Liz Lerman: I am not fragmented

Liz Lerman posted on the Dance Exchange blog while attend a recent conference. An excerpt:

“Introductions at the Symbiotic Art and Science meeting took an interesting turn as one person after another acknowledged their split personality or hybrid research tactics. I found myself remembering my own mantra as a young choreographer moving from a residency at Children’s Hospital in Washington DC, to a rehearsal of the company, to teaching at a local university, and saying to myself, “I am not fragmented. It is just that the world is so compartmentalized that in order for me to be whole, I have to cross many borders.” I have continued that journey and now describe those borders as membranes. For example, we can respect the creative act of making distinctions knowing at the same time that there are real differences between art and science even as we seek and discover with delight their common properties.

This meeting convened by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation was conceived by Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, the president of Marlboro College and a longtime advocate for the power of art on its own terms and in relationship to contemporary issues, and by her longtime friend and colleague Chris Come, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Montana who runs a summer program in Ireland called “Brain, Mind, and the Artistic Imagination.” Everyone seated around the table seems to be immersed in a variety of projects that bring together very curious forms of experimentation in which the arc of observation-research-testing-sharing-questioning cycles around and around…”

Click here to read the entire post.

Image in this post of the Lerman company performing A Matter of Origins, photo by John Borstel, from the Dance Exchange website.