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Dance leader kicks off Jewish event

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by Peter Sielski

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Speaking about creation as a "daily act," a nationwide leader in dance and arts spoke to a lecture hall full of participants from around the country as part of the Conney Conference of Jewish Arts, which began at the University of Wisconsin Monday.

Liz Lerman, who is a recipient of the American Choreographer Award and the 2002 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, was one of the first speakers during the weeklong conference titled, "Practicing Jews: Art, Identity and Culture."

According to UW professor Douglas Rosenberg, who organized the event, this year's program is the largest to date and has a wide variety of artists or professors.

"There has never really been a comprehensive look to the Jewish contribution to the arts, the 20th century and the United States," Rosenberg said. "It is a week long, because there is so much to say and so much to look at that we could have gone even longer."

According to Lerman, distinguishing something into its various parts is a "tool" that artists and people should use in various creative acts, namely in "forming a perspective."

She gave an example of using creation as a daily act with one of her performers, who made a distinction in how he was going to perform and how this was an act of creation through his performance.

"He told me that he wasn't going out there to perform, which I thought was impossible, he had to go out there," Lerman said. "He then said, 'No I am going out there, but not to perform, but to bless.'"

While Lerman admitted that people often place one area of study or field over the other, she insists on the importance of placing all like categories into a "spectrum" where everything is side by side as opposed to on top of one another.

Using the "spectrum" through distinctions, Lerman said artists also have the power to create a sense of belonging within a community or help face a great loss. She pointed to the example of her desire to continue her career in dance after her mother's death.

"Every change comes with loss, whether it is Katrina or 9/11," Lerman said. "Artists have the capacity to partner loss. … They frame the change that is happening all around themselves."

Joel Rubin, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, took special interest in Lerman's idea of the non-linear performance, where 3-5 separate actions are going on all at once.

"On the text-based level it is very difficult to not be linear, and I think it would be interesting to try and escape that form of writing in art." Rubin said.

Other artists thought the idea of getting rid of the hierarchical ordering of parts was also very useful and amusing.

"I thought that her idea of putting everything into a spectrum is what stuck out most for me," said Shirah Rachel Apple, a Milwaukee-based artist who has worked all around the world.

Events will continue today at 9 a.m. at the Pyle Center with a panel "The Art of Seeing: Envisioning Jewishness."

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