Healing Wars

“Lerman takes the audience to places few of us are comfortable being, a place where injury or death is ever-present, but she makes the journey feel necessary, vital and, in some strange way, uplifting. There really turns out to be a touch of ‘healing’ here, a reminder that, no matter how often we fall and suffer, we are all joined together in some fundamental way.”

– Baltimore Sun

Wars often produce huge leaps in medical innovation, but with what consequences? Do we understand ourselves, our history, and our current relationship to war by looking at the situation of the diseased, wounded, or dying? How do healers survive the setting of war and its aftermath?

Grounded in the American Civil War and reflecting on conflicts to the present day, Healing Wars was a multimedia performance featuring an ensemble of dancers and actors including a Navy veteran with a prosthetic leg.

Inspiration

“I’ve been doing my own forms of research about the American Civil War, and about the role of civil wars both historically and currently. I wanted to find fresh and wily solutions to the ongoing tension between abstraction and realism, between emotion and ideas, between information and feeling. I wanted new ways to frame the story, the emotion, and the experience, while continuing to develop a deeper palette of powerful movement. And as in my other recent works, I continue to explore projections as a means of concretizing the setting, action, the emotion through the use of old movies, animation, and graphics as moving images.”

-Liz Lerman

Research

Inspirational Image from Witches and Wicked Bodies

Research

Liz’s approach to this subject was an investigation of the impact of war on medicine, as seen through the experiences of American Civil War nurse Clara Barton, and a military surgeon in 21st century Iraq.

Additional research included site visits to Gettysburg; character development through historical readings, discussions with clinicians, soldiers, medical historians, and doctors; visits with war reenactors; and time in medical laboratories.

More About the Work

The project focused on themes such as the fear of failure which, to a healer, is a matter of life and death; the way we anesthetize patients with ether, chloroform, opium, or hope; images of battlefield spirits gathering souls as they join the Daughters of Charity at Gettysburg, each drawing strength from its ancestors; and the discovery that the soldier being autopsied is actually female.

Project Collaborators

Tamara Pullman, Samantha Spies, Merritt Moore, Alli Ross, Marjani Forté, Ted Johnson, George Hirsch, Bill Pullman, Keith Thompson, Paul Hurley, & Josh Bleill, Development and Performing Ensemble

Darron L West, Sound Design
Kate Freer, Media Design
David Reynoso, Set and Costume Design
Nunally Kersh, Producer
Amelia Cox, Project Manager

Presenting & Funding Notes

Healing Wars premiered at Arena Stage, 2014. Additional presenting partners included: Peak Performances at Montclair State University, Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, and La Jolla Playhouse. Significant early development, and the first workshop performances, were made possible by Harvard University, the Jose Lluis Sert Practitioner Fellowship at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, and the costume shop of the American Repertory Theater.

Healing Wars was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.