Liz Lerman (born 1947) is an American dance choreographer, the founder of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, and the creator of the Critical Response Process.

Early life

Liz Lerman was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 25, 1947. At the age of 14, Lerman danced in Washington, DC, for President Kennedy as part of a group from the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. She attended Bennington College, where she studied under Martha Wittman, who would later become a company member of Dance Exchange. Lerman graduated with a B.A. in Dance from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in Dance from George Washington University.

Career

She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led its multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when she was succeeded by Cassie Meador. The company is now known as Dance Exchange. Under Lerman's leadership, Dance Exchange performed across the U.S. at venues such as National Cathedral, Kennedy Center Opera House, Millennium Stage, Lansburgh Theatre, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Harvard University, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Lerman's early work focused on including older dancers alongside young performers and using personal narrative. Her later work has focused on questions of science from genomics, high-energy physics, and the physical and psychic wounds of war. She and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers. In January 2016, Lerman joined the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona as Institute Professor to lead programs and courses that span disciplines across ASU. Lerman was named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.

Tools

Lerman uses the word "tools" to refer to a piece of information that is detached from other concepts through her artistic process and can be applied to many situations. These include “Rattle around in someone else’s universe,” “Turn discomfort into inquiry,” and “Nothing is too small to notice.”

Critical Response Process

In 1990, Lerman created the Critical Response Process (CRP) in 1990, a method for giving and receiving feedback. She created the process when she realised that artists tended to apologize rather than ask questions when presenting unfinished work. The concept was published in her book "Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert" which Lerman co-authored with John Borstel. CRP is used by international institutional hosts including the Innovative Conservatoire, the Federation of Scottish Theatres, the London Sinfonietta, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Yorkshire Dance in addition to US hosts including the Yale School of Drama and the Tisch School for the Arts. CRP facilitator-cohorts are in development in Scotland and in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2014, Yorkshire Dance developed a beta-version of an online adaptation of CRP called "respond." Lerman’s second book on CRP, called “Critique is Creative,” also co-authored with John Borstel was published in 2022 by the Wesleyan University Press. This book includes essays by CRP practitioners from around the world.

Awards

Publications