Cohen. Board of Directors Elliot Rosen, chair Ellen Coren Bogage, vice-chair Elliot E. Maxwell, secretary Lorraine Gallard, treasurer
Martha S. Head Liz Lerman Christine Morano Magee Christopher Magee
Joan Marsh Steven Newsome Laura Smyth John Urciolo
Lew Winarsky Joseph Wnuk
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