Shape and Momentum
Subtitle
An Insomniac's Guide for a World in Constant Motion
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.
Bio
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. Beginning her choreographic career in 1974, she has spent the past five decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. Recently, Liz and her team of witches toured the dance theatre piece Wicked Bodies (2022) investigating the attempted erasure of embodied knowledge.
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, Shape and Momentum: An Insomniac’s Guide to a World in Constant Motion, is a collection of personal essays set to be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2026. Liz continues to evolve the Critical Response Process® through the Certification program, Fundamentals cohorts, and Essentials online course.
Liz founded and led the Dance Exchange from 1976 until 2011, where she cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance. Lerman’s community-based practices have included residencies at Children’s National Hospital, Roosevelt Hotel for Senior Citizens, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Harvard ArtLab. Her work has been commissioned by numerous presenters, including Arena Stage, The Kennedy Center, Harvard Law School, and Portsmouth Music Hall.
She 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.
Praise for this book
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...
Jennifer Passios theINKingDANCE
Liz Lerman is not only a mover; she’s a thinker. She is perhaps most well-known for founding Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, an age-inclusive contemporary dance ensemble that she led from 1976–2011. Through collaborations with unlikely people and places—from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)—Lerman expanded what dance could look like and the disciplines it could illuminate.Lerman has also developed an array of theories and strategies that offer ways to similarly shift our perspective on life, exploring its deeper queries.
Sophie Bress The Brooklyn Rail
