Moving Toward Life. Anna Halprin

This was a turning point for me in terms of how I viewed dance and its potential uses.

      The third aspect of my work, and the part that has challenged and nurtured me all these years, has been the ways dance has been instrumental in developing community through the expression of these myths and rituals. It seemed an inevitable direction—the experience of community—and as community became my theme, larger symbols, or archetypes, emerged. The driving, pulsing life force that motivates us all became the inspiration of my later works. The shock of having cancer and the changes it wrought on my life and my work led me to explore the relationship between dance and healing. I began to work with dance as a healing art, and with people who are challenging life-threatening illness. Compassion, health, love, catharsis, life, death—the full spectrum of humanity’s striving—needed to be contained in my evolving forms. And over and over again, returning to the mountain, or to the sea, I was fed with images and resources and power which I recycled back into the work of making vital community.

      As many of us struggle to find our spiritual identity, we can, I believe, return to dance to recover an ancient tradition that will serve us in today’s culture. The wisdom of dance and the body contains resources that can provide us with tools for the survival of life on this planet. Our connection to the earth and to one another as forms of the earth is our crucial next step. I believe that this is the wonderful possibility for dance today. Through dance we can rediscover a spiritual identity and community we have lost, and the work of making this dance current, immediate, and necessary continues to be of the greatest importance. At the moment, nature is the greatest teacher for me, the clearest voice guiding my dance. To feel and experience the earth helps me find my own deepest human nature, and I am directing much of my dancing toward this timeless, infinite theater.

      As I sit on the bench overlooking my dance deck, a flood of questions arises. What next? Where am I going? What is my work now that I am seventy-five? What do elders in other cultures do? Teach the young, heal the sick, care for the land, hold the rituals, speak with the ancestors, maintain the family. I take all these actions, and call upon the spirits, wherever they may be, whatever that might mean, and however they may appear, to lead me further into this evolution of dance to which I have committed my life. I continue to believe in the shining potential set forth by all of this work, in its evolution from rebellion to expansion to community to healing and back again to the natural world.

       Anna HalprinKentfield, CaliforniaJune 1994

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The events, performances, and workshops described in these writings are the collective result of many, many good friends and colleagues with whom I have collaborated since 1948. I have been challenged, inspired, supported, and enlightened by their contributions, and their creativity and commitment have shaped the form and development of my work in incalculable ways.

      Often ideas and attitudes have a profound yet indirect influence for many years. For that reason, I want to pay special tribute to Margaret H’Doubler, with whom I studied at the University of Wisconsin from 1938 to 1941. H’Doubler led me to explore an objective and universal path that lives within my work to this day.

      I have immeasurable gratitude for the creative input of the dancers and collaborators who helped me in the creation of my early theater works, John Graham, A. A. Leath, Simone Forti, Josephine Landor, and Patric Hickey. Norma Leistiko played a multitude of major roles for over twenty-five years as a dance performer, teacher, researcher, secretary, manager, and friend.

      The students and participants in my workshops over the years who have been the source of much of my experimental work are too numerous to mention. However, they include Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Kei Takei, Soto-Hoffman, Coni Beeson, James Broughton, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Charles Amirkhanian, Morton Subotnik, and Pauline Oliveros.

      I want to thank Alice Rutkowski, Jamie McHugh, Allan Stinson, Jasper Redrobe-Vassau, and Joseph and Eeo Stubblefield for their contributions as co-workshop leaders and collaborators of Circle the Earth.

      James Hurd Nixon deserves special thanks for his ongoing dialogues which have provided inspiration for over two decades.

      But most of all, thanks go to my husband, Lawrence, and my two daughters, Rana and Daria, for enabling this work to come to be in endless ways. My daughters inspired me to initiate the Marin Dance Co-operative, and they performed with the Dancers’ Workshop Company from its inception. They performed in every major dance and tour and substituted many hours of rehearsal time for play time. My husband has had a tremendous impact on my work, particularly in environmental and architectural awareness and the use of the RSVP Cycles. When the dance deck and studio were built on our land, I didn’t anticipate that the boundaries between work and home would be so blurred. I want to thank my family for tolerating this infringement on their privacy for these many years.

      Final notes of thanks to Janice Ross and Sally Banes for contributing essays to this collection, Rachel Kaplan for her work as the editor of this book, Suzanna Tamminen of Wesleyan University Press for her generous assistance, and the Flow Fund for its support.

       Anna Halprin

      EDITOR’S NOTE

      For the past three years I have had the pleasurable task of being Anna Halprin’s personal assistant. This means I have answered phones, typed correspondence, written and filed articles, wandered through her extensive archives, reminded her to breathe, and listened with delight to the many stories she has to tell. I have been moved by Halprin’s expansive curiosity about the work to which she has so completely committed herself, and its relevance in so many spheres, and I wanted to help her create this collection which articulates, in her own words, her many thoughts, stories, visions, and scores for dances, classes, community rituals, and events. Hence this book, which spans the range of her career, from her early work as a modern dancer and teacher of children; to her challenging proscenium-breaking theater pieces; to the community-based events which marched right out of the theater and into the streets; and her later, more contemporary works, concerned largely with ritual and the healing power of dance and movement. These essays have been edited for repetition, but otherwise are printed as they were written.

      A book of this nature allows us to see the evolution of an artist’s thinking and approach. The writings in this volume span many decades, and consequently, some of Halprin’s thematic concerns are defined in different ways over the years. For example, in 1973 a myth is a “tribal happening” created from the unification of collective energy and group consciousness; in 1974 a myth is simply an “audience participation event.” In 1986 a myth “embodies a personal and collective vision of how we see ourselves and the world,” and by 1993, myth is more specifically defined as “a narrative pattern giving significance to our existence, whether we invent or discover its meaning. 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, an altar; through physical movement, a dance or drama.” As a central quest throughout Halprin’s career, the search for myth is defined over and over again in myriad ways. Because these variations give depth to the resounding themes of Halprin’s long journey, the integrity of each essay has been preserved, although in the 1990s Halprin radically departs from some of her earlier beliefs. Essays exploring similar themes from different vantage points are reprinted here to create a larger portrait of Halprin’s evolution as a dance artist.

      Like all art, Halprin’s work can be seen in light of a few simple themes which branch out in different directions but continue in a familiar refrain. To highlight these themes, the essays are not arranged chronologically but divided into three sections. Halprin’s continual quest has been for a dance of meaning, one that comes from the authentic center of the person dancing. In addition to the theatrical pieces she conceived, she has also developed a number of systems for generating creativity and understanding the creative process, which have come to be called the Halprin Life/Art Process. The first section of this book, “The Halprin Life/Art Process: Theory, History, and Practice,” addresses the theoretical foundations of her work, including the RSVP Cycles (developed by Lawrence Halprin), Movement