Reading Liz Lerman’s Shape in Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide for a World in Constant Motion is like stepping into the basement of the home my grandparents shared for over 50 years. My late grandfather was a practical man. My grandmother, who still loves him, refuses to throw anything away. The basement is a stuffed maze of their lives. Stacked floor to ceiling, piles of doll houses, antique music boxes, aged Birthday cards, mouse-chewed clothing, and old cigarette butts all threaten to topple over and swallow the floor whole. The sheer variety of stuff to look at and attend to freaks me out; it is also curiously spellbinding. In this museum of ordinary things, the collector herself serves as the common bond between treasure and debris.
A similar collage of kitsch and cool, sweet and strange, and at times redundant and frustrating, Shape and Momentum ping-pongs readers through 44 short essays traversing memoir, tool kit, and process book. Along the way, Lerman also posits a philosophy of creativity based on a well-known scientific principle. There’s a lot going on—plenty of relics to dig out and inspect..
The personal stories and process notes, particularly in section 1, “Living and Experiencing,” and section 3, “Rejection and Reflection,” ring with sincerity and reflect the wisdom of Lerman’s prolific tenure as a dance artist, friend, spouse, daughter, innovator, and educator. I will likely re–read “Twenty-Seven Attempts,” an essay that chronicles her four decades of applying for a Guggenheim, at least twenty-seven more times. The essay, which includes a timeline of excerpts from rejected applications, is a clear, succinct snapshot of Lerman’s body of work that I imagine will inspire many artists who are in the middle of building out their own dance legacies.
The fourth and final section “The Atlas of Creative Tools” is okay. While the section does not contain the toolbox itself, it does elaborate on some of the methods and strategies that Lerman has developed for dance making and creative thinking more broadly. It also offers origin stories about select creative tools that appear in the Atlas. An onslaught of repetitive endorsements, one at the beginning of each essay (some an entire paragraph long), detracts substantially from what would otherwise be the pleasure of reading this section. I’m not quite sure why these extended quotes—paragraphs gushing about the Atlas, how great it is, and so on—appear here if the Atlas of Creative Tools® is a separate entity.
“Thinking Grids: A Favorite” represents the best of section four; the essay provides a clear description, developmental trajectory, and practical how-to guide for practicing Lerman’s Thinking Grid. The tool involves creating two separate lists of ideas or concepts (one along an x axis, and one along a y), then asking the grid maker to imagine what might go in the resulting squares made by the intersections of those ideas. For instance, Lerman offers up an example connected to her 2022 work Wicked Bodies where ideas related to nature sit on one axis, and those connected to witches on the other. In the box marking the connection point between “bark” from the nature axis and “trial” from the witch axis, Lerman writes “the witch’s chair is made of bark.” The connection may not be obvious without the grid, but it comes into focus within the relative confines of the intersection between “bark” and “trial.” Out of the box thinking, inside of boxes. Very good.
Lerman seems to be a lateral thinker—someone who easily connects disparate ideas, even when those concepts seem unbridgeable. In addition to being a fruitful creative exercise, “Thinking Grids” also offers a concrete methodology for practicing this form of connection making, even for those who may be less inclined to free associate. Given the book’s proclivity for jumping around, I could imagine the “Thinking Grids” chapter appearing at the beginning of Shape and Momentum, thus establishing associative thinking as an organizational principle to guide readers between topics, writing styles, and ideas right from the get go.
Instead, the central anchor for Shape and Momentum appears in Lerman’s attempt to extrapolate a theory of creativity from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, a foundational rule of quantum mechanics. Articulated in 1927 and solidified in the early 1930s by German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the principle states that the more precisely one can determine the position of a particle along a trajectory, the less precisely the momentum of that same particle can be measured simultaneously–the two values are complementary and relational. In other words, the ability to measure position impacts the ability to measure momentum and vice versa. It is also important to note that the principle applies specifically to subatomic particles that move along wave forms. It does not apply to macro objects like people.
In her “version” of the uncertainty principle (scientific fact doesn’t tend to lend itself casually to subjective variations, so take “version” as you will) Lerman makes two small but significant linguistic deviations that hold throughout the book: first, she replaces the word “position” (a location along a trajectory) with “shape” (the structure of an object); and second, she treats the relationship between her “shape” and momentum as one of absolutes. In the original principle, there is a relationship between the perception of position and momentum. For Lerman, there is shape OR momentum.
Section two of the book is full of assertions like:
“My classical training has made me a shape dancer, and there were many moments in my choreographic explorations where I despaired for my lack of capacity to shift to momentum. At the time, I had not yet understood the powerful metaphor and symbolism in this kind of uncertainty: the capacity to be either and the need to move between them.”
Artists can extend scientific ideas into metaphors, sure. But in order for the metaphor—-and, by extension, Lerman’s overarching theory—-to work, the foundation of the metaphor needs to be sound. In this case, it is not. Shape and Momentum reads as though Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a subjective maxim rather than a proven fact. While scientific knowledge inevitably changes with the discovery of new information, including technological advancements and new classification systems—Pluto, the planet, anyone?—those adjustments come after testing, peer review, and scrutiny. Physics is not fast fashion.
Lerman is a well respected choreographer, director, writer, educator, and community activator whose word holds clout. When someone with such a strong reputation in dance misrepresents a basic scientific fact, builds a theory around it, and then gets that theory published in a book by an equally reputable publishing company, the credibility of dancers and dance makers more generally gets thrown into question. For this book specifically, I’m also left wondering about the editing process. Why wasn’t the Shape/Momentum theory scrutinized more thoroughly?
In her author’s note, Lerman writes, “I am first a choreographer, but I have a desperate desire to convince those people dedicated to the dominant forms of knowledge that those of us living with our bodies and dependent on that relationship have something to offer. We are bright because of mind/body connections, not in spite of them.”
It’s critical to remember that we live at the nexus of physical and cognitive intelligence and that the two are intertwined. I agree with Lerman that bodily intelligence has something—many somethings—important to add to a broader concept of what it looks like to hold and share intelligence. Shape and Momentum shows glimmers of this offering—in Lerman’s stories about creating Wicked Bodies, her musings on death, her discussions of helping people come into their bodies, and the matter of writing itself as a physical act. But she does her own argument a disservice by founding her theory of creativity—one otherwise based on 50 years as an expert in her field—on a derivative of a fact from a dominant knowledge form.
Can physical intelligence overcome its reputation as cognitive intelligence’s pick-me little sister? If so, how? Does dance need to latch on to other fields like physics in order to gain relevance in the public eye? While the deviant facts in Shape and Momentum drive me batty, these larger questions inspired by Lerman’s book continue to gnaw at me in a good way. The accumulation of knowledge—cognitive, physical, or otherwise–necessitates a tolerance for the unknown. In the words of Heisenberg himself: “only a few know, how much one must know, to know how little one knows.” Uncertainty reigns supreme.
