Can an artist who comes from outside a community become an effective partner in creating change?

That was the question we explored in an earlier episode of our Building Blocks of Effective Community Arts Practice series. And in our recent conversation with Eric Gottesman, we heard one compelling answer. His experiences in Ethiopia—and later with For Freedoms—taught him to stop acting as the sole author and begin making work with communities through questions, shared authority, and collective storytelling.

Our next guest, choreographer and community artist Liz Lerman, takes that conversation further. Through what she calls “the horizontal,” she shows us how artists can bring their knowledge into a community without placing it above everyone else’s.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Horizontal — how leadership and expertise can be shared without disappearing.
• Critical Response — a feedback practice built around curiosity, consent, and respect.
• The Heretic’s Path — how artists can challenge established systems while staying in relationship with them.

So, as you listen, consider what becomes possible when expertise is joined by humility, curiosity, and a willingness to share power.

Notable Mentions

Dance Exchange: (Previously, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange) Fueled by generosity and curiosity, Dance Exchange expands who gets to dance, where dance happens, what dance is about, and why dance matters. Dance Exchange harnesses the power of creativity and inquiry through dance to connect communities, to deepen our understanding of ourselves and to foster a more embodied, resilient and just world.

Critical Response Process: Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process is a method for giving and getting feedback on work in progress, designed to leave the maker eager and motivated to get back to work. is Creative

Pee-Posh (Maricopa): The Maricopa people were small bands living along the lower Gila and Colorado rivers. Each of these bands migrated eastward at different times. The Xalychidom (Maricopa of Lehi), left around 1825-1830. The last of these bands is said to have left the Colorado River in the late 1830’s. Eventually these bands came together and became collectively known as the Maricopa. As they migrated eastward, they came upon the Pima tribe and established a relationship. Both tribes provided protection against the Yuman and Apache tribes.

Tohono O’odham: The Tohono O’odham Nation is comparable in size to the state of Connecticut. Its four non-contiguous segments total more than 2.8 million acres at an elevation of 2,674 feet. Within its land the Nation has established an Industrial Park that is located near Tucson. Tenants of the Industrial Park include Caterpillar, the maker of heavy equipment; the Desert Diamond Casino, an enterprise of the Nation; and, an 23 acre foreign trade zone. of Wisconsin with a sociologist named Pearlman.

Freedom Schools: The Freedom Schools of the 1960s were part of a long line of efforts to liberate people from oppression using the tool of popular education, including secret schools in the 18th and 19th centuries for enslaved Africans; labor schools during the early 20th century; and the Citizenship Schools formed by Septima Clark and others in the 1950s.

Anna Halprin: was an American choreographer and dancer. She helped redefine dance in postwar America and pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to herself as a breaker of the rules of modern dance.[4] In the 1950s, she established the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop to give artists like her a place to practice their art. Exploring the capabilities of her own body, she created a systematic way of moving using kinesthetic awareness.[5

Florence West, dance Milwaukee: Modern dance in Milwaukee begins with Florence West (1912-1994). West left Milwaukee at seventeen to dance in a Broadway road show, quit when she discovered ballet during a tour stop in Detroit, and found her way into the corps of the Chicago Civic Opera ballet. A Milwaukee opera producer asked her to come home to add choreography to a local production of Carmen. She soon became the go-to dance person for Milwaukee dance, theater, and opera companies.

Amira de la Garza: After spending a year in Mexico as a Fulbright Scholar, her experiences with the everyday talk and life around her led her to develop methods to integrate the arts, spirituality, and personal reflection into the study of culture. She works with many border-related projects, and has had students from around the world travel with her to many places to learn the methods she teaches.Professor de la Garza reports her research using creative writing, poetry, fiction, and has often shared her research through staged performances.

The California State Summer School for the Arts is a rigorous, preprofessional, month-long training program in the visual and performing arts, creative writing, animation and film for talented artists of high school age. CSSSA provides a supportive environment in which students hone acquired skills and explore new techniques and ideas for an intense and exciting learning experience.

Ethel Butler, one of Liz’s teachers: From 1933 through 1945, Ethel Butler was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company. She went on to become a well-known teacher of the Graham Technique, counting among her students Paul Taylor and Dan Wagoner.

Sandy Spring Friends School: Sandy Spring Friends School is a progressive, coeducational, college preparatory Quaker school serving students from preschool through 12th grade. SSFS offers an optional 5- and 7- day boarding program in the Middle School and Upper School.

Art in Other Places, William Cleveland, Artists have established a remarkable record of innovation and success in institutional settings. Their work with hospital patients, prisoners, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and others has shown that the arts can have a significant positive impact on the lives of these people. This book recounts the histories of 22 institutional and community arts programs across the country pioneering this approach through activities such as creative writing and the performing and visual arts.Rabbi, Danny Zemel.

Wicked Bodies: Inspired by powerful and grotesque images of women’s bodies over multiple historic periods, Liz Lerman’s Wicked Bodies, is an intimate spectacle, brings together several consistent themes of my choreographic output:

– the invisible ways and means of feminine thinking and action which have been celebrated, erased, or criminalized;

– legal systems that attempt but often fail to bend our actions towards a fairer and more just world; and

– how we as a group of intergenerational artists bring our personal lives to the stage within characters that are imagining futures

Anand Giridharadas, The Persuaders is a stunning insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens who are on the ground working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy.

Anat Shanker Osorio: Host of the Words to Win By podcast and Principal of ASO Communications, Anat Shenker-Osorio examines why certain messages falter where others deliver. She has led research for new messaging on issues ranging from freedom to join together in union to clean energy and from immigrant rights to reforming criminal justice. Anat's original approach through priming experiments, task-based testing and online dial surveys has led to progressive electoral and policy victories across the globe.

Malonga Casquelourd: Even as a child in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, Casquelourd could hardly keep from moving, becoming a principal dancer with the National Congolese Dance Company in his teens and performing internationally before joining Le Ballet Diaboua in Paris. In 1972, he moved to New York and co-founded the United States' first Central African dance company, Tanawa. But his greatest impact was in the Bay Area. He arrived in Oakland in the mid-'70s, teaching Congolese dance and drumming at CitiCentre Dance Theater, where he was a founding instructor, and African studies at San Francisco State University. Even dancers who didn't take his classes looked forward to hearing his booming voice in the Alice Arts Center halls every Saturday. When the center faced closure in 2002, Casquelourd led the campaign to keep it open to the public.

Cristobal Martinez: Cristóbal Martínez, PhD is from Alcalde, New Mexico and is of the Genizaro, Pueblo, Manito and Chicano people in Northern New Mexico including Española, Abiquiu, Velarde, Pó t'síí pangeh, Embudo and Dixon. He is an artist, digital designer, publishing scholar, and Professor of Expanded Arts at Arizona State University. Martínez co-founded the artist-hacker ensemble Radio Healer in 2003; joined the internationally acclaimed artist collective Postcommodity in 2009; and co-created, with post-Mexican artist-composer Guillermo Galindo, the experimental electronic music ensemble Red Culebra in 2018. Martínez has dedicated his life and career to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art, and continues his work within these groups.

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Change the Story / Change the World is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

Hey there. Can a highly accomplished artist partner with a community in a way that honors and amplifies what is already there?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Well, that question I just posed has followed us from Kathy Bentley's collaboration across the Mississippi river to Eric Goetzman's transformation from photographer and observer to collaborator and co author. It also echoes our Building Blocks conversation in episode 188 about whether outside artists can become effective partners in community change.

Dance legend Liz Lerman takes that question a step further through what she calls the horizontal.

She shows us how leadership, knowledge and authority can move through a room or a community without disappearing and without remaining in the hands of a single artist.

In this third episode of our four part journey about creative community collaborations, Liz introduces ideas and practices designed to make curiosity, caring, connection, and shared power part of the creative process.

In this reprise episode, listen for what becomes possible when a sensitive and ethical artist's expertise is joined by a willingness to be changed by everyone else in the room. I don't usually quote web blurbs, but I was taken by this description of Liz on her site.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher and speaker. She 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.

In Chapter one of our conversation with Liz Lerman, we'll talk about her early years, her career as a heretic, the critical response process, the Heisenberg Principle, the power of the horizontal, and how Dance can Make the World a better place. Part one Sometimes Dance so Liz Lerman, welcome to the show. Where are you hailing from today?

Hello, Bill Cleveland.

As we speak together, I am in my office at Arizona State University, which is in Tempe, Arizona, and we are on the lands of the Pipash and the Tooda O' Odham peoples.

I will say, when I think about the people who have stewarded our places, I particularly like to give a special thought to the dancers, the painters, the poets, the basket weavers, the ritual makers, all of those amazing people who did all of that in part to hold their communities together and in part to understand their individual relationship to the universe. And I like to think in some ways, I'm doing the same. Whether I do it with as much honor and character as they must have done, I don't know.

But I take some courage from having moved here to the Southwest. And honestly, Bill, you can feel it. You walk on this land, and you can feel it, and you look at this sky. So I'm grateful to be here.

So I'm speaking to you from Alameda, California, which at one time was a piece of land Connected to the west coast of the United States. And is now kind of an island. And it is the traditional and unceded lands of the Ohlone people. Not only the lands, but the waters as well.

So I'll begin with a question that's jumping up for me. Because you did a benediction for those people all those many years ago.

Who were the movers, the ritual makers, the people who prepared the ritual fire. So do you think what you have done all your life, which we call dance, this moving, is an intrinsic and essential human behavior?

Well, I think that creativity is intrinsic and a birthright. And that as much of anything, has been my life search. But moving has been the elemental and first way. That I accessed that in myself.

Well, I don't know if it's the first way. Because I had quite an active imagination when I was a child. But I was pretty clear from an early age that dancing was to be mine.

And gratefully born into a family that was willing to find the means to support that. But in all these years that have ensued, I've come to see dance as a tributary to a larger idea which is, well, motion.

And that the world is in motion. And that all things are in motion, including our institutions and, well, the ground we walk on.

And that our bodies are the manifestation of how we can express, hold, learn, comprehend, work, be in dialogue with. To help us understand these things. So dance, although dance is central, Dance sometimes gets in the way of what talking about.

But dance sometimes furthers it. And for many people, it is an absolutely essential place. In which they can enact this. Whether it's in their clubs or in their room by themselves.

Or beholding nature when they lift their arms up to the sky or whatever. So intrinsic. Absolutely. Dance as we sometimes imagine it in this Western culture. Not always, no.

Right. So you're in an airplane, and you're sitting next to someone who turns to you and says, hey, there, I'm Maurice, and I'm an underwater welder.

Who are you and what's your work in the world? How do you respond to that?

Well, you know, I have a lot of different ways of answering that, depending on what that person does once I start talking, because there's a way in which any number of things will ensue.

But I started answering that question, Bill, not because I was in an airplane, but because my daughter threw her arms around my legs while I was walking out the door yet again to go do something, and she wished I was with her. And why are you doing this? And I have often then said this question, what are you doing? Is really deep?

And that your answer may change depending on who you're talking to. Although the essential truth of it probably needs to be there no matter what. So in the airplane, I don't say dance anymore.

It's just too confusing and too narrowing. But I will say things like, oh, I teach. I may start now. Oh, I teach at asu. And then I'll say, oh, I teach creativity. I might do that.

Or I might say, well, actually, I'm a choreographer. And but for me, choreography. And then I'll jump into choreography is bigger. It's not just the steps.

And, oh, and I'm working on a piece right now about witches. Or I'm working. And then I wait and see what they do.

And if, by the way, they don't ask me some questions, they want to talk a lot, I will eventually pull a book out.

So since we're talking about movement, I'll just give you the context in which we're having this conversation.

I am sitting in my gigantic recording studio, which is a closet, in a little chair on a hot pad, because for the last two weeks, I haven't been able to tie my shoes.

Oh, I'm sorry.

So the reason I'm bringing this up is that, of course, movement is something most of us take for granted. Right.

And when you find yourself surprised that your body is not actually cooperating in the way that you expect it to, it's a very significant consciousness raiser about this bag of bones we carry around with us. It's pretty amazing.

Exactly.

Another amazing thing is what little I know about your origin story. So how did you come to this work that is sometimes dance and sometimes teaching creativity?

One thing I love about the origin question is that you don't really know where to start, because every origin begets another origin. To be honest.

I mean, I feel really blessed to have been born to the mother and father I was born to because they were so divergent and in their own manner bequeathed me so many things that I spent my life trying to work through. But I was thinking about it today. You could go further back. I've just been thinking about Russia and the Ukraine.

So a lot of American Jews come out of the Ukraine. My family does. My grandfather was in some tiny little village. Well, was in a ghetto and then made it to Odessa and then escaped the army.

But have to really understand the grimness of those ghettos for Jewish people at that time. I mean, it was slaughter. What did it take for him to rebel and get himself out and land in Milwaukee, where he's still a pious Orthodox Jew?

Gives birth to my father, whose mother dies in the plague and the flu epidemic when he's six months old. So there's a whole, you know, all the stuff of being raised by all your neighbors and all that.

But I was on a panel on art and social justice a long time ago and was talking just a little bit about my Milwaukee roots. And this guy comes up to me afterwards, and he launched into a story that I did not know.

He says, oh, I. I just want you to know your father was part of a group of Jewish boys who got really angry at the piousness of Orthodoxy. They didn't know what to do with themselves.

They ended up first generation at the University of Wisconsin with a sociologist named Perelman, who totally changed their lives. So before I start complaining about higher education, wait a minute. It altered my father's life. And I just. That's the story in and of itself.

And they all got radicalized, including my father, who was wonderfully radical. So that's a way. But, I mean, usually the story starts with the civil rights movement in Milwaukee and my leaving ballet.

This is the thing I'm just so struck by here at the university. I'm in what's called Music Dance Theater. So I'm in a music school.

And we know that music schools are, by and large the most conservative schools in the arts. And they've got a huge classical music program. And you just see classicism playing out over and over again.

And the act of leaving a classical tradition is just, you know, I did mine at 14. I managed to get out at 14 because of what was happening in Milwaukee, the civil Rights movement.

And I didn't understand how I could dance the bluebird and also go to Freedom School. And that. That conflation caused the explosion that gave me the energy to say, wait a minute. There's got to be another way to do this.

But I watch how seriously the tentacles are around classical notions and classical ideas, and I see it's a challenge to remove Oneself. And it's not just removing the body. You're removing thought, ideas, myths, traditions, all of that.

But I managed to begin an exploration that, of course, is ongoing.

Part two, Making the World a Better Place.

And so, as you said, your parents were both understanding and supportive of your ideas and how you wanted to manifest yourself in the world, obviously, first through classical study. But what happened when you broke with the canon? How did that go?

Well, you know what's interesting about it, I mean, basically the joke in the family was that they'd make me watch anything that was moving on television. They're dancing on television, Liz.

I can do some shuffling, too. Look out, man. What you gonna do? Yeah, man. Chairman.

And I'd have to come downstairs and watch. And it could be tap or it could be. So they were. They had. My dad had a large unit, plus he'd gone to college with Anna Halperin.

Wow. And so you're talking about Deanna Halperin, the choreographer and dancer whose work literally transformed modern dance in post war America.

Yeah. And so it wasn't as if. I mean, they were both modernists at heart. They just, I think, understood something about, oh, you're going to be a ballerina.

It was like the career thing. Not so much the whole art picture thing. I think the idea that I was going to quit was hard for them.

I think that there's a part of them that love that I was involved and so serious about my dancing. But it wasn't a total quitting, it was quitting ballet. And so then we could begin to focus on, well, where else would I get my education?

Yeah, but there can be an orthodoxy even in the modern dance world that you certainly never seem to have gotten to. I. I've always thought of you as kind of a mad scientist inventor as much as a choreographer. Where does that come from?

I go back to, where do you learn the things you learn from?

And maybe this is a big part of who I am now, but my father and Florence west, my dance teacher in Milwaukee, they both borrowed freely from other fields in order to pursue what they thought was important. And that is a gift. So instead of being narrowed, you can only do this and this. Actually, they were broad in their ideas.

And so I had a lot of little wow. Stories in the back of my head, and not the least of which is my Jewish upbringing that helped me understand how to be a.

Well, the gentle rebel, or what I have come to see is maybe more of a heretic than an actual revolutionary. Amira de la Garza, a woman who teaches decolonial thought here just said, maybe you're more like a heretic.

It's really useful to think about because heretics stay in relationship to the thing they're struggling with.

Yep. It's like abstract to realism. Absolutely.

You're just sticking in there with the problem. You haven't just walked entirely away. And I thought that was a way for me to see it.

Yeah. Not giving up on the question. And you are, in essence, a questioner, you know, an inquiry organism.

You know, one of the things I think about when I ran the California State Summer School for the Arts, and we had a dance department, and most of our students came with the expectation that they were going to get better at dancing. I mean, that was it. And our first class, of course, was choreography. And many of them basically said, whoa, I don't do that. Right.

So my question for you is, even as you switched over from one form of dance to another, this idea of yourself as a maker in addition to being a dancer, where did that come in?

I'll say I was lucky, because my first teacher, Ethel Butler, who had danced with Graham, she let us improvise for about 10 minutes. Not every class, but some classes. And she was quick to tell me that I excelled at that, which was interesting. I heard that early on.

And then Florence West Milwaukee, she had something she called Choreographers Workshop, which she held every other Saturday. I went for two hours, and we would paint and draw and get up and dance around and come back, you know, so these ideas were there.

I didn't think I was going to be one. I'm not even sure I knew precisely what that was even at that age. But I liked the messing around part. So it wasn't entirely distinct.

But at the period in which I'm coming up in the arts, I mean, my. My teacher was a bit of a radical. You wouldn't think to start teaching people young. This is just a sidebar.

But recently I did spend some time with the head of one of our very big ballet companies. I called them up because they had just commissioned a bunch of dude dances, and they'd commissioned only men.

And I wanted to have a discussion about that. And it led to a very serious look at the assumptions that they were holding. And they were all assumptions I'd grown up with.

The girls don't really want to do it. The girls are afraid if they step out, they'll lose their place. The boys take more risk than the girls do. So that was the world I was coming up into.

However, it became clear to Me somewhere in this period of deep unrest, deep trying to understand how to be an artist in the world, because I had all this stuff from my upbringing. You need to make the world a better place. From being Jewish. You need to make the world a better place. From my father.

You need to make a world a better place. It was like the one who was sustaining the idea of artists was my mother. Everybody else is like, no, no. You know, manage this larger picture.

And well, you can't do that unless you have some way to manifest the forms in which you're going to do it. So it didn't hit me when I was studying in college. It hit me more as I began to try to apply what I knew. And making was the thing.

And that took place first. I mean, they're little forages. But the real place where I got to experiment was the Sandy Spring Friends School.

So wait a minute. Your extraordinary career as a choreographer started out in. In a Quaker school with kids. Wow.

I cannot tell you what a lucky person I am. I was looking for a job. I was just finishing up college, my third college. I went to three different colleges. It's a mess.

And saw this ad for a position at a Quaker boarding school. I went out. They wanted a history teacher, but they also wanted a dance program. And I went. Somehow they let me come and interview.

And I walked into the headmaster's office and he didn't say a word because he held the meeting as if he was, well, he's a Quaker. It was a Quaker meeting. That was the job interview. So can you. I mean, it's just such a beautiful thing.

And I sat there, I don't know, about 10 minutes and then thought, well, maybe I should tell him something. I got the job. And basically he said to me, keep our students curious and interested about the world. And so off I went with all my ideas about dance.

Everything I ever wanted to try. Yes. I taught history for one semester. Then it was all dance, all the time. And I taught the boys on the lacrosse field.

I went into the faculty offices and taught people. I put everybody in these big productions.

Everything that you would have seen later in community based practice, I got to do with the Sandy Spring Friends School when I was 21.

That's incredible. I mean, that was the question I was going to ask the bridge.

You know, you talked about making the world a better place, and then you have this contained world with permission to experiment and explore with your ideas. What an incredible gift.

And also at that particular school, the connection to spirit, which is so important to Me. And even though, again, the art world you and I entered, that was like, almost practically a dirty word.

But for me, it was so beautiful to be able to find mechanisms for the expression of that, to do, as I said, do all this experimentation. Hey, I didn't care if we talked and danced and sang and danced or when.

I realized, like, my students were a little nervous of performing their own pieces because they were all showing stuff of their own right away. So we performed under the light of the first full moon. That became a regular thing. I just was so fantastic. Yeah, I am ever grateful.

And also at Sandy Spring Friends School, I think this is one of the ways dance is particularly good in the world, is most dancers understand a relationship to continued education, whether it's just keeping their body fit or whether they just, you know, and teaching and that old saw, well, if you can't do, you'll teach. You know, none of that engagement.

The circular nature of knowledge growing because of who you're in relationship with and who you're trying to help and how they send back to you the signals. I mean, honestly, it was pretty profound.

And it's also where I played a little bit with this intergenerational stuff because we would do these big performances, and I have the students, these are high school kids, but also faculty, families. So I got a little taste of that, which was enough to be a seed for later.

And I left there when I was 23, and my mom died when I was 27, so I had four years for that to grow inside me to the point where I got serious about dancing with older people.

So didn't you have a brief time in New York as well?

So when I left the Sandy Spring Friends School, I understood some deep things from experience, not from theory, not from dreaming. But what I didn't know was whether I needed to fulfill this idea of being a professional dancer.

So I left and went to New York and thought I should test my wares in that city. My nine months in New York, it wasn't affirming because I hated it. I was miserable most of the time.

But it did ultimately affirm the direction my life would take. And that is, I tried to do professional dance as it was defined in those days. And I did not like the system. I didn't like the process.

I didn't like the secrecy. I didn't like the power structure.

There was nothing in the construct of what you would do to become a dancer in New York City that felt in any way relational to the values that I held about dancing. And what I thought art should be. And I, again, I was lucky sequentially that happened because I couldn't have handled all that misery.

That misery plus the misery of my mom's death. I mean, I did it sequentially, but I couldn't have all at once. But I did a lot of saying goodbye in those nine months in New York.

And what's remarkable to me is that I didn't just hang up everything again, just say, oh, I'm giving up on it. But my dad used to say, don't confuse Judaism with the institutions that Jews have made to sustain it. Don't confuse the two. That was very useful.

Yes. Apply that everywhere.

Yes.

Don't confuse it. And I was able. It's almost. What's that song you put it over? Let your light shine.

You know, I was able to nourish this little thing in there because I understood on some level that, oh, yeah, right. This is. These institutions are. I mean, they're powerful, but they're frail. So it was important for me to close all those doors.

Then I went to Washington. I decided, okay, I'm going to go into a master's program.

I'm going to recreate what I did at the Sandy Spring Friends School, but I'm going to do it in a city, and I'm going to see if I can do this. And then my mother got sick. So I had turned an important corner.

It was during her dying process that Liz began to envision a dance that reflected the stories and visions her mother had shared in their regular conversations during this time. The following year, after her mother's passing, Liz choreographed and performed a dance piece in her memory.

While the dance was meant to celebrate her mother's life, for Lerman it also marked the beginning of an extraordinary new life path. The following is an excerpt from my book Art in Other Places.

The woman on the stage is speaking about death. Her death is coming, she says, and she wants it to hurry up.

The audience sits waiting, interested but uneasy and a little impatient because they are here to see a dance. But she's talking, and talking isn't supposed to be a part of a dance concert.

This is unusual enough, but there is something else in addition to the talking that is unsettling. The dancer is young, but she speaks like an old woman. A San Francisco lady, she says.

And even when the monologue ends and she begins to dance on the bare, dimly lit stage, what she is Doing doesn't feel like a performance. It's too real. It is personal and intense and.

And even though the audience sits hidden in the dark, resisting the woman's increasingly anxious dance, they can't, because they are a part of it.

I think about it, not every day, but certainly every week. How something so terrible could be turned into something so amazing.

And some of that, I think, has to do with how, again, how fortunate that I was allowed to. And fought my way into sustaining a creative life. And that if.

If you really believe that you have some agency over the things you're going to do and that you already have some idea that you can translate emotions into something else, or you can translate ideas into something else. And that in my case, the body. But maybe for other people, it's poetry or painting or.

But if you have a sense that this is actually a real thing, it may be experienced ephemerally by others, but it's real. If you have that, you have a chance in this life to do what I was able to do.

The concert continues. It's not nearly so difficult now as when the woman was talking. There has been more dance, more dancers.

And despite the fact that the woman is clearly dying, there has been humor and many good stories.

The woman has been reminiscing, jumping through time, lucid one minute, hazy the next, prompted by visits from family members paying their last respects. There are other visitors, too, characters, actually, with strange names, like Mr. Religion, Ms. Demerol, Aunt Chicken Soup and Lady Page.

All I can say at the beginning of the situation with my mother was that I had visions while she was dying. I'm not sure, Bill, that there was anything yet in my life to tell me to pay attention to those visions.

I think this is one of the first things I try to teach my students, or anybody who's listening to me. Is that for every word that you hear, for every line that you read, for any time you're listening to any.

Your imagination is busy painting pictures for you. And that if you pause and notice, you're actually customizing the information to your own story. And it's all there for you.

You just have to take a look. And most of us experience that as unbidden as I did while my mom was dying. I mean, I didn't. I mean, the visions were. I couldn't avoid them.

It's like I couldn't suppress them. And it's only later that I've been able to understand how to nourish, make a space for them. Try to allow that to continue.

Because it's just so important. And I got those while she was dying.

The dance is coming to an end. The dancers have been superb. The audience has come a long way since the uncomfortable opening moments of the concert.

It feels more like a collaboration than a concert. Now the stage is filling up with even more dancers, and they're singing as well as dancing. The song is California, here I Come.

But wait, there's something unusual about their movements. Some of the dancers, the new dancers, are old and looking very fragile. They are 70 and 80 years old and trying to dance. No, actually dancing.

The woman is dying, her friends are dancing, and there is a celebration going on.

So. And some of it was this idea of all these people she talked a lot about, people she used to know, and they were all just floating in the house.

The house was full of these floating figures in my mind. And that became the power to send me down to find some old people.

I mean, I don't know if I would have had the strength, but at this point, everything else had failed. So that's sometimes what happens.

Yeah, well, I've recognized many times in my life, and then, of course, forgotten it, that the cosmos is actually quite generous, often in the worst possible moments, often with the nourishment, the vitamins that you need to move from one place to another with grace and. And the question is whether you abide it. Our culture isn't particularly supportive of that.

But I know, and this is. It's funny you should say it like that, because actually, this is a more recent story.

One of the laboratories for me over the years was my synagogue in Washington, run by this amazing rabbi, Danny Zemel.

I never expected to have found a home in a synagogue that let me experiment with all kinds of participatory forms, which I did there for some 20 years. But I still go back there for Yom Kippur. The afternoon of Yom Kippur. Every. Everybody dances. There's a whole process.

The congregants help make the dance and all that. It's all done seated, gesturally and all that. But typically, he'll introduce me when it's that part of the afternoon, and then I talk a little bit.

But this time, what went on just before me was the story of Jonah. And Jonah is the one swallowed by the whale. And Danny goes on to see. To talk a little bit about Jonah.

Jonah's running away from God and gets into a whale. And that's when he finally, finally gets God. He said, but you can't escape God.

My rabbi goes so I get up and I said, because I've been working on this for the last year or so, that I feel like my search for creativity is probably like some people's search for God. I mean, it feels similar. So I said that.

And looking at my rabbi, I said to everybody, you can't escape God, but you can't escape your creativity either. You can try. You can say you have two left feet. You can say, I can't draw. You can say, no, I have nothing. I said, you can try, but you can't.

And honestly, that was like an amazing little moment for me and for my rabbi. He jumped, right? He was jumping up and down. He was so happy. But I mean, it's like you just said, it's actually. The cosmos is generous.

It's all around us. And part. I just feel a lot of my teaching is helping people, like, become liberated. Just accept what's theirs.

Accept the gift. Yeah. The hard gift and the beautiful gift. Part four, the horizontal. So one of my questions, is there a story that really says, hey, this is.

This is what I'm up to? This is something I'm proud of and that taught me as much as I gave.

Well, I'll tell you something, Bill. It's really this idea of the horizontal that I just. I really don't understand how people can live without it.

When I first heard about this, you described it as a gesture to me and 750 other people in a big auditorium. And you literally had people move their arms up and down in a vertical.

And you talked about how much of what we experience in the world is organized in this way that forces us into false up, down dichotomies defined by winning and losing in scarcity.

And then you just moved your arm from one side to the other on the horizontal and said, hey, think about a continuum of rather than a hierarchy, and maybe this is a more productive place to play.

It's hard to understand. It's really hard to actually comprehend. It's not that everything is equal and it's not like that.

But what the horizontal does is it allows you to absolutely sustain multiple ideas. Let's say we're talking about leadership. It's not about not making decisions. You make decisions, decisions every second.

But sometimes the decision is based on, I need to be the leader in this room right now. I need to take over. I have to do this thing right now.

And at other times, it means I can commit to an entire collective and consensus, and why would I choose one of those over the other as the only way to Be in the world. So it's like a consistent practice of giving people that context affects the decisions that you.

I can use words and I can describe it, but our bodies actually can manage it way better than our rational logic can. And so having experienced a lot of that, I think in a sort of a physical form helps me to sustain it too.

It seems so obvious, but it's hard to understand. When you actually live your life, you are putting things back in vertical. Every single second it requires, requires such an effort. And I like.

I mean, one of the things I point out consistently now is that if you are in the vertical and you want to make a distinction, the only way you can do it is to put something down or shame it or. And this is what sustains the vertical.

Because then if you've ever been shamed, you're going to make sure you're never shamed again and you're going to put yourself back up on top. You just. Whereas if you live in the horizontal, you can make distinctions without rancor. And of course you're making distinctions.

I mean, even take something like the idea of collaboration. So when we were coming up, of course, individual was everything. Well, right now there's so much pressure for collaboration.

I've got a bunch of students who think that if they do something on their own, they're being selfish. This is an example of that. They just flipped it. Now, it took 10 years to flip it, but they flipped it.

That honestly, you can't do collaboration well if you don't have a voice. And then, yes, you want to be able to be part of group. So it's consistent over and over again.

And so, I mean, maybe the pull is always towards, oh, history is a new idea. Let's all go figure out how to collaborate. I think that's important. But we just have to sustain the breadth of the horizon. So for me, it continues.

I would like to not have to talk about it anymore because I like this new idea I'm working on, but it just keeps coming up so much so even I think, for example, around. I think the racial reckoning is a really interesting place where we are seeing that it necessarily has to shift. The power has to entirely shift.

Will it shift all the way to a different vertical? It might, until we can come back around to something that's more horizontal. I don't know, because we have so much repairing to do.

But it's very interesting.

As you know, I've spent a lot of time in institutions, correctional institutions, cultural institutions, and you know, naturally, when most people look at places like these, they identify the institutional hierarchy as the devil. The hierarchy and the people on top, which it certainly can be.

But my experience is that the muscle memory in those institutions, the inertia of the way things have always been, is often way more powerful than any individual with good or bad intentions that passes through it. And sometimes I see institutions not wanting to be that way, really struggling with even incremental change. And it's really hard.

Good intentions and strategic bullet points just don't cut it. The way I think of it is that some institutions are like polymer elastic material.

When you add a certain amount of heat stress, they just snap back into their original form, that safe place that they know best. But if you add too much stress, too much heat, they just melt, which in some cases might be a good thing.

Well, this. Bill, it's funny you should say this, because this is where I'm heading with this newer idea. And it started when I did the project around physics.

It's the Heisenberg, which everybody talked of, Heisenberg uncertainty, which I've defined as if you measure the shape, you lose the velocity. If you go after the velocity, you can't see the shape. And I think this is really interesting because you really need both.

You have to be able to do both. Most things can't. In fact, most dancers can't. Most dancers are shape dancers or momentum dancers. There are very few who can do both.

But institutions are shaped and they want to change their shape. They can't. It's all interlocking shapes. So you have to dissolve the molecules.

You've got to dissolve back into where you have momentum, which can be terrifying to an institution. It doesn't know if it's going to know its shape again. But you have to like a curriculum. You have to let it go.

I don't think the ingredients actually change that much. I mean, the stuff is all there. And then you let the new shape take its form. That's going to be more ready for the time we're in.

And you want a flexibility between shape and momentum. And I think institutions have a terrible time with this. So that's my new advocacy.

And what I'm looking at is the nature of how do you help people not lose their entire self when they lose their shape?

Well, I've certainly seen this in many of the institutions I've worked with. How have you seen this play out in the real world?

You know, when I left the Dance Exchange, one of the things that we said to people is that everybody would have a job When I left, they just might not be in the job they had.

And that's an example of an institution changing its shape, supporting the ingredients, but saying, wait a minute, this is an amazing opportunity with Liz leaving for us to reconceive of so many things. But you have to be. You had to have some kind of guarantee in there.

You know, it reminds me of Wicked Bodies, this new work of yours that explores the social and institutional shapes or systems that made the witch trials and witch persecution possible. I think at the end of the day, what we're talking about is fear.

Hierarchies are basically created to provide maximum safety for people with maximum power and the opposite for everybody else.

I've been able to watch how that works in places that are designed to intimidate and cast fear as an institutional imperative, as a mission imperative, to maintain systemic shapes that maximize control. Places like prisons, you know, some adjudicated youth programs, certainly in police states like Serbia and Cambodia.

But it's amazing to me when I move over into a place like a mental health facility, a senior program, or educational institutions and see similar strategies taking place, just with softer edges. You know, the words are different, but the whole idea of protecting status, not taking risks, all those things are still in play.

So I have a question.

As long as I've known you, you've been applying your creative process to explore how and why things are the way they are and examine the potential for change. So is this something that you think about in terms of power, how to change the balance of power?

Well, I guess I want to say one thing about status, and then I'll try to talk about power, although I'm less good at talking about power. But early on in my work with seniors, I spent all time the at least 10 years in senior centers and nursing homes trying to figure things out.

Like, you were over there in the prisons. I was over there.

And I came away thinking that the biggest obstacle to change in these institutions was wealth and status, and that with wealth, people just bought their experience. They didn't want to have experience. So the wealthier the nursing home, the more drugged they were. I mean, it was just totally evident.

But this idea of status, I mean, second grade classrooms have people with status. So status, I think, is an under, recognized under, looked at, fluid motion through almost everything we're doing.

And honestly, I think this is a part of Trump is his capacity to play on the relationship between power and status that he does so, so well, along with cruelty and brutality and all the rest of it. My answer to you about Power is going to be unsatisfactory.

What I feel I've done, and maybe it's the heretic speaking, is that I feel like I've evolved all kinds of systems that allow a person to live more healthily, more fully, more respectfully in a power structure in which they don't have the power. So I think, and I sometimes assign this to my gender and to my field. I mean dance, ephemeral, female, all the issues that come with that. Nomad.

I never stayed anywhere super, super long. Well, I stayed with the dance exchange a long time, but nomadic.

But I feel critical response, for example, the critical response process is absolutely a way of living in a world where you don't have power, but you can assert yourself in all kinds of ways if you understand how to use that process. More recently here at the university, I was brought in in a fairly high level position.

But it became clear to me that unless I was willing to engage in the power wars, which I'm not at the university level, it's not worth it. And you get justice beat up, so why do it? Drop back down into my underground world and I'm happy.

I'm doing all kinds of things that I hope have value. And I think I'm affecting my students and some of my colleagues, so I don't engage in it at a certain level.

On the other hand, I have been enough of a heretic that in my writings and in my philosophies and in my constant chatter at people, it's like I'm a constant hammer, but the hammer is really small.

Because actually, Bill, I was thinking, even when you come comes down to aesthetics, I'm a person who was partly accepted into the higher echelons of my field and also rejected continually. So I think if you really, truly want to embrace what I've been talking about and what I've been doing and living by, you have to change.

And I don't think many people actually want, I mean, I don't think the institutions want to change, so they'll. It's there. As I say, this is an unsatisfactory answer about power.

Quite the contrary.

I actually think you're part of a growing movement of folks who understand that power is a persistent social dynamic that is often toxic, but doesn't have to be. I think critical response and the horizontal reconfigure power in ways that center respect and equity and accountability.

Anand Giridharadas has a new book called the Persuaders.

In it he tells the story of an activist communication guru named Anat Shankar Osoria, who's been working to change the way progressives advocate and communicate their issues.

She believes strongly that if you try to fight a vertical power structure on their terms, on the vertical battlefield, you know, by shouting, we're not baby killers, we're not communists, you're losing the battle. Because they control the language, the terms of engagement, and the definitions of success. So here's my way of thinking about it.

I use the image of the devil a lot because it's such an evocative thing. And if there is a devil out there in the world, he lives in the vertical realm of absolutes, good and evil. I win, you lose.

But on the horizontal, it's a different story.

If you plot this on the horizontal, you have the power of fear on the one end and the power of desire on the other, but the power of freedom is in the middle. This is because freedom is not the absence of fear and desire. I mean, they're not going away.

Freedom is knowing their power and putting them in their place.

So once you come to grips with the fact that these forces are always going to be a major factor in change work, then what we call the power struggle doesn't have to turn into a tug of war. It can be about redefining power and how it shows up.

And I think your work is a journey that many people are taking together to investigate and redefine the assumptions that often hold sway so much of the time, like patriarchy and commodified beauty and the stigma growing old. The powers that you bring to the party are the wisdom of the collective, the imagination and human creativity.

You're actually defanging the devil and basically saying, hey, you know, it's a given, right? Come on, let's deal with this.

The better angels that folks have been talking about for a long, long time, they're there and they're available and they're powerful.

Thank you. Yeah.

Which reminds me, we've been talking about critical response as though everybody out there knows it. For those who don't, could you describe it?

Yeah.

Well, I'll just say the critical response process is in its formal form, a four step process for giving and receiving feedback that makes you want to go back to work. The maker is central, but another way I like to say it is it's a four step process.

You practice the steps, but like dance, you practice the steps, but dancing is not about the same steps. It's the same in critical response.

You practice the steps, but critical response is not about the steps, it's about the values that each of the steps hold. But those values are difficult to keep during life.

So you set aside a time, some people call it a ceremony, and you take time to practice, practice how to do this.

If we could actually go there for our listeners, it might be helpful.

So let's imagine that my performance of the Deep Sea Welders Boogie has just finished, and my creative partners are gathered backstage to share their impressions. God, I'm already feeling nervous about it.

But with critical response, rather than a free for all critique which often ensues, we're going to have those four steps that Liz referenced, which have the potential to change the dynamics here from a fearful encounter to a supportive give and take. So here's what happens.

In the first step, my colleagues get to share what they thought was meaningful or interesting or exciting about what they just saw. And the second, I get to ask them questions about what they experienced and what they thought about the work.

In the third, my friends can ask neutral questions about the work.

And the goal here with neutral is to ask questions that do not have embedded opinions, such as, hey, why did you have that awful cha cha scene with the aqualung and the camel? You know?

Then in the final stage, folks do get to offer very specific opinions that they'd like to share, but I get to decide whether or not I want to hear them. So that's how it unfolds.

Yeah. Well.

And it turns out now, Bill, after all these years, that as much as I thought critical response was about the maker, if you practice it for people who are interested, I think of it now as a de escalation technique for the speed with which your opinions arise and how you may want to question your own opinions and your own assumptions. And here's a way to do that. It turns out it's consent driven. I mean, we didn't talk about consent when critical response started out.

And yet that fourth step I have an opinion about. Do you want to hear it? Is it's consent driven. So there are things that are inherent in it that I don't think I understood it all when I made it.

And thankfully, there's a whole community of practitioners who continue to practice, practice and push it into its variations and its lots of ways that it's being used. So it's exciting to see what's happened to it.

You know, there was a Congolese drummer, dancer, Malunga Kaskalord, who worked with us at San Quentin. He was. He was just amazing. He's got a cultural center named after him in Oakland.

Anyway, he introduced his Incarcerated students to what I think of as an indigenous version of the critical response process in a workshop which ended up becoming a neutral zone where gang leaders allowed themselves to be in the same space. It was all pretty organic. Nobody organized it that way, but it was very critical response. Like it had similar stages, but it was a drum based ritual.

So the questions and the permissions had the same kind of give and take. And after everybody learned it, he shared that it was actually a dispute resolution process from his ancestry.

The idea was to give people a chance to say their piece in a safe space to vent, you know, question back and forth and give people agency in the process so that all those vertical conflict producing muscle memory things are less likely to occur. You know, you don't have to push and you don't have to be right every time. And hey, people respected him.

And it was one of the only peaceful places in the joint.

Well, a number of people have spoken about the overlap of the values within Critical Response to various indigenous systems.

And the last chapter in the book that just came out, written by Cristobal Martinez, is both a challenge to Critical Response, but also comparing it in some ways to Lana's, which is something that he does in his community. But I think where I see, when I see critique at work, that is the worst kind. It's usually associated with power and authority.

And whether you're talking about faculty at universities or bosses, the thing I'm working on right now with people is people say be brutally honest, but actually brutally honest is not brutally honest. It's brutal power, because the person can shoot from the hip and say whatever they want whenever they want. Fine. The secretary does it, she's fine.

So no, it's not honesty, it's power. And again, critical Response is full of nuances of how you can address that and remain humane, which is to me really important.

It is. And what a gift the critical response practice is to both the feedback giver and the recipient.

Nobody wins when what is supposed to be an opportunity for learning and improving ends up being destructive.

I also think that critical response process and Liz's concept of the horizontal both give practical form to a principle we've encountered throughout this series. Artists do not build community by surrendering their skills.

They do it by placing those skills in relationship with the knowledge, experience and creative authority of others. In the final episode of this four part journey, Liz applies that thinking to wicked bodies.

Her exploration of witches power and the forces that determine which bodies and which forms of knowledge are celebrated, erased or criminalized.

We'll also hear about cultural humility, aesthetic equity, and what it means to challenge a hierarchy without simply replacing it with with another one. So that's coming up next week. Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our soundscape and theme are a miraculous manifestation of the extraordinary musical imagination of Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe.

Our special effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration, as always, comes from the mystery, mysterious and ever present spirit of UK235. If you like what you hear here, please subscribe, share and drop us a line. Until next time. Stay well, do good and spread the good word.