Moving Toward Life. Anna Halprin

visible. The stage was completely visible, stripped of curtains, flats. The light sources were completely visible, movements were everyday movements that everybody could identify with. They were task-oriented. Like “build a scaffold and when you’ve built it, go up to the top.” They were risky and they made people excited and created a kind of a tension. The music was live by people we collaborated with who sometimes became dancers, like sometimes we became sculptors. So that was very unfamiliar, people would get charged up. Emotionally insecure.

      NANCY: It sounds like you started out with the kind of mood of the times, of challenging the assumptions that were in your field, and in the process you realized that you were cutting across more than artistic boundaries but also social taboos. Was there political content in any other way?

      The automobile created a wonderful environment for movement. I was attracted to it as a prop with so many possibilities—visual, audible, kinesthetic, symbolical. From Automobile Event, A. A. Leath and Lucy Lewis, 1620 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, 1968.

       Photo by Rudy Bender.

      Automobile Event, Norma Leistiko facing camera, John Graham on car, 1968.

       Photo by Rudy Bender.

      We began to pay attention to the feedback process between movement and feeling. Circle the Earth, 1985.

       Photo by Paul Fusco.

      ANNA: In a sense, yes. There were very few grants in those days, and they were very small. One of the reasons we took to the streets, just went outside, was that this was a place to perform. A place where you could have ready-made audiences. You didn’t have to go through the expense and the machinery of putting out brochures, getting the press and renting halls. And audiences would be wherever they were. We wanted to perform. So we went to the streets, to beaches, to bus stops, to abandoned buildings, to anywhere.

      Well, this became a political issue as we found ourselves getting arrested over and over again. It became a political issue regarding the right of using the street territory. When were we obstructing the peace? We were behaving in a way people were unfamiliar with and people would get irritated about it. So finally we did a march with blank placards, as a procession through the city. Well there was an ordinance that you have to have a permit if there were more than 25 people in the group. So we would have 24 people go at a time and then we’d leave a space of about a block between us, but we kept it going. We had a hundred people or so doing this.

      What we were really trying to build up to was a dance throughout the whole city. You could get permission to perform in a park, but we wanted to be able to use the whole city as we wanted to. So in a way we were rebelling against the restrictions that were put on artists performing in the environment.

      NANCY: So it wasn’t that the piece was a political satire, but the doing of it was challenging some political definition. Where did it go from there?

      ANNA: Making scores for an audience to perform. We did a series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, open to the public, where we led 100 to 500 people in performing various scores. This led to the development of Citydance, which was performed from sunrise to sunset, in subways, neighborhoods, parks, plazas, hillsides and the ocean. We did Citydance for three years as a statement that the city was a place to be creatively enjoyed by all its inhabitants.

      Then in ’64 and ’65 we began to go back to exploring on a personal level, and the workshop modality became very important for us. We wanted to withdraw and look at a more inner world within the person. Really study the social terrain of the person, the whole person. This was at the time of the human potential movement. This was the time also that we began our first serious training program.

      NANCY: When you say “whole” person, what do you mean?

      ANNA: The emotional life, which dancers rarely study. Dancers studied movement. But movement is related to feeling, and we had no system for looking at those feelings that were evoked through movement. Nor did we have any idea of how the mind was really functioning in relation to movement or feeling.

      During that period in the ’60s, there were all these conferences on body-mind-spirit, as if they were separate. But in terms of what we were exploring, we said there is no separation. They’re in a single impulse. There is the mind working in terms of images which think faster than the linear verbal thinking process. But images are like dreams. They go instantaneously with the movement, with the impulse to move, and the feeling. And so we were working with that integrated power. And at the same time realizing that was also taking us to the connection between artistic growth and personal growth, and that the two went hand in hand. And this was, again, part of a larger issue going on: the Human Potential Movement, which has had an incredible impact, all over the world.

      Now what that led us to was dealing with real-life issues. And it’s as if all the work up to this point was laying the groundwork to deal with real-life issues. All this was the foundation.

      NANCY: You’ve got the context of the society and then you’ve got the individual.

      ANNA: And we’ve got the tools. We developed a system of movement, a system of working with emotions. We studied eight years with Fritz Perls, who worked with Gestalt Therapy, which is “the whole is greater than the parts.” He worked specifically with our company. So we had this system for working with emotional material that came up and also with imagery. This is called the PsychoKinetic-Visualization process, which we use now with people challenging AIDS and cancer. But we developed that then.

      NANCY: When you say you developed “a system of movement,” what do you mean?

      ANNA: Simply that if you do not teach people a traditional or idiosyncratic style and instead you set up a situation to move in, you systematically give people the opportunity to develop a full range of original movement. You set up movement situations that evoke emotional responses, situations in which the movements may be extremely assertive or very passive, or with partners in intimate contact. This will tend to bring up a lot of emotional material, which we then process. We do a lot of drawings of images and dance them. That’s called the PsychoKinetic-Visualization process.

       In dealing with real-life issues, we had to find a way of moving, feeling, and making images. These three images show the development of the self-portrait work done by Nicolette Uta, 1987.

       Photos by Anna Halprin.

      In dealing with real-life issues, to be totally authentic, we had to find a way of moving, feeling and thinking that would become new tools. Like when I got cancer, and I wanted to deal with that issue on a level of healing. I had to have an open-ended vocabulary. How did I know what I was going to do until I worked with it? If I had a stylization of movement, it would have been predictable. I could not have gotten past what I already know.

      One of the things about working with real-life issues is that it can be transformative. You work with an issue because it is unresolved, and through the dance, we hope to discover new possibilities. It’s not about the dancers and it’s not an interpretation of a theme, it is real. And by doing it you get to a different place with that issue, and in your life. The dance changes the dancer.

      The purpose is to create change. That’s when we started using the word “ritual.” To distinguish that from dance as entertainment, dance as spectacle. Not that