Photo Essay and Participant Response by Cherie Hill
The “Aesthetic Equity” workshop, led by Liz Lerman and Paloma McGregor on October 26, 2019 at the Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco, was presented by HMD’s The Bridge Project in partnership with Yayoi Kambara, a 2019-2020 Community Engagement Residency artist leading “Aesthetic Shift: A Dance Lab for Equitable Practices." The workshop, in the words of Lerman and McGregor, “allowed for examination of movement practices from company class to compacts for collaborative performance making to the work of being in the room together. The urgency of our times demands our fresh attentiveness to decision making, imagination, and building multiple frames for our work.”
Images are ephemera from the workshop and include notes taken from small group dialogues and prompts for dialogue that were offered to the group by Lerman and McGregor. Text is by artist and educator Cherie Hill, HMD’s Community Engagement Coordinator.
Gather around the circle
Do you agree?
Move closer
Disagree?
We spread
Bodies vary in proximity to the axis
Back and forth, back and forth
What’s your name?
Your preferred pronouns?
Where do you come from?
half-way
access check
Aesthetic equity is ___?
Aesthetic equity is not __?
When I negotiate a contract I get nervous, put on my “professional stance,” try to not be overrun. I try to hold my own. But I wish to play.
When I write a program note/bibliography I try to be honest and sound deep. I want to be profound.
My scribe flows & curves with words. Some diagonals.
How do you depict laughing on paper? Head nods? Hand motions?
Dialogue requires understanding each other’s values.
She said shadow & light; I think spirit and soul.
Did she disagree?
In geographical mapping, sometimes we are close
and other times distant
I thought I was listening,
but maybe I wasn’t.
An inner knowing takes over
I wonder why creating choreography is not enough?
Is this workshop about advice? Are we listening?
New partner. Oh, they’re literally talking about aesthetic equity. Ha! The beginning meets the end. No, I have not asked my dancers if they think the piece has aesthetic equity. Nope, I’m not sure if my dancers feel included in aesthetic decision-making. I don’t know if I want to ask.
Gesture, movement, gesture. I see you. My first partner is back. Gesture, movement, gesture.
Say it - “what’s equitable for me?”
Conversation continues…
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Cherie Hill is HMD’s Community Engagement Coordinator and the Director of Community and Culture and a teaching artist at Luna Dance Institute. Hill is the artistic director of Cherie Hill IrieDance, where she researches dance, transcendence, and how the body is a vessel for metaphysical presence. Cherie has published dance research in Gender Forum and the Sacred Dance Journal and has presented at conferences such as the International Association of Black Dance Conference and the International Conference on Arts and Humanities. Cherie’s dance teaching project, “Creative Movement and the African Aesthetic” has been presented at the National Dance Education Organization and Dance TAG conferences. She has presented work on embedding dance, race, and equity into practice at NDEO, National Guild, and ACOE conferences. She is President-elect of the CA Dance Education Association, chair of Berkeley Cultural Trust’s equity and inclusion committee, and an alumna of the National Guild for Community Arts Education Leadership Institute. Cherie received her BA in Dance & Performance Studies and African American Studies from U.C. Berkeley and her MFA in Dance Choreography and Performance from the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Liz Lerman (workshop co-facilitator) is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of honors including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Key to her artistry is opening her process to various publics, resulting in research and outcomes that are participatory, urgent, and usable. She founded Dance Exchange in 1976 and led it until 2011. Her recent work Healing Wars toured the US. Liz teaches Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance at institutions such as Harvard, Yale School of Drama, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Her third book is Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer. As of 2016 she is an Institute Professor at Arizona State University.
Paloma McGregor (workshop co-facilitator), originally from St. Croix, is an award-winning artist and organizer living in Harlem. Paloma’s work centers Black voices through collaborative, process-based art-making and organizing. A lover of intersections and alchemy, she develops projects in which communities of geography, practice, and values come together to laugh, make magic and transform. She has created a wide range of work, including a dance through a makeshift fishnet on a Brooklyn rooftop, a structured improvisation for a floating platform in the Bronx River and a devised multidisciplinary performance work about food justice with three dozen community members and students at U.C. Berkeley. Paloma was a 2013‐14 Artist In Residence at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, a 2014-16 Artist In Residence at BAX | Brooklyn Arts Exchange, a 2016-18 New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist, and is currently a Movement Research Artist in Residence and an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Fellow. Paloma facilitates technique, creative process and community engagement workshops around the world. She toured internationally for six years with Urban Bush Women and two years with Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, and continues to perform in project‐based work, including Skeleton Architecture, with whom she received a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for performance.