Episode Details

In Episode 63 of Change the Story / Change the World, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer, teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. In this Episode, (64) we hear about Wicked Bodies, her latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches.

Special Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for their support of Liz Lerman's work and the use of an excerpt from the Wicked Bodies trailer.

BIO

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others.

Called by the Washington Post “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,”[4] she and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers.[5] In 2002 she won the MacArthur Genius Grant;[6] in 2009, the Jack P. Blaney Award in Dialogue acknowledged her outstanding leadership, creativity, and dedication to melding dialogue with dance, and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.[7]

She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman passed the leadership of her company to Cassie Meador;[8] the company is now called simply Dance Exchange.[9] .[10]

Under Lerman's leadership Dance Exchange appeared across the U.S. in locations as various as the National Cathedral,[11] Kennedy Center Opera House,[12] and Millennium Stage,[13] Lansburgh Theatre,[14] Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center,