Small Dances about Big Ideas (review)

The choreographer Liz Lerman was once told that she would never earn any critical support because her work wasn't confrontational. The memory of that comment has stuck with her despite her being recognized with a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 2002 and receiving numerous critical accolades for performance and community work. During a question-and-answer period at the conclusion of the New York City performances of Small Dances about Big Ideas, she said of her audience, "I want to keep them in the theater, not chase them out," and added, "I love this"—referring to the sense of community one feels after a shared theatrical experience.

For Small Dances about Big Ideas, an evening-length dance/theater piece, Lerman was commissioned by the Seevak Fund for Harvard Law School to create a choreographic work commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremburg Trials that would encompass human rights law from Nuremburg onward—an important and unprecedented commission for a dance company. Even in New York City, often called the dance capital of the world, dance artists can feel like an irrelevant part of the culture as they struggle to convince presenters, arts funders, critics, and new audiences of the validity of their work. Much of having a contemporary dance company involves teaching people why they should care about the art form at all. Then along comes Harvard Law School, an unusual dance partner, demonstrating not only that they appreciate the relevance and possibility of the medium but also that they are willing to commission a work for it.

In the choreographer's commentary version of Small Dances about Big Ideas (a smaller version of the original work, designed to fit into tiny spaces like Dance New Amsterdam's black box theater), Lerman talks to the audience, reading e-mails between herself and her legal muse at Harvard, Professor Martha Minow. Minow believed that Lerman, with movement, could illuminate human rights law in an unacademic fashion that would resonate with an audience in their very bones.

One of the powerful stories presented in Small Dances is that of a woman forensic anthropologist, an analyst of skeletal remains who determines whether bodies have been tortured or mutilated before death. The "bone woman's" voice is overheard speaking of her work. She talks of marking victims by placing red flags beside their bodies. In a short time she discovers that there are not enough flags. A dancer (Cassie Meador), on a dimly-lit stage, moves away from a mound of crumpled bodies at her feet. She reaches out for one of the male figures in the pile, tenderly rolling, folding, and kneading his body to bring him toward her. She embraces his head, caresses the back of his neck lovingly with her finger tips, she nestles her ear to his thigh, then gently cradles and rocks his body as one would a newborn. As she moves, we see the Narrator (Peter DiMuro) observing from the background while reading from a text describing the bone woman's disbelief at the torture she uncovers. Meanwhile, Meador continues her mindful ritual, listening to the story this body has tell, its various positions seeming to whisper, "I was hit here . . . on the left side . . . on the right side." At the scene's conclusion the bone woman releases the cradled body from her grasp and stretches out empathetically to rest on the ground beside him. The scene evokes an additional aspect of genocide: the beauty and commitment of those who fight for victims.

Many stories overlap in this performance, some danced—at times with simple movement and at times with great energy and technique—and others vocalized. Lerman and her company of dance artists use straightforward minimal movement (walking, running, jumping, and falling) with abstracted familiar gestures (waving, nodding one's head, wiping a brow, or rubbing eyes) to reach out directly to the audience. Most of the movements, with the exception...