Moving Toward Life. Anna Halprin

art-making. Both the now defunct San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop (1955-78) and the fully operational Tamalpa Institute (1978-present) were founded to ensure the development and deepening of the Life/Art Process. Sally Banes has contributed an introductory essay that places these discoveries within the larger context of dance history.

      A unique aspect of Halprin’s career has been her unfailing ability to remain contemporary—to shift her concerns to match the concerns of the time. In that light, it is no surprise that her work of the late 1960s and early ’70s reflects the social upheaval of that American landscape and is concerned with racism, the development of multicultural community, and issues of power between women and men, elders and children, performers and audience. At this time, the Dancers’ Workshop began to create what Halprin called Events—nearly synonymous and synchronous with Allan Kaprow’s Happenings—group experiments in which audience members were an integral and creative part. Simultaneously, the Dancers’ Workshop was exploring various body-centered therapies, altered states of consciousness, and shifts in lifestyle, and their work was reflective of this research. Halprin also initiated numerous street theater events and formed a multicultural dance company. The section of the book which describes this work is titled “The Work in Community.” Janice Ross has contributed an essay to this section, contextualizing these developments.

      During these convulsive years, Halprin discovered a convulsion of her own—cancer. This traumatic experience has changed her life and her art, and continues to determine, in large part, the direction of her activities today. After this encounter with her own mortality, she became more committed to making a useful art rather than a decorative one, and she became interested in the significant healing functions of movement as well. Large-scale experiments in community theater and healing grew out of this impetus and are described in the third and final section, “Leaning into Ritual.” In an essay introducing that section, I discuss the ramifications of this direction in Halprin’s career.

      A portrait of Halprin’s lifework would show a true search for place and meaning—for the individual and the community—in the body, in the family, and in the world. Halprin’s work has grown and developed, as she has grown and developed, from the individualistic search of the “creative” artist to the more expansive search of a community leader working in service to the collective. I hope the essays in this book will give you insight into the heart and mind and work of Anna Halprin, an artist whose vision has significantly stimulated and fed generations of dance, theater, and visual artists. Her continuing challenges to become embodied, to tell our stories, to feel our lives through the center of our bodies and come together in community, represent, I believe, central human strategies for our survival.

       Rachel KaplanJune 1994

      MOVING TOWARD LIFE

      Movements were of the everyday sort that everyone could identify with. They were task oriented. For example, build a scaffold and when you’ve built it, go up to the top. Parades and Changes, 1965.

       Photographer Unknown.

      THE HALPRIN LIFE/ART PROCESS:

      THEORY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE

      INTRODUCTION

       Sally Banes

      When Anna Halprin turned her back on the dance establishment in the 1950s, modern dance was at its pinnacle of achievement. Among Martha Graham’s dances of that decade were Seraphic Dialogue and Clytemnestra; Doris Humphrey choreographed, taught at the Juilliard School, and wrote The Art of Making Dances. Charles Weidman, José Limón, Pearl Lang, Pauline Koner, Helen Tamiris and Daniel Nagrin, Anna Sokolow, and others had successful companies. Even Ruth St. Denis was still performing, and Ted Shawn still ran the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Generations of younger dancers and choreographers were trained each summer there, at Hanya Holm’s summer dance school at Colorado College, and at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. American modern dance had established itself, but the entrenched and the status quo were not Anna Halprin’s metier.

      Educated as a dancer under Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Halprin had moved to California in 1945 with her husband, Lawrence Halprin, making a career as a New York dancer a virtual impossibility, although she had danced in Humphrey and Weidman’s Sing Out, Sweet Land in 1944. She could have made a career for herself as a modern dancer on the West Coast: Lester Horton worked in Los Angeles until his death in 1953, and Bella Lewitzky founded her own company after leaving Horton in 1950. But Halprin chose another path.

      Although her way was unique, in the 1950s she was not alone in hewing an individual path, nor was she entirely unprecedented. The tradition of modern dance itself had been founded on individual experimentation—on antiacademic principles. But to Halprin and many of her peers, what had once been a dramatically new and eloquent art form now seemed hidebound. On the East Coast, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, James Waring, and others looked for various methods—chance, technology, collage—to escape the new academy.

      At the University of Wisconsin, H’Doubler had stressed personal creativity and the scientific study of anatomy and kinesiology over the values of dance as an art form in performance. Forsaking the stylized, expressive movements and prescribed structures of traditional modern dance choreography, Halprin did not start from scratch; she had the H’Doublerian repertoire of movement studies at her disposal. But her gift was to bring these ideas to a new pitch and to place them in new contexts.

      Cunningham and Halprin shared an interest in reflecting in art the arbitrariness of modern life through radical juxtapositions of disparate activities, undercutting narrative logic. Both also reacted against the emotional coloring of the modern dance establishment. If Cunningham rejected the expressionism of modern dance by looking outside the self to chance procedures as a way to generate and structure movement, Halprin at first chose the opposite extreme—going deep inside the self through improvisation. This was not, as she has said, for the purpose of self-expression. Rather, it was to plumb the depths of the human corporeal imagination, to discover capabilities that had been stymied by the conventions of modern dance.¹ Halprin penetrated the interior of the body/mind, guiding her dancers and students to scrutinize individual anatomical workings as well as unconscious needs and desires, in the voice as well as with movement. This led to a surrealistic effect in which untrammeled psychological and movement behavior rubbed against the cool tasklike performances produced by scientific kinesiological explorations.

      After thoroughly investigating improvisation with her group, however, Halprin felt the need to discover external stimuli and frameworks. This she found through various approaches, including collaborations with other artists throughout the 1960s, and a crucial abiding framework—the use of scores, which allow for individual input within an ordered collective whole.

      Halprin’s interest in community and the rituals that create and sustain it eventually led her away from dance as a theatrical art and toward dance (or simply movement) as a healing art—whether in social terms, as in the healing of racial divisions, or in physical/psychic terms, as in her work with persons confronting cancer and HIV/AIDS. This interest in the creation of community, in turn, led her from the incorporation of ordinary life in her avant-garde dance/theater pieces toward the appreciation of the dancer in every person, whether trained to move or not. Both her commitment to community and her architectural collaborations with Lawrence Halprin steered her to the creation of environmental performances.

      In many of these arenas, Halprin has been an unsung pacesetter. She disowned the modern dance world—both its technical apparatus and its production system—early on. She used nondancers in her performances. She forsook the proscenium stage, and even the familiar dance studio. Many of the new generation