This is an excerpt from Liz Lerman’s new book (in process, stay tuned for pre-order dates!)
Chapter: An Ode to Relationship, the Long of it, and the Beauty and Conjuring of Martha Wittman by Liz Lerman
The first person I cast in Wicked Bodies, and therefore my partner in making a dance about witches, was Martha Wittman. I met her when I arrived at Bennington College to be a dance major. I stayed two years and probably would have left earlier were it not for Martha’s watching out and over me with her quiet, authoritative teaching and achingly beautiful dancing.
I was 17 and couldn’t figure out who I was. And my dancing body didn’t help since part of the drama of the decade that followed was figuring out what of my past training I was to keep, and what was I rejecting and why, and who had forced what and which myth was I going to forsake or seek shelter within. Martha was a like a lighthouse, present, floating, sending me signals that it would be ok even as my distress emanated with constancy whether about how to move my torso or what to do about a roommate. I wasn’t thinking about witches at that time, but reflecting now, I see her mysterious apparitions as those of a benevolent, demanding healer.
We got back in touch a decade later because Martha took an interest in my work with old people. Her messages steadied me on this rocky and lonely path. I carried them as blessings, a kind of protective layering. When she left Bennington, long after I had, she came to the Dance Exchange to join our ensemble, insisting on taking an audition. She need not have done, that as I knew I was the lucky recipient of her presence.