Lily W. Susskind
Interview with Lily from Unsung Baltimore, 2010.
Improv with Janel Leppin at High Zero 2011.
Android, from Terrible Secret of Lunastus, BROS, 2011.
Lily W. Susskind founded the Effervescent Collective in 2008 as a way to acknowledge the contributions of the dancers that work with her in dance making. It has since developed into a vehicle for all of its members to explore and promote the power of movement. In addition to Effervescent, Lily dances locally with Guardian, a vernacular dance preservation group in Sandtown; She is an advocate of Lindy Hop (aka Swing Dancing) and vernacular jazz traditions. Lily has travelled twice to Tel Aviv to study Gaga, the movement language of Ohad Naharin. Sometimes, Lily ends up working in theaters, which turns out to be the opposite of her usual choreographic sensibility. She enjoys contributing to the face melting of Baltimore Rock Opera Society (B.R.O.S.) Sometimes, Lily works as a waitress/hostess/temp to pay bills. Since 2003, Lily has worked five seasons for the Summer Stages Dance Festival outside Boston, MA, managing varios projects including collaborations with the Institute of Contempory Art and The Choreographer' Project Fellowship. Lily would like to hang out at the Folklife Collections at the Library of Congress.
In 2004, Lily lived in Salvador da Bahía, Brazil while volunteering at an orphanage in the Tancredo de Neves favela. The contrast between the Bahían approaches to movement/music and her experience in New England sparked her later academic interest in Dance Anthropology. During a semester at Sarah Lawrence College in 2005, Lily had many awesome teachers that helped her connect the dots. Toni Schultz - professor of Dance & Media - introduced Lily to the writings of Michel Foucault. Historians Komozi Woodard and Rose Ann Thom encouraged Lily to pursue her interest in African-American music and dance traditions, in conjunction with anthropology. Awarded a $2,000 Innovation Grant in 2007 by Goucher College, she created the site-specific installation Hounddog vs Golddigger (2008), that examined the religious inheritance of a mind/body division and acknowledged pop culture's African-American movement/music inheritance. Effervescent Collective was born.
While organizing dance opportunities and advocating for dance students at Goucher, Lily began investigating Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process as a useful alternative to the academic convention. CRP continues to influence the language and organization of Effervescent Collective. Recently, Lily is thinking about protocols for engaging literature can be applied to dance analysis and criticism.
Lily works with Effervescent Collective to bring dance to a wider audience in Baltimore - particularly the already thriving music scene. In fall 2010, she won an Ignite Baltimore grant to create a comprehensive web resource for dancing and dancers in Baltimore, bmoredancehub.org. It's not perfect yet. Far from it. In November 2011, she was awarded a 'b-grant' by the Baker Fund in recognition of her contributions to arts in Baltimore city, she used the funds to continue her study of Gaga, and help to bring more of it to Baltimore.
