Dance Tribute in a Miner Key

Four generations of a family contribute to the new dance piece "Imprints on a Landscape: The Mining Project"-- choreographer Martha Wittman and her late father, as well as her son, niece and grandniece.

The work, which explores the coal industry, was created with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and runs this weekend, one year after the Sago Mine explosion in West Virginia killed 12 miners.

Wittman was inspired by her father's family of Irish immigrant coal miners in Scranton, Pa. She incorporates her father's artwork -- etchings, woodcuts and lithographs -- into video installations that her niece filmed. Wittman's son composed original music. Her grandniece, 10-year-old Megan Wilson, dances.

Quite the family affair.

"There's a side to this where I wanted to know [my father] better by exploring his work in this way," Wittman says. "Feeling the connections with someone's hand and the lines it made has been emotionally strong." Her father, Michael J. Gallagher, died in 1965.

Wittman started research for the project four years ago. At the Library of Congress, she listened to oral histories and music from mining communities. She read about how heat and pressure create coal, and she incorporates this geology into her dance.

"Mining Project" is the first performance of the Master Elders Program at Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Wittman is 71, and half of the 14 dancers are seniors. She has been teaching, dancing and choreographing for more than 50 years, 35 at Bennington College in Vermont.

One of her favorite scenes in "Mining Project" was inspired by a Scranton mine tour. "You ride in backward in these little carts that went down steeply," she says. "That feeling of watching the light recede was quite something."

$8-$16. Tonight at 8 p.m. and tomorrow at 3 p.m. Round House Theatre, 8641 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring. 800-494-8497.

-- Rachel Beckman