This is an excerpt from Liz Lerman’s upcoming book Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide for a World in Constant Motion.
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.
So, years later, with me now living in Arizona, it was no surprise I would seek her comfort and great capacity as a dancer, mover, choreographer, mentor to help me figure out the worlds of witches. We had already done some work about crones during Small Dances about Big Ideas (2005), a commissioned piece from the Harvard Law School in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials. In my research for that dance, I had discovered a Norse legend that three very old women, called Norns, lived under Mt. Nuremberg. Their job was to keep the waters clean, give legal advice to the gods, and weave or cut the thread of life for each living being every single day. She became one of the Norns, protecting all of us, as we made that dance about genocide and human rights law. Other wonderful elder dancers who came in and out of the project accompanied her. Martha was steadfast and the leader.
But part way through the arduous and long years of making Wicked Bodies, Martha approached me to say she could not take the rigors of touring anymore. She could not be steadfast in the way our working relationship was based. The travel and the unforgiving nature of her body’s changes made her skittish. She didn’t trust her back and feet to keep up. I listened and reluctantly agreed, but we would have done everything to make it work. After all, she was always the first one warming up in the rehearsal hall. The one standing at the side of the room, holding the wall, bending and straightening her limbs with a watchful eye over all the proceedings in the room. If I asked, she always had commentary, which she delivered in a calm, even, almost whisper. But she was clear. It was time for her to stop.
I was devastated and broken-hearted. Not just for losing her presence, which was so powerful for me when working as a choreographer, but also there is no one like her. Somehow, Martha had now advanced beyond just being older. She was becoming a mysterious, ephemeral, human, part mountain-part valley all at the same time.
So, we decided to conjure her. Paloma McGregor, an amazing presence in her own right, became the Ancestral Witch, and through her words and dancing, brought Martha to us via video and magic. The three of us had a remarkable rehearsal week at the Kennedy Center’s Reach, a beautiful building with multiple spaces to work in and a series of outdoor paths that allowed walkers to view the Potomac River in majesty and solitude. We filmed all conceivable movement we could imagine needed so that Paloma could bring Martha to her, to teach the ways. In Wicked Bodies, Martha became a presence that guided the rest of the witches in understanding their many tasks. “Remember, every body needs protecting. Every country has a Texas. Every witch has a story,” Martha tells the witches assembled on the stage, ready to fly off.
If, as I am beginning to believe, that creativity lies in our ability to move between shape and momentum, then Martha is a master. But so is the way she lives in relation. Or maybe it is both at once. It makes me think that perhaps relation IS the capacity to move between shape and momentum, side by side with its twin, creativity. Together they help us, and require us, to move between what we know what we can’t know, without diving into the motion of the world, whether that of witches flying, or laws changing, or climate heating up. Maybe the way she and I have lived in relation over six decades is a testament to this, but also a training ground.
We were teacher and student, explorer and observer, choreographer and performer, researcher and researcher, friend and colleague, mentor and mentor, and mentee and mentee. We were in airports, hotels, hundreds of rehearsal rooms, many stages, and drank thousands of cups of tea. We bowed together and applauded each other. She let me video tape her. She let me video tape her naked so that her older body could be seen from the back of the theater as it was projected in space. When I visit her now, she insists I sleep in her bed while she takes the guest room. She has some silly excuse why this is how it should be. I accept.
There is shape to it. We recognize it in our connections, in picking up the threads of contact and conversation. But it is very much in momentum. I never know how she will move next. I cannot account for the way she sits forward in her chair or reads to me from some of her memoirs. I can count on her till the end, which we both can see from this vantage point in our lives. But there is no stopping the thrust of the motion swirling like two tornadoes, although quiet ones.
Martha once told me that she could recognize my back anywhere. I looked at her, questioning what she meant. “In the airport terminals you are always way out front in a hurry, with nowhere special to go except the gate.” I love her for this observation. And like when we first met, one of us leading, one following. All that is needed is for the world to tip upside down to see the picture of us in reverse. And the world is always tipping.