Liz Lerman, Still Keeping The Audience On Its Toes

There's a full orchestra onstage at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, driving toward the finale of John Adams's soaring "The Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra." And who should come sashaying through the string section but a curvaceous dancer from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Dressed in a clingy pink gown, she's having a grand time kicking up her legs and swishing her hips as she winds around the busy violinists to get to -- no, not the conductor! But there she goes, slinky as a cat, pouncing onto the podium, where, rubbing up against the maestro (you can almost hear her purr), she grabs his baton just as the final notes sound.

Raising it like a scepter, the dancer aims the baton at something unseen far above the brass section. With reverential obedience, the musicians' bows and drumsticks follow, lifted in a silent, stirring salute to the power of gesture.

This was the eloquent ending to "Man/Chair Dances," Lerman's newest work, which kicked off her 30th anniversary program Thursday night. The evening was a mixed bag, with one misfire ("Small Dances About Big Ideas," reworked from its premiere last year but still somewhat murky). But "Man/Chair Dances" embodied what is best about Lerman's groundbreaking work.

Performed in the Smith Center's Dekelboum Concert Hall, the piece was full of wit and surprises, as six dancers darted through the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra, progressing from small, restrained solos on chairs to well-behaved duets to far wilder group formations. Somehow, they managed to avoid mishaps with the musicians. In this context, the good-natured conductor, James Ross, could be considered one of the dancers as well, performing his own energetic solo.

And that is exactly what Lerman is after, what has been driving her since she formed her troupe here in 1976: to get people to see dance -- art -- in unexpected places. Infiltrating orchestras is only her latest move in a career that has brought her national renown, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 2002.

Many of the revolutionary ideas that Lerman embraced back in the 1970s don't seem so far out now. But she has long been considered a pioneer -- for creating works in which the dancers speak as well as move, for casting elderly dancers alongside those in their 20s and for making art from everyday, ordinary movements and gestures. Her notions about what dance is and who gets to do it have become ever broader as she has welcomed nondancers into her works, something she did in "Still Crossing," which closed Thursday's program.

To see that piece, and "Small Dances About Big Ideas," the audience filed out of the concert hall and walked across the lobby to the smaller Kay Theatre. (True to form, Lerman got everyone moving, not just her dancers.) In "Still Crossing," created in 1986 to mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, regular folks filled the stage, old, young, a few physically disabled, all members of the community that had participated in a workshop with the company.

Lerman was there, too, hair spilling out of her signature topknot, joining her company members and the nondancers in a series of simple but evocative gestures -- pointing skyward, covering the eyes, dropping the hand and looking into the distance. Performed in unison, accompanied by a slow and dignified score by Mark Isham, with additional music by Teddy Klaus, the movements were a powerful expression of unifying disparate parts into a whole. Springing from Lerman's boundary-breaking aesthetic, it was an especially fruitful metaphor for an ideally serene American society.

What Lerman's greatest works show is that her once-radical practices make for brilliant art. They're not just wacky, against-the-grain ideas. For years, my favorite Dance Exchange dancers have been the oldest ones (the ages range from 25 to 72), and that's still true. Of all the excellent company members, none grabs the eye like elegant, silver-haired Thomas Dwyer, who joined Lerman's troupe after retiring from the government in 1988, or the precise, dramatic Martha Wittman, who started her dance career half a century ago with Doris Humphrey, one of the forerunners of American modern dance.

Over the years, putting dance in unexpected places has meant performing in shipyards and parks, as well as tackling unusual topics through dance. One of those is the subject of "Small Dances About Big Ideas," which commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. Lerman links the Nazi atrocities brought before that tribunal with more contemporary genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and brings a number of characters into the work, including that of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term "genocide." It's all done in an effort to make a statement about the pervasiveness of genocide, and the uniquely brutal aspect of seeking to exterminate an entire people. ("In genocide, the idea is the crime," intones the narrator, Peter DiMuro, who is also the company's producing artistic director.)

But here Lerman's creative strategies are less effective. The spoken text feels like a lecture. The gestures, which compose most of the action, are inscrutable. Much of the movement happens in tense silence, and in shadows, but has little emotional impact. The dancers look like they are play-acting, and they are certainly grim enough, but it comes across as pantomime that just doesn't reach the heart. The piece is clearly full of ideas, but ultimately it lacks authentic feeling.

That is, until the moment midway through when the lights come up and the dancers filter up the aisles to glean comments about genocide from the audience. When they return to the stage and recount some of those remarks to DiMuro, he turns them into a sequence of small motions, rather like the simple gestures that fueled "Still Crossing." The lights go down again and the dancers resume the piece, incorporating the new gestures into one scene. This was the work's most memorable section.

Even 30 years later Lerman's work is truer than ever to those progressive 1970s ideals that launched her. Breaking down the barrier between the audience and the performer is essential to making art matter, she believes, and she achieved that again on Thursday night.