Twenty Years Later, Liz Lerman's Approach Is Still Revolutionary. By Margaret Regan MAKE NO MISTAKE. Liz Lerman Dance Exchange ranks up there with the best in modern dance. The 20-year-old troupe, which will perform at Centennial Hall Saturday night, has racked up the usual prestigious commissions, from the likes of New York's Lincoln Center to Washington's Kennedy Center. Artistic director Lerman has won an American Choreographer Award and fair praise from The New York Times, whose critic opined, "Liz Lerman Dance Exchange offers visionary work of extraordinary eloquence." So why, then, does this big-time company put non-professional dancers into its performances? And how is it that the pro dancers in its troupe range in age from the usual 20-something to the decidedly unusual 70-something? For Lerman, it's partly a matter of artistic principle, partly a matter of the survival of dance. "A lot of our dance has lost its meaning," Lerman said by telephone last week from her Maryland studio, where the company was between rehearsals for its upcoming Dance on Tour residency in Arizona. "Unless we engage the audience in a participatory way, we're going to lose the audience...If dance means physical virtuosity of an extreme nature, then dance can be hard to take. Old people (performing on stage) force people to say, 'Dance is more than raising a leg this high.' " For Lerman, older dancers, with their long life histories and their distinctive ways of moving, sometimes provide precisely the means to endow dance with new meaning. At the Tucson concert, for instance, a Lerman dancer in her 70s will do a solo performance of the choreographer's 1996 piece "Nocturnes," set to a Willie Nelson love song. "It makes you rethink the music, it makes you rethink what's happening to all these people in their 70s," Lerman said. "It's very beautiful. With a 20-year-old it would be quite different." The Dance Exchange is a company of 10, half of whom are in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Two of those, said Lerman, have danced all their lives, one on Broadway, another as a dance professor at Bennington. (She taught Lerman there.) Another dancer was a government worker who retired in his early 50s and has danced ever since. Paraphrasing Martha Graham, who said every dancer needs 10 years of training, Lerman says of this man, "Now he's had his 10 years." It just came later in life than usual. Consistent with this philosophy is Lerman's reaching out to people who are not dancers at all, in community workshops she conducts around the country and in the nursing homes where she teaches seniors to dance. If Lerman helps them to see the artistry in the ordinary gestures of their daily lives, they in turn provide fresh imagery for Lerman's dances. In a recent workshop with workers at a New Hampshire shipyard, for instance, Lerman incorporated into a piece "the movements that are inherent in the lives of workers," the raising and lowering of a hammer, the tightening of a bolt. In Tucson, Lerman's 1986 "Still Crossing," commissioned for the Statue of Liberty Centennial, will be performed by the pros in the troupe along with a host of Tucson recruits, "guest dancers" from local Asian, Latino, Jewish and gay and lesbian groups. The professional dancers will perform the more difficult movements of the work, "a beautiful and abstract work about immigration," but then the stage will begin to fill with the neophytes. By virtue of their sheer numbers on stage, Lerman said, their simple gestures will become powerful. Lerman, who started dancing at the age of five, said she first got the idea of working with old people following the death of her mother many years ago. But no other companies at the time were doing anything like what she wanted to do. So she formed her own troupe. "I had these wild ideas and I wished other people would have them. Nobody else did, so I realized I had better take it on...I've been doing this for 20 years. It makes me sad that it's still so revolutionary.'' The choreographer, whose own age now falls right in the middle between her young dancers and her old dancers, tries to break down other art barriers besides those separating professional artists from lay people. Her dances incorporate the spoken word, and in recent years she's been making dances that investigate her Jewish identity. One of Saturday's pieces, "Faith and Science on the Midway," takes as its setting the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, but "uses as its core a Hebrew prayer about sustenance." It's one phase of a larger work called "Shehechianu," a Hebrew word meaning "Gives us breath." But the concert, the second in UApresents' three-concert Millennium Project, will also have at least one dance to please those who like their modern dance pyrotechnical. " 'Fresh Blood' is very wild, very physical, very challenging. It's the most abstract piece on the program. Pure dance lovers will respond to it." Liz Lerman Dance Exchange will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday, February 1, at UA Centennial Hall. At 7:15 p.m., Professor John Wilson of the UA School of Dance will lead a free half-hour discussion. Tickets to the performance are $9, $17 and $23, with $4 discounts offered to faculty, staff, students and children. Tickets are available at the box office or at Dillard's (1-800-638-4253). For more information, call 621-3341.

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