Interview with Liz Lerman & Ben Wegman:
The Matter of Origins and the Poetry of the Mind

The spirit of inquiry infuses much of Liz Lerman’s choreographic storytelling and her newest piece, The Matter of Origins — premiering at the Center September 10 & 12 — is no exception. How do you create a work that asks questions about the very nature of the universe? Liz and company member Ben Wegman recently sat down in Dance Exchange’s Takoma Park studio to discuss the process.

What inspired you to create a dance piece that is so heavily rooted in high-level physics?
Liz Lerman: This particular work was inspired by a meeting with a group of physicists who said that because of the work that they’re doing in CERN (which is the place between Switzerland and France where they’re moving protons very, very fast, smashing these particles and discovering all kinds of things, they hope) is that they might get very, very close to the Big Bang. And my response to that was kind of visceral: “Oh that’s wonderful, but what is that going to do to our notion about beginnings, and will that have an effect on us?”

And so I got interested and after some discussion they sent us to CERN and Ben went with me on that trip and it was pretty incredible.

What was it like to work at CERN?
Ben Wegman: CERN feels very otherworldly, like did that really happen? Did we actually experience that? I had the opportunity to meet a group of fabulous physicists and also dance around much of the equipment at CERN, which we found out later perhaps we should not have done. But that was OK.

I got to actually dance near the magnets where many of the experiments are now taking place, within the tunnels with the colliders, in the computer rooms with all that data and information happening at our fingertips. Feeling that, physically, and also experiencing that mentally — simultaneously — was just really incredible.

LL: The other thing about CERN that’s just kind of wonderful is [this]: big huge experiment, big huge machines, [but] you can’t see the stuff. They don’t know if it’s going to work. They don’t know what’s going to happen.

And I love that it’s practically invisible. And in that sense it felt much like movement — very ephemeral, the way our role feels. As dancers, we spend all this time, all this energy, making these things that disappear every night. We do it and then it’s gone. The process at CERN is not unlike that.

Have you had any revelations about form or content during the process?
LL: The dancing in this particular piece is really strong, hard, pushy — and I think that’s from two ideas at least, maybe more. One is the whole issue of speed — speed and intensity — and the other is something that I did not realize was so magnificently important, which was a discovery in 1998 that our universe wasn’t just expanding, but that it was accelerating.

This notion is partially why [the physicists] are able to understand so much that they are understanding. The idea of acceleration has really propelled — well, I don’t know that I’ve come in and talked about it so much in rehearsals, but it has really propelled me.

What have you learned from working with creative minds in a completely different discipline from your own? How has that experience informed the piece itself?
BW: For me, what I took from CERN was this idea of range and opposites and how opposites aren’t really opposites, they’re often the same thing. …As humans we love to make these very simple distinctions, but the physicists can see [these opposites] as both very different things and very similar things simultaneously. What a joy and a struggle it has been to play with that idea in the body.

LL: One of the questions in choreography is structure and meaning — what’s the sequence, where’s the audience supposed to be at any given moment and how can I structure the experience so that something happens to them? In the circle at CERN there are four places where the material actually collides, so we’re looking at a piece that has four collision points. The collision might be religion/science; the collision might be symmetry/asymmetry — but it’s this idea that things are clashing.

I think this piece is about the poetry of the mind, really. It’s just incredible what these scientists put themselves through to think the things that they’re thinking. …I’ve actually learned a lot about thinking from just being around them.

For more information, please visit Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s homepage, the official CERN website and join us for Liz Lerman Dance Exchange’s The Matter of Origins on September 10 & 12, 2010.

This excerpted transcript of the full video interview has been edited for length and clarity.

BUY TICKETS TO THE MATTER OF ORIGINS

Read our other interviews

• Stephen Webber: Orson Welles and William Shakespeare via Macbeth (SITI Company)
• Walter Dallas: Changing the World with Chekhovian Passion and Love (UMD School of Theatre, Dance and, Performance Studies)
• Erica Philpot: Post Show Blog on Am I Black Enough Yet? (UMD School of Theatre, Dance and, Performance Studies)
• Leon Major: The Power of Art and the Power of Magic (Maryland Opera Studio)
• Daniel Phoenix Singh: Touching Hearts, Tackling Issues and Inspiring Audiences (Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh)
• Lauren Withhart: Femininity within the Architecture of the Body (Dance MFA)
• KJ Sanchez: Directing Feel-Good Theatre at a University (UM School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies)
• Liz Lerman & Bill Dorland: Rearranging the Way We Think About Things (Liz Lerman Dance Exchange)
• Angel Gil-Ordóñez & Joseph Horowitz: Reintroducing Gershwin to American Audiences (Post-Classical Ensemble)
• Michael Votta: Revitalizing the Classical Music Concert with the UM Wind Orchestra (UM Wind Orchestra)
• Heather Henson: Mythic Imagery, Sprawling Landscapes & Wild Places (IBEX Puppetry)
• Greg Sandow: The Future of Classical Music (Artist-in-residence at the UM College of Arts and Sciences)

Find us on: