Making Dances That Matter. Anna Halprin

we have—whether they are artistic, political, service-oriented, or educational—to heal our families, our communities, our land, and ourselves. Dance and art offer primary ways for people to access their inner and collective power. We can use art expressions to contain, express, release, and heal our fears and motivate us toward social change. Movement expresses universal human responses through a vehicle we all share—the expressive, mysterious, complex human body. Dance puts us into relationship with one another and our environment, reaching into the depths of our beings and reflecting this knowledge back to us. Dance is an immediate, direct, and powerful force that bypasses discussion, argument, and difference. We all breathe; our hearts beat; we need air and water to live; we love; we fear; we suffer—all through the vehicle of our sacred bodies. Through dance, we can use our individual resources and our collective experiences and narratives to subvert the isolation of our culture and build a collective response truly answerable to our human needs.

      My work and my perspective have been influenced by the dances of indigenous peoples. One event that intrigued and deeply moved me was a Corn Dance I witnessed in the Santo Domingo Pueblo, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Corn Dance can go on for five days and nights before being completed. The dancers perform their repetitive steps over and over for hours and hours, day after day, until they finish their tasks. Often described as a rain dance, a rite of renewal and purification, its full meaning is known only to the Pueblo participants. What I witnessed was something deeply committed in this dance, the moving fierceness of the dancers’ intent. I am interested in creating participatory dances as captivating as this ceremony, and as essential. The expansion of time in such ceremonies, the commitment to the ritualized activity no matter how long it takes, moves these events out of the realm of the mundane and places them in the realm of the sacred.

      My grandfather was fortunate in that he had a ritual that connected him to his people and his community, and in turn sustained his Jewish culture. Many of us do not have this kind of dance ritual or active tradition in our lives. We live in a society fractured by differences and dishonored tribal and cultural affiliations. For many of us, the absence of a solid community base creates a spiritual and social vacuum needing to be filled. This absence cries out for the creation of different kinds of rituals than the ones that functioned for my grandfather and his community. At this point in human history, there is a pressing need to integrate all the cultural, human, and natural resources to ensure our survival. Throughout my lifelong search for dances of deep devotion, I have discovered road maps that have helped many communities. By exploring how we can make dance rituals to facilitate community process, I have learned that many challenging life experiences can be confronted through dance. Some specific ones might be AIDS, child abuse, homelessness, isolation, violence, environmental destruction, racism, death, marriage, initiation, or celebration. It is my intention in this book to present a philosophy and a process that can be used to create dance rituals that apply to any important theme facing you, your community, and our world.

      As we confront specific issues in our creation of embodied rituals, we gain a window into the larger, mythic polarities of life and death, male and female, good and evil, culture and nature, self and other. In dances of this sort, it is important to take a leap of faith from the specifics of the situation and look at its larger ramifications. When, for example, we confronted the AIDS epidemic in Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (see chapter 3), we also touched on a variety of bigger contexts: the struggle around life and death, the destruction of the environment, the limitations of human resiliency, the chaos and unraveling of the twentieth century, and the power of nature over culture. As we learn to reweave our personal experiences into the fabric of the larger human experience, we turn a story into a “myth” and a dance into a “ritual.” Just as the astronaut’s first look at the earth from the moon became a symbol for human unity, so too the human body in Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line becomes a symbol of our connection to one another. If one of us has AIDS, we are all ill. The personal body is a fractal of the communal body, each reflecting the other. When we dance from that kind of wisdom we expect the healing of the personal body and the collective body to arise reciprocally.

      I have struggled for years to find a name for this approach to dance. I have chosen the words “myth” and “ritual,” even though there are certain problems inherent in doing so. For the purpose of this book, “myth” is defined as a series of symbols, actions, and stories that, when placed together in a certain order, create meaning and give significance to our individual and collective experience. A myth is not a fantasy or an untruth. It is a story we discover in our bodies, and it is both unique and common to us all. When expressed in words, a myth is a story; in sound, it becomes music; in visual images, a painting or sculpture; through the shaping of matter, myth becomes a dwelling, a village, a temple, a garden, or an altar; and through physical movement, a dance or drama. The term “ritual” refers to the enactment or performance of the myth, and either everyone participates or some perform while others witness it. Witnesses are different from audience members in that they have an active supporting role in the ritual; audience members observe a performance with a less conscious intention and empathize in a more passive way. Audience members want to be entertained; witnesses want to participate. In ritual theater, the audience is part of the performance; for this reason, I refer to them as witnesses.

      All the myth-making rituals I’ve worked with aim to answer some fundamental questions: Who am I and where do I belong? What do I value? Who are we as a community? What is our collective identity? How can we accept our differences and find our commonalities? What is our connection to the mystery of creation? What are our attitudes about life and death? What spiritual values do we embrace? These are fundamental human concerns expressing themselves over time and place; it is remarkable how community-based dance creates an opportunity for us to learn more deeply about ourselves in relation to one another and to the wider world. Our myths identify and tap into our deeper need to take part in the mystery of life.

      Although there are underlying principles governing the rituals of traditional cultures, we cannot borrow or imitate them. We can bow to the enduring power of dance ritual that our ancestors knew in their bones, but we must return to the narratives that are really our own—living in our own bodies, speaking about our own experiences—to forge a new way of honoring our human dignity. The challenge and excitement of making contemporary rituals lie in discovering and exploring what is relevant, necessary, and alive for us today. I am interested in what emerges from our present personal and collective experiences, as opposed to borrowing from other cultures and traditions outside our experience. It is our task to discover who we are as individuals and who we are in relation to earth and one another. We live in a changing world, where traditional structures are falling away. Yet, as humans, we hunger for rituals to mark the pivotal experiences of our lives. Our need to make sense and meaning out of our lives is perhaps the thing that is most specifically human, empowering us in the task of responding to the randomness of experience.

      This book reveals how, when we personalize a universal experience such as living or dying and translate it into dance, the “dancing” of this experience can transform our lives. This goes beyond simply presenting real-life issues as performative images and moves into the realm of creating dance experiences that have the potential to change the dancer. A contemporary dance ritual should address the needs of the participants and attend to each individual’s personal story as well as to the universal problem the myth addresses. Encompassing diversity is one of the challenges in making this kind of ritual. We are a culture of many people from many places, and we often do not know how to bridge the distances between us. A contemporary ritual that speaks to our differences will encompass this diversity and place an equal value on everyone’s story. A contemporary ritual that speaks to our differences will acknowledge our individual responses to the universal problems facing us. In political terms, ignoring individual input and fabricating a collective view is coercive and dangerous. In ecological terms, privileging one kind of awareness to the exclusion of another creates a monoculture, which is unsustainable over time. It’s too late in the history of the world to dismiss the contributions of every individual to the strength of the whole. If we are to rebuild our culture, we must learn, experientially, how each individual story weaves into and strengthens the fabric of our collective body.

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