professional membership

Featured Member

Since 1976, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, a professional company of dance artists, has been creating, performing, teaching, and engaging people in making art. With the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Online Toolbox, they have made their groundbreaking approaches to community-based art and unique body of knowledge widely available and accessible to the field.

The Liz Lerman Online Toolbox is an ongoing, expanding website that offers art-making techniques, concise descriptions of principles and practices, and essays that explore the theory, background, and applications of many of these ideas. Designed for anyone seeking concrete techniques for choreography, community building, and constructive human interaction, it includes practice, theory, and history. The toolbox the Dance Exchange seeks to share is one “where the tools all can occupy the same box, where a single act, idea, or technique might have many functions.”

Since its start in 1976, and in each encounter, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange asks four questions:

1. Who gets to dance?
2. Where is the dance happening?
3. What is it about?
4. Why does it matter?

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange answers these questions with a range of interrelated activities:

• Groundbreaking new dance works performed by a cross-generational company on major stages internationally, throughout the U.S., as well as closer to their home—in the communities of Maryland; Washington, DC; and the Mid-Atlantic region.
• Classes, workshop, and institutes for people who dance to make a living, people who dance to make a better life, and people who have never danced before.
• Local and national projects that engage individuals, institutions, and communities in making and performing dances.

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange pursues a broad definition of dance as a multidisciplinary art form that encompasses movement, music, imagery, and the spoken word. Throughout its programs, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange builds an accessible body of knowledge and makes meaningful connections between people and art.