‘RUSSIA’ MARKS A NEW BEGINNING FOR LERMAN

The first time Liz Lerman tried to quit dancing, she was 15 and an ultra-serious ballet student.

“I was learning the ‘Bluebird’ variation and at the same time I was taking part in a boycott of the Milwaukee schools, which were still segregated at that time,” she recalls. “I tried to put the two things together, which was impossible. So I quit dancing.”

She soon found her way back to dance, if not to the ballerina career she had once envisioned. Instead, she traveled a route through the dance departments of Bennington and other colleges, studies in New York with Daniel Nagrin, teaching, activism and community work that eventually led to the elusive synthesis that she had once felt couldn’t exist.

Lerman has always oriented her choreography toward social and political concerns. During its 10-year existence, her Washington-based organization, Dance Exchange, has generated educational and community outreach activities as well as performances, all reflecting her concern for using dance as a tool for involvement.

Scheduled for May 1 and 2 in the Japan America Theatre as part of the “Explorations” series, Lerman’s “Russia” marks both a culmination and a new beginning, according to the 38-year-old choreographer. Vibrant and articulate, she speaks rapidly yet thoughtfully about the evolution of this panoramic piece at the Dance Exchange studio on the grounds of Glen Echo Park, just across the Maryland border from the nation’s capital.

She is in the process of reshaping “Russia” for the Los Angeles performances, making significant cuts and additions to what was initially presented in Washington last June.

Encompassing Russian history from the 9th Century to the present era, with stops along the way for portrayals of czars, class struggles, purges, artistic and intellectual development, and detours for traditional fables which caught Lerman’s fancy, “Russia” draws on the choreographer’s fascination with, and extensive research into, the drama of that nation’s past.

Although her family’s roots are in Russia, Lerman began the venture not as a personal quest but as an outgrowth of a successful series of works from the early 1980s called “Docudances.”

Searching for a dance equivalent for the documentary form, Lerman mined the rich raw material of Reagan Administration policies to create works of social and political commentary.

Global nuclear policy, technical data about weapons systems, David Stockman’s budget maneuvering--all these found their way into works that surprised many by being more entertaining than didactic while communicating Lerman’s concern about the issues.

Through her encounters with the Soviet Union as Americans perceive it today, Lerman grew interested in the country’s evolution, and began an exploration that has now occupied her for nearly two years. “I feel the piece is much more a documentary than the earlier ones were, because those had points of view,” she explains. “In ‘Russia,’ there is not, and was never meant to be, a through-line. It isn’t set up with everything pointing towards an end--although I think a lot of people wish it was.”

Intrigued by the connection between information and emotion, Lerman says she hopes that if she can “present the information in a particular way, then it is possible for emotion to be a part of it. These are not two separate entities for me; when I take in information, I immediately have a response to it. I like to think that you’re getting not only a history lesson from this piece but also one person’s perspective on the events.”

Ironically, while she set out to remove from “Russia” the dominant personal presence that marked her earlier pieces, she discovered in the process of restructuring it that it lacked something with which the audience could become involved. She eventually found a means to re-introduce her individual perspective.

“I’ve had to resort to a contemporary American presence, which exists in the piece through a series of footnotes,” she says. With the addition of these entirely new segments, narrated by Lerman, she hopes to create a more personal connection with the audience than the work did in its original form.

As she hones sections of the work in an afternoon rehearsal, Lerman samples different approaches to the text, an integral part of the work. Reviewing a segment on political intrigue, she contemplates whether the dancers should speak as they move, or whether the text belongs to her own outsider’s voice or to the dominant figure of Mother Russia whose symbolic presence she has incorporated into the dance.

She also supervises a duet version of a solo, “Snow in Siberia,” created for her by Pola Nirenska, 75, a former Mary Wigman dancer who has become influential in the Washington dance scene.

Offering suggestions to and soliciting ideas from her performers, Lerman appears to thrive on the harried multiplicity of elements--from a speech by Stalin to music by Rameau, Tchaikovsky and Siberian choruses--involved in her ambitious undertaking.

An additional element is the presence of four members of the Dance Exchange’s company of senior citizen performers, who take part in “Russia.”

Through her teaching and community work, Lerman has found an important source of inspiration in her encounters with these older dancers. The senior troupe, Dancers of the Third Age, which performs regularly on its own as well as taking part in Lerman’s Dance Exchange pieces, is a vivid demonstration of her philosophy that dance can be a source of engagement with contemporary life, that dancing and living may indeed be interlocking activities.

She says she especially values the senior performers because “they are continually educating people; when you see them perform, you have to let go of some of your assumptions about what dance is and let it expand to a larger point of view.”