The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is bringing its inclusive philosophy of dance to the Rhode Island community for two weeks. Above, a diverse group goes through warm-up exercises at Beneficent Congregational Church in Providence yesterday.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

PROVIDENCE You’re a dancer; everyone is. Liz Lerman says so.

“That is saying something,” says Jim Brown, 49. “I’m not very limber.”

That doesn’t matter. Yesterday, the 49-year-old Providence actor, who had never taken a dance class, was a dancer. That is to say, he was a participant in a Liz Lerman Dance Exchange workshop at Beneficent Congregational Church.

“I wanted to see what would happen,” Brown says.

Well, about 60 people gathered in a room. They sat and stood, walked and talked, improvised poses and, most basically, breathed — all of which Lerman, one of the nation’s leading innovators of dance, considers forms of dance.

“Breathing is moving.”

And dancing is living, according to Lerman, who says we understand ourselves and others through our bodies.

“I would advocate that the body belongs in conversation,” Lerman says. “But in our society, where we’re trained to restrain our gestures while speaking, we have to manufacture opportunities for that to happen.”

Dance. It’s open to all ages, and all at once, which showed in the workshop. Participants ranged in age from 4 to 82.

“I am a dancer,” says Venus Irving-Prescott, 82, of Pawtucket. “But I do not dance now.”

Lerman, a pioneer of some provocative dance principles, disagrees.

We are all dancers, regardless of age or physical ability. And no experience is required. In fact, she says, sometimes none is desired.

“I’m interested in people dancing. I love dancers dancing, but I want them to be like people dancing. Technique sometimes covers that up.”

This workshop was the first event in a two-week residency for the Liz Lerman Exchange, which is as advertised: an exchange.

“We come with questions and some movements and materials,” says Cassie Meador, a choreographer, dancer and project director with the Exchange. “The rest is up to the people.”

The residency is sponsored by numerous organizations at Brown and RISD, most notably Brown-RISD Hillel, an organization for Jewish students. The residency will end Feb. 3 with a community-based performance of one of Lerman’s works, 613 Radical Acts of Prayer.

“We’re really excited about what radical acts of prayer mean for secular people and people from different faiths,” says Shirah Rubin, Hillel’s director of engagement and special initiatives. “We thought this would be a fruitful opportunity to experience spirituality within a diverse community and to use the arts as a means of exploring this.”

Rubin says she and the other organizers of this event were drawn to Lerman’s philosophy, which is to involve people in art rather than observe it. “Many times dancers or artists come and it’s a performance. What’s exciting about her methodology is it’s partnered with communities.”

That’s at the core of what Lerman does: engage communities and all members in it — young and old, the physically able and the disabled. In 1976, Lerman, 60, founded her company on different ideas of dance: that it shouldn’t just be for dancers; that it should be multigenerational; and that it can include dialogue.

“At the time, that was a radical thought. I was so condemned for so long. My position is ‘Why not talk?’ What’s the big deal? Sometimes you talk. Sometimes you don’t.”

Talking may matter, Lerman says, when dance is being performed. Otherwise, she says, dance is understood.

“When we’re all doing dance, I don’t think you need many stories. But when you’re watching and we’re dancing, I think the rules change.”

Lerman, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, first boldly changed the rules of dance when she set a piece, about her late mother, on older nondancers.

“That changed everything for me. In those days I did call them old, and they were old. Then it wasn’t like the 60s was the new 30s. They were old.”

And they had no training, which Lerman welcomed.

“It’s more real. I think you’re limited to your stories if you only have 24-year-old women who only weigh a certain weight and pull their hair back in a certain way.”

Lerman’s adjunct company members include two with disabilities, one of whom is in a wheelchair. Lerman’s nine core company dancers range in age 24 to 72, which includes Martha Wittman, who taught dance to Lerman in the 1960s at Bennington College.

“The connection between the generations is beneficial,” Wittman says. “The learning goes back and forth all the time.”

The local workshops that will lead to a show are more about participating than watching.

“Those who watch a dance may walk out and say, ‘It’s about this and this.’ But when you’re in it, it’s more likely you’ll walk out and say, ‘I thought this and I felt this.’ It’s a little more poetic.”

Most wouldn’t characterize yesterday’s workshop as dance. Participants walked and talked, struck their own poses and mimicked others. But in so doing, they learned how they felt and, by body language association, how others around them felt. Then Exchange members took what they heard and saw and created an expressive, communal improvised dance.

“They surprise themselves,” Meador says. “They are shocked at what they can do and what you can do in a group.”

The movements were modest, more gesture than dance. But dance as most would know it was done. Members of the Exchange performed a portion of Lerman’s emotionally moving Small Dances About Big Ideas, which commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials.

The participants in this workshop will create their own version of 613 Radical Acts of Prayer. The work is an exploration of diverse forms of spirituality, about what unites and divides us. The title draws from Judaism, the 613 mitzvoth, or commandments, contained in the Torah.

The piece, when performed by members of a community, is subject to change, and, in fact, does change from group to group.

“We’re just beginning to understand what this project is,” Meador says. “We don’t come in and say, ‘We know what 613 Radical Acts is.’ ”

People in the community will tell the Exchange what 613 Radical Acts is, then show them, among others, in a performance open to the public.

“My hope is seeing your neighbor dance would make you go out and dance and would provoke you,” Meador says.

The 613 Radical Acts of Prayer project, which builds on other ideas Lerman developed decades ago, she calls “ahead of its time,” a kind of reality TV without the TV, and the mean spiritedness.

“We’re putting real people out there. The difference is we’re protective of them. We don’t build it on competition and don’t treat people poorly.”

brourke@projo.com