About this Event
Join us for a conversation with Liz Lerman to celebrate her new book, a profound and fierce blend of essays, anecdotes, and wisdom drawn from her long celebrated choreographic project, Wicked Bodies. She will be in conversation with Wendy Perron, followed by a signing.
PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.
Can't attend? (please specify that you would like it signed in the comments box at checkout).
A choreographic manifesto for life in motion, offering new ways to navigate change and thrive amidst instability.
A sequel to Hiking the Horizontal, Liz Lerman's Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac's Guide for a World in Constant Motion is a choreographic manifesto for living in motion — part memoir, part creative toolkit, part philosophical inquiry. Written in a series of essays, from single-paragraph meditations to expansive chapters, the book weaves together personal anecdotes, creative theory, and movement-based wisdom. Lerman draws on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to frame a central question: how do we hold both shape and momentum — form and change — at once? With insight and generosity, she explores creativity as a life practice, rooted in embodied knowledge and accessible to all. Witches from her decade-long project Wicked Bodies appear throughout as fierce, funny guides, helping readers stay curious and grounded. Essays are grouped in thematic sections—lived experience, kinship, rejection, reflection, and radical imagination — culminating in an "Atlas of Creative Tools®," a practical and poetic resource. Bridging dance, education, politics, and spiritual practice, Shape and Momentum offers tools for navigating instability and making a more relational world.
Liz Lerman is a choreographer, writer, educator, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Award, and the 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Award. Liz founded and led the Dance Exchange from 1976 until 2011, where she cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble. Current projects include building the Atlas of Creative Tools®, an online resource and archive, and Legacy Unboxed that involves a series of site-specific research performance events called My Body is a Library™. Lerman’s upcoming book is a collection of personal essays set to be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025. Liz continues to evolve the Critical Response Process® through the annual certification program and an upcoming fundamentals course.
Liz is the author of Teaching Dance to Senior Adults (1984), Hiking the Horizontal (2014), and co-author of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (2003) and Critique Is Creative (2022) with John Borstel. She is currently an Institute Professor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
Photo Credit: Christine Johnsson
A dancer/choreographer turned writer/educator/historian/curator, Wendy Perron danced with Trisha Brown in the 1970s and choreographed about fifty works for her own company. As a writer, she has contributed to the New York Times, the Village Voice, vanityfair.com, journals in Europe and China, and Dance Magazine, where she was editor in chief from 2004 to 2013. She has taught at Bennington College, Princeton, and NYU Tisch Dance. In 2011, the New York Foundation for the Arts inducted her into its inaugural Hall of Fame. Her second book, The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970-1976, fills a gap in the literature on postmodern dance and improvisation. Wendy has been teaching dance history at Juilliard since 2019, performing with Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks since 2021, and giving an online course for Jacob’s Pillow. She edits an annual column of “Notable Dance Books” on wendyperron.com.
Photo Credit: Da Ping Luo for Juilliard
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 0.00
