Interview: Lizzie Leopold

Pulse Check is an interview series led by Dance Presenting Series Marketing Manager Alyssa Gregory. The series is a way to check the pulse of how the Chicago Dance community is doing after a year of living with COVID-19. You will hear from a wide variety of artists who have managed to keep pushing forward despite the pandemic.  

I’ve known Lizzie for about seven years now. I danced in her company The Leopold Group for four seasons. I learned so much from her and I’m still learning things from her. I was interested in talking to Lizzie because she has stepped back from dance making and has turned her focus to dance education and arts administration. She is a powerhouse with words and really knows how to use her platform to educate and challenge the white dance community. Importantly, she is a mom. Parenting during a pandemic while also working from home is not an easy job. Instead of asking, “How does she do it all?” I wanted to know “What’s your secret for survival with all of these new challenges?”

--Alyssa Gregory

May 2021

Alyssa: All right, let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about pre-pandemic Lizzie. What was she doing? 

Lizzie: So in a lot of ways, the same stuff I'm doing now, I'm splitting my time between the University of Chicago, teaching in their theater and performance studies program.  I just started there in March of 2020. So, I never actually got to set foot on campus in a studio. And then in my role at the Dance Studies Association (DSA), which is, you know, out of my bedroom and it's still out of my bedroom.

Yeah, I'm still doing those two things.

Alyssa: So the pandemic hit and everything changed. What has been keeping you sustained during this time: mentally, emotionally, and creatively?

Lizzie: I think the answer to the creative outlet has really been my syllabus creation and using the political moment to re-examine all my curriculums and all my syllabi. And that has been an incredible creative outlet because it's in this moment, I feel.

There's not a lot of return on creative output because if you're doing screendance or something, but building a syllabus and then interfacing with 15 students and getting feedback. We built a DSA list that was about Black dance scholarship by Black scholars and making sure my syllabus reflected that, not just in content, but in creation.

We did a whole section in my contemporary dance class on dance as protest and also dance scores, which I feel I learned as a post-modern, Yvonne Rainer, you know, dance score, but actually dance has protest and dance scoring. When you think about it, it's deeply overlapped. How to protest and the choreographic scoring that goes into being in a protest place. And that scoring is not at all something that's relegated to the white avant-garde. So, that was interesting to think about that as a contemporary practice.

So that's been for sure, my creative outlet, the syllabus creation.

Alyssa: I'm curious about the process of making your syllabi.

Lizzie: I start with a list of content, what's available and what's cool. And then I try and find readings that frame that. But I feel if I've learned anything, if we've learned anything, it's that you have to be incredibly flexible in this moment.

Creating too much structure in my classes has not been useful. I was teaching March 3rd through June to students living on the South Side of Chicago through the murder of George Floyd and the protests. So at the end, in the last three weeks of class we threw the whole thing out. So a level of flexibility was actually more important than the planning in a way.

Alyssa: What about mentally and emotionally?

Lizzie: Well, I've been teaching myself woodworking. You see my desk I've been making. So I've learned. Cutting and staining and measuring it. So I made a desk also out of necessity because we needed a desk. Suddenly we were all working at home now and I learned how to wallpaper and paint. It's definitely that DIY vibe, but definitely the woodworking. I also have two kids at home as you know, little kids. So the solitude of that is really nice.

Alyssa: What does the word community mean to you now? And has it changed at all during the pandemic?

Lizzie: I think for me it is totally changing and you're a huge part of that. I think when I stepped away from making dances, which wasn't super intentional, it just sort of happened over time. And primarily because I had two babies and I was probably deep in some sort of postpartum anxiety that I didn't know about, but I took on these roles that are deeply invested in dance, but don't have any local community. So I felt suddenly, I didn't know what my role was or if I had a part or how to be a part. And then, through this pandemic moment, I got invited back into the community in various spaces. I felt empowered to leverage my own power, as opposed to continuing to say, I don't know my role is in this community anymore. I felt better saying, well, here's what I have. And here's what I know. So I will just participate in the ways that I can. I took some of the money I would've spent on shows and I've been pretty good about GoFundMe campaigns and fundraising, responding to those. But I think the change is me. Having a little more confidence in, in that I am a part of a community, which I felt pretty outside of for a minute.

And I still don't know what I'm doing. I feel deeply connected to the Chicago dance community, but I felt there was a moment, a solid decade where I felt I knew everyone and I was in the spaces and I was participating and applying, and now I'm doing none of those things.

So I have to renegotiate what my role is.

Alyssa: On the other side of this, what will be the first art experience you want to have?

Lizzie: I saw that on your questions, and that's really hard. I don't know. I can't even imagine. I feel that whatever it is, it’s going to be a very emotional live art experience. I want it to be small. I know that much, not out of fear, but out of intimacy.

Alyssa: Yeah, you want that to be a very intentional, intimate feeling setting.

Lizzie: I want to watch someone I care about, even if I don't know them directly. That’s the people over policy part of me. I want to walk back into a dance space and not feel I'm sustaining an organization, but that I'm supporting a person.

Alyssa: Well, Lizzie, you're gonna make me cry.

Lizzie: Yeah. What is your answer?

Alyssa: I don't know...part of me, part of me wants to go out. I do want to go dancing. I want that so badly. And then there's part of me that wants to see my friends' art. I want to go and just see a friend go be great on stage.

Lizzie: I'm a little anxious about a year of damn shows about COVID-19 or a year of dance shows about social and political unrest. That feels calculated in a way that I think is going to be a little ugly. I think, I think you think too, dance can reflect and reverberate in all sorts of ways without having to, I dunno what the word is....I don't know.

I worry about a cycle of grant applications that are, how did you respond to the COVID pandemic? Yeah, I just would love to see a dance. I think it all will reflect the political moment we're in and every person in that audience, myself included, has been so deeply traumatized in different ways but, let us just encounter it because it's gonna resonate.

I just don't want to go see some COVID dance.

Dr. Lizzie Leopold is an independent scholar of dance and performance studies and a dance maker, living in Chicago, Illinois. She is the Executive Director of the Dance Studies Association (DSA) and a Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. DSA is an 800+ member international organization of dance scholars, artists, and pedagogues. Having been a dancer/choreographer before turning to academia, Lizzie holds an Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University, an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, and a BFA in Dance from the University of Michigan. Her published works include “Staging Stars and Stripes: (Re)choreographing the American Flag” (University Press of Florida, 2018), “The Merchant of Venice’s Missing Masque: Absence, Touch, and Religious Residues” (Oxford University Press, 2019), and “The Choreographic Commodity: Assigning Value and Policing Class for Nite Moves and William Forsythe” (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). She is currently co-editing a two-volume anthology on Chicago dance histories, Dancing on the Third Coast, and will contribute essays to the volume on mid-century modern dancer Sybil Shearer and twentieth century Chicago jazz dance luminaries including Gus Giordano, Joel Hall, and Lou Conte (co-authored with Jeff Hancock). More broadly, Lizzie is interested in the intersections of dance and the political economy of its production and circulation – asking questions about cultural and financial value. Lizzie is a choreographer and director of Chicago-based modern dance company The Leopold Group.