Moving Toward Life. Anna Halprin

Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk—were inspired by their studies on the West Coast with Halprin. So were important visual artists and musicians of the next generation, including Robert Morris, LaMonte Young, and Terry Riley. Her outdoor performances in both urban and pastoral landscapes prefigured the environmental pieces that swept New York by storm in the 1970s. Since the late 1960s, she has worked with multicultural groups specifically to struggle with racial and ethnic tensions. In the 1980s and ’90s, her work with men and women challenging HIV/AIDS and cancer, as well as her large group dances for the environment and for world peace, once again showed visionary thinking coupled with compassionate action.

      This first section of Anna Halprin’s collected writings lays out the history and theory of her lifelong exploration of dance and movement. It shows a lifetime of intelligent analysis, courageous innovation, unwavering commitment, and, above all, a passion for dance, art, and life.

       NOTE

      This introduction is based, in part, on information gleaned from my conversations with Anna Halprin and Janice Ross, and also from Janice Ross’s forthcoming book, Anna Halprin: Revolution for the Art of It (Berkeley: University of California Press), as well as Anna Halprin s writings.

      1. “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin,” this volume, p. 75.

      THREE DECADES OF TRANSFORMATIVE DANCE

      INTERVIEW BY NANCY STARK SMITH

      NANCY: Today is April 13, 1989, we’re in Kentfield, California, at Anna’s house. We’re having a talk about work that Anna’s done over the years that relates to social and political issues.

      ANNA: Dealing with issues has many layers. It’s only political when it begins to affect our economy. But it can affect us culturally. It can affect us deeply emotionally. We can say that the Watts riots, which I’m going to get into later, was a political issue, but it was much more than a political issue. It was a cultural issue of a dominant Anglo-Saxon society over a subdominant minority culture. It was an issue of prejudice which is a psychological, emotional issue. So when I think of issues I really tend to think of them on all those layers simultaneously. When they are deep enough in our culture they will ultimately affect our economy and then they become political and social. So that’s a good landmark to know when something has gone that deep.

      I think of the late ’50s and up to the mid-’6Os as being a very crucial time in the arts for dealing with one of the most prevalent issues of the time which was anti-establishment, and which led to the hippie movement. During that period we were often referred to as avant-garde. Though we were doing things that were new or against the common values, we were really attempting to search out what was authentic, what was real, as opposed to accepting what was the conformity of the time.

      NANCY: Artistically or socially?

      ANNA: Both. Because they were completely connected. Simple things, like modern dance had become accepted. You had the three or four major dance companies. All the Graham dancers looked alike. All the Humphrey dancers looked alike. You looked like the person who was leading your company, who in a sense was a guru. Your movement style, your philosophy, everything. You wore the same kinds of costumes. And you always went with bare feet. It wasn’t just me who felt that rebellion. Musicians were rebelling, like Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, against Stockhausen or whoever was the traditional modern musician of the time.

      NANCY: On what level do you think you were challenging the tradition?

      ANNA: Movement, particularly. There was the Graham style, etc. And that became very much a conformity. So all of that had to be reexamined. You had to find new compositional forms as well as new movement. That’s how the whole idea of task-oriented movement and my particular interest in Mabel Todd and her approach in her book The Thinking Body arose at the time. I was interested in going back to my roots with my original teacher, Margaret H’Doubler, where we really looked at movement from the point of view of anatomy and kinesiology with a strong emphasis on creativity. And so I started doing improvisation as a way of getting away from the a-b-a forms. Looking at space differently. Why did we have to be in a proscenium arch? If you did perform in a stage area then you used the aisles, the ceiling, and you used the pit, all the inside and the outside spaces. And along with that you began to take issue with what your role was as a dancer. Who said we couldn’t speak, sing, build environments? You didn’t have to go around with bare feet, you could wear shoes, dresses, or no clothes at all and go naked.

      When we did Parades and Changes in New York City and used nudity, I was very surprised when we started getting the kinds of reviews we did. It was made fun of by the New York Times: “The no-pants dancers from San Francisco.” We were not self-conscious about what we were doing. It seemed to us a very natural thing to do. It was very natural to the other artists we were working with. That was a time when there were all these interdisciplinary connections, we were breaking down the narrow role of the dancer. The dancer could be a musician, a musician could be a dancer, the audience could participate. And we were so dead serious about it, it seemed so absolutely normal to us. Also I was surprised because we had gone to Sweden where there was nothing radical about what we did. The use of nudity was accepted as a ceremony of trust.

      It occurred to me that we were doing something very anti-establishment in New York when we started taking our clothes off and we could hear people in the audience whisper, “Oh, they’re not going to do it … Oh my God … they did it.” And I saw policemen backstage. Before Parades and Changes, we had done other kinds of smaller performances but this was the first major full-length piece by the Dancers’ Workshop.

       We look at movement from the point of view of anatomy and kinesiology. Norma Leistiko teaching in the training program, 1974.

       Photographer Unknown.

      As we began to perform some of our smaller pieces, we began to notice that the audience was getting very unglued. They either wanted to do it with us, at us, or somehow or other be involved. And so they started throwing things at us, yelling and shouting and really getting very [laughter] involved.

      NANCY: What were you actually doing?

      ANNA: We were doing things that were very unexpected. Breaking rules without letting them in on it. Going into their territory. I mean I buy a ticket and I sit in my seat, somehow or other I’m buying my space. And what are you doing in my space? What are the boundaries now? You’re getting me all stirred up; does this give me permission to react any way I want? So I began to realize that we were breaking tradition, that we were involving other people who weren’t in on the process. And so as a result of that, they’re telling us something, which led us to do scores for all the people to perform.

      In a way, that kind of audience reaction had its own excitement and certainly on a social level was making a statement about “anti”; anti-this, anti-that, react, make your voice felt. What was instructive about that response was that it was part of the times. People rebelling and being very dramatic, saying, “I want to be heard!” But it stopped right there. We felt there was a lot of power there and it wasn’t being channelled in a creative way.

      NANCY: Would you say that audience reaction was the issue, the driving force?

      ANNA: Absolutely. It was a great driving force. Without that reaction I think we would have gotten stuck in our own indulgent way of just doing our own exploration, forgetting that the audience is who you are performing for.

      NANCY: What were you actually exploring in that work?

      ANNA: