Making Dances That Matter. Anna Halprin

rituals at this juncture between the individual and the collective body. But it doesn’t work to start from preconceived ideas or concepts of who we are and what rituals we think we need. We need to work with the essential language of the body and movement, a language that hasn’t been shaped so specifically by our censoring minds. This will show us what we really need, not what we think we need.

      At the heart of this book are accounts of two dances: the Planetary Dance, which continues to be performed in different communities throughout the world, and Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line, which evolved from a series of community dances and affirmed that, after years of searching, my collaborators and I had found a path toward a dance that mattered. For many years I had been asking these questions: Can dance be used as an effective tool in healing social divisions? Can dance reveal myths and enable us to enact purposeful rituals? Can dance be for everyone and still be art? Can we find ways to sustain our search for our own myths and rituals? Can dance once again be a participatory and creative act of an entire community, an integrated part of its life? With the evolution of these two dances, I offer an enthusiastic “Yes!”

      Today there is a large community of dance artists who are exploring how to create dances that catalyze social change. This book offers just one perspective among many possibilities. It is about all that I have discovered so far, about the different ways I have learned to release the secrets of the body and create individual and collective dances that evoke emotions and images. These are dances that facilitate change, dances that matter. It describes how I have worked to create a cultural, social, and artistic form to shape a dance of necessity. Both Circle the Earth and its offshoot, the widely performed Planetary Dance, provide an opportunity for people to come together over issues of great concern and to communicate across the borders that may separate us in our ordinary lives.

       1

      The Life/Art Process

       An Approach to Making Dances That Matter

      Over the many years of my career, I have evolved a series of maps to outline the territory my dances traverse. They are all rooted in a search for meaningful movement connected to somatic experiences, emotions, and our encounter with the environment. Over time, the processes I have worked with have evolved into multistep “instructions,” which can be applied by anyone wanting to create dances and rituals with community groups. Because these instructions derive their power from our individual and collective life experiences, and an inquiry into how to transform them, I call this approach the Life/Art Process.

      The Life/Art Process is a theoretical framework for dances like Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line, the dance detailed in chapter 3.¹ This process is based on the notion that movement, sensations, emotions, and images are interactive and that cultivating and exploring the interactions between them allows participants to connect with an authentic experience, free from their preconceived ideas about “Art.” Through this process, people have an opportunity to experience what is real for them, and the expression of this authentic experience is their art. This method stresses differences in human experience and individual expression, while acknowledging the inherent biological and psychological characteristics common to all human beings. The Life/Art Process therefore supports diversity as well as commonality. The process encourages exploration and experimentation, and generates new and effective responses to life situations. Through it, people can creatively identify life concerns, resolve conflicts, and support integration, both personally and within a larger context.²

      The evolution of the Life/Art Process reflects the development of my work in the dance field, from comic dancer to theater artist to someone who strives to make dances that matter to the people who dance them. As I began to incorporate real-life situations into my work, I moved from making small personal and interpersonal pieces mostly designed for the theater, to pieces that focused on larger social issues and took place in venues outside the theater. One of my most important projects in developing the Life/Art Process explored the issue of racism. After the shock and horror of the Watts riots in 1965, I launched a project with an all-black group of ten dancers from Watts, Los Angeles, and an all-white group of ten from San Francisco. Culturally, there was tension in the air, emotions were running high, the risks were great, and it was clear that we needed a new way to communicate with one another across racial lines. By creating a situation where members of these two groups had to reach out and listen to one another, we placed ourselves in a microcosm of the larger social context. There was no escaping the cultural portent of the process.

      The two groups worked separately on the same “scores” for nine months (see “The RSVP Cycles” later in this chapter for an explanation of scoring). I traveled to Watts every Saturday to work with the African American group, and during the week I worked with the white group. After working this way for nine months, the two groups came together in San Francisco and, using our real-life situations, we built a dance to confront our prejudices and learn from our differences. It was a difficult, challenging process. There were times that seemed like open warfare. We fought, struggled, cried, laughed, loved, and cared for one another. We evolved a piece called Ceremony of Us and performed it at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. It was a miraculous experiment in human contact, difference, and confrontation. In retrospect, I believe this piece was about our desperate need and struggle to survive and to learn to love the “other” as ourselves.³

      This experience demonstrated to me that if my purpose in theater and dance was to deal with individual experience, with what was really going on in people’s lives, I was going to be dealing with monsters and passion and fear, and I needed some solid and trustworthy ways to get there. I began a more conscious search for new techniques. Not the kind of physical techniques that would enable us to lift our legs higher, turn faster, fall and rebound more smoothly, or invent more dance “moves.” Instead, I was looking for techniques that would include emotional, visual, theatrical, and kinesthetic experience and offer new ways to explore human nature, individually and collectively. These new techniques needed to maximize differences and commonalities, as well as allow for mutual creation and the integration of body, mind, and emotion. I wanted new ways to listen to emotions through movement and for collaborating with other artists and interfacing with the environment.

      Ceremony of Us workshop, 1965. Photographer unknown. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.

      A few guidelines arose from my search for a dance that would meet human needs on so many different levels. The underlying principle is that as life experiences deepen, art expression expands, and vice versa: as art expression deepens, life experiences expand. This idea, when applied to groups of people, is centered around six intentions:

      1. Maximize participation. This approach is open to all people. No formal dance training is required. All movements are potentially dance, and we are all dancers.

      2. Encourage diversity. Honoring the differences in human experience, respecting individual expression, and encouraging cultural and ethnic input are essential.

      Ceremony of Us workshop, 1965. Photographer unknown. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.

      3. Search for commonality. Despite our cultural differences, there are inherent biological characteristics common to us all as human beings—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. This creates the basis for a shared language of expression.

      4. Generate creativity. A high value is given to involvement, experimentation, and exploration leading to the discovery of new and effective ways to respond to life situations. The process is free of judgmental reactions or an attachment to a preconceived outcome.

      5. Encourage life change, growth, and healing. Criteria