Making Dances That Matter. Anna Halprin

      Score for In and On the Mountain, 1981. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.

      By this time it was clear that one intrinsic theme of these dances was the struggle of life against death. In 1983 the dancers and participants in our workshops presented Return to the Mountain, in which we used images from the animal world in a dance and ceremony for peace between people and the natural environment. The next day, Don Jose joined us and members of the local community for a ceremony on the top of Mount Tamalpais. He planted a feather he had received on a Himalayan peak and then led us around the top of the mountain, so we could look out and see the four directions. This moment in Return to the Mountain signaled a broadening of our view from our specific community needs to their connection with the larger world around us.

      For the following year, 1984, we decided to use running as our theme and called our dance Run to the Mountain. Our intention was to dance for peace among the peoples of the world. Peace rose up as an issue of importance to us during our preparatory workshops, and we chose to highlight running because it is a movement common to all people and it symbolized the urgency of our hope for peace. A month before the performance, we began running with banners through our neighborhoods and on the Golden Gate Bridge, both to get in physical condition and to arouse curiosity about our upcoming event. The hardiest of our group ran up the mountain from four different directions. An eighty-five-year-old participant, Jack Stack, led us on the first mountain run. For many subsequent years, running continued to be an integral part of our day on the mountain.

      As Don Jose pointed out, Mount Tamalpais, where the dance originally took place, is historically the sacred ground of the local Miwok tribe. I wanted to honor their connection to this land as we honored our own connection to it. However, in no way was I attempting to imitate or replicate Native American rituals. I seek to honor the values of this culture, not appropriate them for my own uses.

      In 1984 religious leaders from different faiths led participants around the peak, stopping in each of the four directions—north, east, south, and west—to offer inspirational words. As we made our procession, I looked out from the mountain toward the ocean and deeply felt how important it was to relate our dance not only to our mountain but to the larger world as well. At that time the greatest threat to peace on the planet was the tension between the Soviet and American superpowers and the proliferation of nuclear arms. I imagined our dance becoming a peace dance on a larger scale.

      In envisioning a global scope for our dance, I realized that a local group of dancers would not be strong enough to match this vision. The power of the performance needed to match the power of the intention. I imagined one hundred people joining together to perform this dance. I thought that if enough of us danced together with a common intention it would have the potential to create change.

      For our 1985 ritual, we decided to go beyond our immediate community and open the dance to anyone who wanted to perform. We sent out a call for participants: “One hundred performers to create a spirit voice strong enough so that our peaceful song is heard and our peaceful steps felt. The weapons of war have a critical mass. So, too, do the hopes of peace. We need 100 performers, 200 feet, to dance upon the planet for its life and its healing—to find a dance that inspires us to keep the earth alive.” Even though one person acting alone might not make much difference, we hoped that working with a large group of people would gather more and more energy around the intention of peace and increase the possibility of creating change.

      Over one hundred people came together in a high school gym, which had been transformed with banners, flowers, fruits, and special objects. I offered a weeklong workshop to ready the participants for the performance of Circle the Mountain: A Dance in the Spirit of Peace. We began with a run to the mountain, to gain inspiration for the dance, and then engaged in a workshop experience, preparing a performance for friends and the community. This was our fifth year of dancing in our quest to purify the mountain. Curiously, it also took exactly five years for the killer to be convicted. One cycle had ended, and another cycle begun.

      I renamed the dance Circle the Earth, and where it was once danced to reclaim a small measure of peace on our mountain, now it was danced to reclaim peace on the planet. This is how it was described: “Circle the Earth is a peace dance. Not a dance about peace, not a dance for peace, but a peace dance: a dance in the spirit of peace. It is a dance that embodies our fears of death and destruction, a dance that becomes a bridge and then crosses over into the dynamic state of being called peace. Circle the Earth is a dance of peacemakers. A dance that makes peace within itself, makes peace with the earth on which it moves. In a world where war has become a national science, peacemaking must become a community art in the deepest sense of the word: an exemplification of our ability to cooperate in creation, an expression of our best collective aspirations, and a powerful act of magic.”

      As with Circle the Mountain, Circle the Earth evolved from an intensive workshop process, involving movement and sound exercises, along with drawn visualizations. Although I had already developed an overall series of scores for the culminating performance, the workshop allowed the performers to find their own responses to these scores and bring their personal experiences to bear on the final creation. The nine performance scores had evolved out of my own healing process with cancer as well as years of observing participants in very open scores and noting which results were repeated over and over. Essentially, the dance progresses from starting alone to joining another person in relationship and eventually forming a group. Once we get a feeling for our own strength and the strength of the community, we are able to look at our dark side and take on the most challenging issues of our lives. Out of that effort, which inevitably entails an expression of fear and anger, comes a release, tears, and, with comforting help from others, peace. Then, we are ready to connect with the world and send this message out.

      Requests began coming in to do the dance in places other than my local community. The dance and its living myth started to travel, first to other sites in California, and then across North America to the United Nations Plaza in New York City. Using the structure developed for Mount Tamalpais, different people performed the dance in their own communities. In 1986 Circle the Earth crossed the Atlantic to Europe and the Pacific to Australia. By 1987 queries were arriving from interested parties worldwide. Although it wasn’t possible for me to travel to all of these places to create Circle the Earth, it did occur to me and to one of my Swiss students that the Earth Run, a section of the dance that we do each year on Mount Tamalpais, was a simple score that many people could adapt to their own community, no matter where they lived. If each community were to frame that dance with their own symbols and add to it out of their own community needs, the Earth Run would be a dance we could all do together, no matter where we lived. As a social species, I believe we need to come together and celebrate our unity and alignment, and to connect with the larger body of our culture and our planet. We need stories that tell of our oneness and our connection with the earth. And we need hopeful stories about living in an age threatened by pollution, nuclear devastation, overpopulation, hunger, ethnic war, and disease.

      Confronting the dark side in Monster Dance from 1985 Circle the Earth. Photo © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos.

      The Earth Run, which is designed for people of all ages and abilities, calls on participants to run (or walk) for others and to see their actions as influencing the larger whole. The point of the run is that people dedicate themselves to the health and healing of the planetary body. Embracing the overall intention of peace, each participant announces a personal intention for the run—declaring, for example, “I run for Alice and all children suffering from violence in our cities,” or “I run to bring Israelis and Palestinians together.” Moving to the musicians’ steady beat, participants run or walk in concentric circles, creating a moving mandala. Each step becomes a call for peace. When a large number of people move together in a common pulse with a clearly defined purpose, an incredible force takes over. It is a power