An outside artist does not become effective by knowing everything about a place.

Effectiveness begins with recognizing how much they do not know.

That idea has followed us from our Building Blocks episode on outside artists, through Eric Gottesman’s journey from photographer to collaborator, and into the first part of our conversation with Liz Lerman. Liz calls us toward a more horizontal practice—one in which expertise matters, but does not automatically confer authority.

In Part Two, that principle becomes even more urgent. Through her work Wicked Bodies, Liz asks why some knowledge is honored, some erased, and some declared dangerous. She explores witches, cultural humility, aesthetic equity, and the hidden systems that decide whose stories and bodies belong.

In this episode, we will learn about:

• Wicked Bodies — and what witches reveal about power, fear, and whose knowledge counts.
• Cultural humility and aesthetic equity — practices for entering communities without assuming authority.
• No singular stories — why meaningful work is built through shared inquiry, relationship, and consent.

Listen for what these ideas reveal about entering another community—not as its interpreter or savior, but as a curious, accountable partner.

Hey there. So what can witches teach us about effective community art making?

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.

I think most people recognize that outside community artists do not assure success just by learning everything they can about the place they are working. In fact, their effectiveness may depend more on their recognizing how much they do not know.

That idea has followed us from our Building Blocks episode on Outside Artists through through Eric Goetzman's journey from photographer to collaborator, and into the first part of our conversation with dance pioneer Liz Lehrman. Liz calls us toward a more horizontal practice, one in which expertise matters but does not automatically confer authority.

Now, in the final episode of our series examining the roles outside artists can play in community advancement, that principle becomes even more urgent. Through her work, Wicked Bodies, Liz asks why some knowledge is honored, some erased, and some declared dangerous.

Through this work, she explores witches, cultural humility, aesthetic equity, and the hidden systems that decide whose stories and bodies belong.

Listen for what these ideas reveal about entering another community not as its interpreter, but or savior, but as a curious, accountable partner across time.

We know that every culture has its witches, and we know that they well, we are powerful healers, midwives, and connected to the natural forces of the universe. But some also call us lethal and dangerous.

With Wicked Bodies, I've collaborated with a cast of intergenerational performers to make a work that welcomes audiences back to the theater. This is not just a dance piece. There's storytelling and video and incredible music and sound with intimacy and spectacle. Come join the witches.

Everybody needs protecting. Every witch has a story.

In our last episode, Liz Luhrmann shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer, teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic.

She also talked about hiking the horizontal, the critical response process, challenging the canon, the Heisenberg uncertainty, and how dance can help make the world a better place.

In this episode we'll hear about Wicked Bodies, her latest work exploring the ugly, the beautiful and the sublime embedded in the age old story of witches.

Part 4. Which witch are you?

So Liz, I spent a good portion of the last few days immersed in Wicked Bodies.

It's conception and evolution over the last few years.

And I have to say what you have here is a powerful way to interrogate the structure of authority and the impulse to criminal difference and things that are hard to understand and not just in authoritarian dictatorship.

So could you just tell the story of this journey and how you came to this idea of wicked bodies that has manifested as a work most recently on the stage of the Yerba Buena Cultural center in San Francisco.

You know, one of the theories that moved me was why is some knowledge erased, some knowledge celebrated, and some knowledge criminalized?

And I'll just say that that act of criminalizing knowledge is again, part of the vertical world, that if you really practice living on the horizontal, you can make distinctions. You don't have to make that person a criminal for thinking what they thought.

But another thing I like to point out is when Christine Blasey Ford spoke at the Kavanaugh hearings at noon, she was a hero, but by the end of the day, she was a witch. I mean, it didn't take but four hours for that to happen.

When I came forward last September, I did not feel courageous. I was simply doing my duty as a citizen.

I was not prepared for the venom, the persistent attacks, and the collateral damage to my friends and my family. I was not prepared to be physically threatened or to be forced out of our home for over three months.

And if anybody's curious about it, just watch and you'll see the speed and what Kavanaugh and his people did in order to make that turn so fast is interesting. In my case, I'll just quickly say.

I was in Scotland. I was actually teaching Critical Response. I had an afternoon off. I went to the museum in Edinburgh.

An exhibit was up called Wicked Bodies, Witches and something else. It was 500 years of drawings. And I like to say when I went in, I was not that interested in witches. Interested in women, yes. Bodies, yes.

Older bodies, yes, all that, but not witches. But when I came out, I was like.

I was inflamed, furious, crying, that you cannot imagine the accumulation of these drawings, and most of them by men, and many of them by men of the church, mostly from a Western perspective. It wasn't shamanistic, although I got into that with my research.

But I went and found the woman who put it together, a woman named Deanna Petherbridge. And we had quite an interesting talk that the.

Her exhibit was moving on to the British Museum, where they had already told her she could not use the word misogyny. I mean, so, I mean, like, you just what? You know, and.

And to some extent, Bill, I even have my own question as to how much this piece will tour in part around terms of misogyny and. Or people's ideas about witches. But what turned out for me to be interesting in this Was, among many things, is that.

And I looked into all the history, and every culture has its witches. Every timeframe has its witches. Are they celebrated, erased, or criminalized? It depends. Often criminalized. Often. So what was that?

And initially I decided we would only do one story about the worst of it, which we end up using. James the first, the man who translated the Bible, who also was responsible for the death of many witches. There could have been any number of people.

I picked him just because in rehearsal one day I had said, how can one person cause so much havoc? And then I realized this is two years into Trump. And I thought, oh, of course. This is how this happens. So that's why I picked James.

Although there could have been many people that we could have picked, but because of the pandemic, it took us even longer. So we moved among things over a period of five to six years trying to figure this out.

And the thing that I feel I learned is that I desperately did not want to portray the witches as victims.

And therefore, I had to work through so much of my own feelings about the nature of, say, being a victim as a woman, so much of what we were going through with racial reckoning and how her horrific. This has been the long history. How do we contend with all this? All of us in the piece had to do this, too. We all had to work through this.

We needed all that time. So now, if you come see it, well, there's just so much going on.

One of the questions I asked was, well, how can the witches help you come back after the pandemic? So. And I decided that people wanted intimacy and spectacle.

Both fascinating. So both intimacy and spectacle. How does that play out in the piece?

So the first 20 minutes of the piece, you come into the theater and the witches are all there, and you're in little pods, and you get to tell stories, and everybody's, what witch are you? And then there's some.

All of a sudden, the dancing happens all around you, and then eventually it turns into the spectacle of a pretty formal concert with lots of video and stuff. But it was really fun to work on that part. It's just. I really think it changes entirely what it feels like.

Like to be in the theater, even a big theater like YBCA and Gammage here, you really can change it with it. I mean, it's just such a buzz for the first 20 minutes. Everybody wants to talk to the witches.

Amazing. So why do you think that is?

Well, I think probably, like we said earlier, everybody has a birthright of creativity.

I think probably Everybody has a birthright of what is beautiful, about magic, about spells and bending the world towards something that you believe in, towards the idea of a coven where you're close to people, where you. You're close to animals, you have a right relationship to the planet. I mean, there's so many wonderful things. You understand the stars.

You know, who doesn't want to be. To be in that world?

And, you know, by the time the piece ends, I think the audience feels like they are in that world because the whole second act, each of the. Each person in the piece is the witch of something, the witch of blackness, the witch of revenge, the witch of in between, the witch.

And we've determined what the story is now is that every 500 years, the witches of the world get together and choose our next narrator. And 500 years ago, it was a white guy. Kepler saved his mom from being killed. She was a witch. And New Shakespeare, all that.

But he's clearly out of step and. Which is played delightfully by. By Will Bond. And the witches bring forward not just who they are as people, but what the.

What would it be like if the narrative of our life was. It's not just trauma that travels through generations, it's also love. I mean, how would it be different if that was our national narrative? And then.

Well, to me, there's a real sense of hope at the end, but it's really flimsy. But it's totally believable, and only the witches could do it. And maybe that's the best invention of.

This is, to me, a tangible, maybe whimsical, but flimsy form of hope. And there's no reason why we can't have that. Despite it all.

I love that idea. Hope. You know, it's like so many things in our commodified world that have been materialized. But, you know, hope is not a destination.

It's a state of mind that only has momentum when it's fed by tangible outcomes. It's the yeast of change.

I think pretty much all forward progress has a yeast component which is both hardy and vulnerable and has to be fed, you know, and has to produce both real bread and the mother. More yeast for the next loaf and the next loaf. You know, we live in a world that says, okay, job done, close the curtain, close the oven.

But it's not job done, is it?

You get to rest, you can reflect, you can celebrate, but the job is not done that there's always a next chapter that contains the next hard and hopeful yeasty question. I'm the kind of person that says, oh, no, job's not done. I mean, what the heck would I do with myself if that were the case?

I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that. As we both turn another year.

Bill.

Part five. No singular stories. So I have a couple of one liners that I want to throw at you. The first is aesthetic equity. Can you say something about that?

Well, it's really critical. The easiest way I explain it is we could be a dance department at asu that is a modern and ballet dance department that makes room for hip hop.

That would not be aesthetic equity. Or we could have aesthetic equity in which actually hip hop, breaking, Afro, Latin forms, modern dance, if we decide to sustain it, would be equal.

This means now we're on the horizontal again. We are definitely on the horizontal. And now everything has to change. The floors, the history classes.

Everything has to change in order to make that a truth. So aesthetic equity is a way of upending the canon from being vertical to being horizontal.

And like I like to say about the canon, canon is not just what's produced the canon is all the decisions that get made to sustain those decisions. And what happens if you fight the cannon? Well, those decision making practices are defined as professional. This is how to be professional.

Well, if you fight them, you're unprofessional. No, no. Aesthetic equity changes all that.

So another thing you talk about that I think is related is cultural humility as opposed to cultural competence. Could you say something about that?

This is my beautiful friend Shuman. Amandala is the person who brought this to my attention. I think it is a beautiful way for. I'll speak for myself.

For a white Jewish woman born in the middle of the last century to enter my relationships with my students who come from other cultures, with my neighbors, my colleagues, I wish I knew all that I could know about their histories, but I don't. And so. And I can study, but that won't make me know it.

So humility seems to me a space where settle back, be gentle, be curious, assume you're not the only person in the world, and that not knowing is the best way to be something like that.

Which leads to another quote from you. I can't find the story unless we find it together.

Yeah.

Which can sound like a pretty simple thing, but I know is the hardest part of the work.

When they turned hiking horizontal into an audiobook, I got to go to a studio and read it. And, well, I cried a lot. These beautiful young engineers, Latinx engineers, they all. They just kept saying, we got your back, Liz. It's okay.

Just bursting into tears.

Here is a small excerpt from Liz's recording of that wonderful book, Hiking the Horizontal.

This book is a personal history of ideas and actions that emerged from making dances. It is also a description of the Dance Exchange, a place I think of as a think tank and action lab.

I wanted people to understand that art is powerful, that dance can make a difference.

I wanted to document ways of seeing and being that have the power to change the environments we live and work in and the encounters that we have with each other. The phrase hiking the horizontal is the most recent and encompassing terminology to express the underlying philosophy of my work.

Before I found the words hiking the horizontal was a physical gesture. It took me a very long time to understand the full implications of what was so simply accomplished with my hands.

But the movement came first as a way of explaining why I wanted to live in a non hierarchical world. Imagine for a moment a long upright line that runs from top to bottom.

At the top is art so separate from the rest of culture that its greatness is measured in part by its uselessness. Other characteristics arguably include emphasis on personal expression, crafting, aesthetics, and a commitment to purity of form.

At the bottom is art so embedded in its culture that no one thinks. To call it art.

Here reside sacred rituals, healing ceremonies, objects made beautiful by their functions, people meeting and moving through the stories and needs of the calendar of festivals. Or your perspective might lead you to put culturally embedded art at the top and arts for its own sake at the bottom.

Either way, the forms of art are ranked from top to bottom according to a system of values. This is the kind of hierarchy of ideas that I grew up with and that continues to prevail in many worlds.

Now imagine turning this line sideways to lay it horizontal. That way each of these poles exerts an equal pull and has an equal weight.

Of course, the line is not completely flat, and the poles are often not equally heavy. It's more like a seesaw. And that is why dancing and art making provide sustenance for the hike ahead.

If we are lucky enough, we can actually take the long highway between the sometimes opposing forces.

But partly what would happen in that book is I would read a sentence like, okay, at the end. We had a week's residency, then we had a gathering and people shared stories. Okay, there's probably a million hours that went into all that.

What is it that makes people feel like they can gather? Why would they come together? What story would they choose to tell? Why would they sit in a circle? Is this the story they always tell?

Are they willing to tell a story that they did until before? Why would we share these stories? In what form is it going to take? Oh, wait, we only have 30 minutes. We can't tell everybody's stories.

We're going to have to not tell everybody's stories. Now what happens? Oh, can I reframe your story? Oh, actually, I can't. May I? No, go home, check with your family. Is this okay with them?

That it's all right, that this story is being told? It's like that and much more. But that particular quote comes really from Wicked Bodies, which is.

It became evident to me that in order for us to tell this story, each of the people committed to this five year long process was going to have to figure out which they were and where were they in the story and then how these all went together. And it was interesting, Bill, because again, it's not singular. It may be a single story, but it's not singular.

No, it's not. And there are always story strands that go way back.

And most folk, I think, understand at some level in those vulnerable moments when they give themselves permission to tell meaningful, untold, intimate stories that they need to get with their family, their community, their ancestors, suss out whether it's okay to.

Share and what happens when people go home and ask.

We did a project in Japan and I was interested in these charm belts from World War II called the Sensembara, where each belt had a thousand stitches and each stitch was made by another woman who. So I arrived to Japan with this idea and I walked into an intergenerational group of people we were going to work together, all Hell brokers.

They got so mad at me. The young ones were furious. They hated sense of. And the old ones were embarrassed because, well, they were embarrassed.

So anyway, I said, well, okay, before we change ideas, go home and talk to your families about it. Let's find out what this means to everybody. Well, whoa.

The stories that came back, turns out that the women knew this was crazy, that they pricked themselves with blood, that they put their pubic hair in it, that they, I mean, all kinds of things that nobody knew. They were still mad at me.

And there was still a section in the dance where they yelled at an American who thought that she could come over and tell them what to do. So that that didn't change. But the notion of what these things were, it was really powerful. That's where I came up with it.

Act one was protect us as we keep the original meaning of things. And act two was protect us as we change the original meaning of things.

That's a change theory. Those benedictions are the guardrails. It's not the only work. But you have to have those guardrails or you're not getting to Act 3 at all.

I really get that. And you know what, Liz?

One of the most frustrating things to me in situations like this is I feel like humans get way out over their skis when they try to use their brains alone to solve problems. Like those women in Japan. Every vexing question, every problem is stitched into a complex system of cause, effect, every solution too.

Solutions rise up from the whole culture, you know, whole body, whole humble sense of being part of an interdependent world. Right. So two more questions. First, what's sparking you right now? What are you really excited about?

Oh, well, mostly everything.

I know that's a funny answer, but I mean, I'm just so curious about what's going on around me, what my students are up to and what my daughter's up to and what I'm going to do next. There are a couple projects that I'm approaching, will see if they come into being.

There's one I've been working on for a long time that you're aware of, the Atlas of Creative Tools and what form that ultimately takes.

Now, the Atlas of Creative Tools is a work in progress, right? There's a toolbox online that people can go to, but you want to take it further.

You know, my obsession with tools and trying to create different mechanisms by which people can access creative tools which I think can be used anywhere.

It's envisioned as a digital commons to hold all these things that you and I have been talking about just now in the form of action related things that people can do, but also mini lectures and all kinds of things that people can take along with them and also add their own to it. And I haven't been able to convince anybody to actually fund that at some level that you know. So we'll see where that goes.

What else is out there?

Well, this the thing I'm doing with a group of older choreographers we're calling Legacy Unboxed.

And we're just looking at the wildness of being this age and all the wild ways we want to be in the world and what we want to do about that and how we want to handle that.

And that might relate to some questions of the Library of Congress and how the Library holds its dance and theater stuff, which it holds in recreation. I mean, you can't find it. And it speaks to what you were just talking about.

It speaks to an overly rational place that doesn't have any clue how to not only hold these things, but how to help people find them. And we may get involved in that. And if we do, I feel really excited for the very reason you said.

When is the world gonna like just wake up and realize we have a lot of these knowledge systems that could help?

Yeah, absolutely. So what are three creative encounters you've had recently that have rocked your boat, that have been meaningful to you? Books, movies, theater?

Well, I was inspired by the movie she said, by the persistence, clarity and the takedown that eventually occurred. It's a really good movie. I am listening to the Audible book, Barbara Kingsolver's Demon, Copperhead. It's incredible.

She holds a mirror up to some things that are just really hard to listen to and see and the pictures in your mind. It's really good. And I continued to collaborate with my daughter on some of the things that she's making.

The Amazing Anna is a documentary filmmaker and journalist.

She lives in Turkey with her partner who works for UNESCO and she works for Univision and she made a little five minute thing for the exhibit at YBCA that is like a dream. It's actually relates to some of what we've been talking about, fear, about shape and momentum.

But she used all these old pieces of footage from other dances together as if you lie down on the couch and it's pretty nice. She's working on a long form film about a young woman who was four when she came into herself and needed to transition to become Maddie.

And Ann has been with the families for quite 10 years, but she's going to stay with the family until Maddie's 18. And it's an amazing story of a North Carolina family with where mother decided to become a lawyer in order to help support this girl's decision.

And it's pretty amazing. So stay tuned for that one.

Wow. It sounds like a long haul effort, like her mom's work, like Wicked Bodies.

And Liz, so much of what you've been doing ongoing and interconnected to one big story, art and life. It's been a treat and a privilege to catch glimpses of that story and this conversation. Thanks so much Liz.

It's so good to see you. Really great.

Absolutely.

All right, David.

Bye bye bye and Bye bye. And thanks to our listeners.

And a reminder, please check out our collections of past episodes that have been organized by subject and arts discipline and other ways on our website at www.artandcommunity.com. Under the podcast Dropdown, Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our theme and soundscape blossom up regularly from the brilliant musical Garden Tended by Judy Munson, our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration rises up from the ever present spirit of OOP235. Until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. And one last note, this episode has been 100% human.