Tools for Creative Research
Liz continues to develop and to harvest artistic tools with applicability to a wide range of endeavors. Workshop participants get active with new takes on tools such as naming and categorizing, translation, deconstruction, thinking grids, and creative problem solving.
Format: workshop, two hours to two weeks, as this is central to Liz's way of working.

Partnering and Collaboration
Ask a big enough question and you will need more than one discipline to answer it; collaboration is a necessary set of tools for working in hybridized world. Learn tools that generate and promote the excitement and joy of collaboration as well as tools that address the difficulties: who gets credit for success? Who takes responsibility for failures and mistakes? What if your collaborators don't agree about what the collaboration is? What if your collaboration isn't recognized because of reward systems slanted towards individual achievement? What do we even DO when we're collaborating…and what can we do better? Using practical experiments in partnering to discover and generate micro-tools, Liz and the participants will decide how to transform them into macro-tools and investigate the real challenges of collaborative processes and outcomes.
Format: lecture with participation (90 minutes) or workshop (90 minutes).

Critical Response Process: getting useful feedback on anything you make
This system is based on the principle that the best possible outcome from a feedback session is for the maker to want to go back to work. Whether returning to the studio or the desk or the kitchen or the laboratory, Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process (CRP) gives tools to both people who are making work and people who are responding to that work. In use for over twenty years, the Process has been embraced by artmakers, educators, scientists, and administrators at theater companies, dance departments, orchestras, science centers, museums, and beyond. The Process has deepened dialogue between makers and audiences; it has enhanced learning between teachers and students. It has proven valuable for all kinds of creative endeavors, work situations, and collaborative relationships within and beyond the arts, from kindergartens to corporations.
Format: Between two and four hours, depending on the size of the group and the desired amount of work on display. CRP is a process of response, so we need things to respond to: a dance-in-progress, a draft of a paper for a conference, a new lecture that a faculty member wants feedback on. Liz will discuss all of this with you to get an appropriate range.

Biography as an Engine for Learning
Whether current or contemporary, famous or barely-known, the "other" or the self, individuals can be portals into unimagined avenues of exploration. Liz works with participants (or in advance with a planning team) to choose focal figures. Then, by applying tools of inquiry acquired from the choreographic process, their discoveries and their stories are combined to fuel further areas of research. This workshop is especially open to a focus on gender awareness, women's issues, and public/private figures.
Format: two-to-three session workshop, over two/three days (90 minutes to two hours per session)

Modeling Science, Modeling Ideas
With vast improvements in quality and complexity of data across many fields but especially in the life sciences, what thinking skills do we need to make sense of what's there - and to make discoveries? Modeling brings precision and depth to the conceptualizations of biological processes, and embodied learning through "science choreography" catalyzes deconstruction and illumination of the core components and processes in modeling. This workshop is especially functional for mixed groups of artists (theater and dance) and scientists, comprised of students or faculty or both.
Format: workshop, 90 minutes to two hours.

Embodied Learning How is knowledge generated? How is knowledge learned? The body is both a resource for learning, and a tool for new questions. Liz has worked extensively with scientists to test and work with information about biology, genetics, and physics in active environments, so that participants gain both information and generate insights. This workshop is especially functional for mixed groups of artists (theater and dance) and scientists, comprised of students or faculty or both.
Format: workshop, 90 minutes to two hours