Moving Toward Life. Anna Halprin

what it means to them on a personal level. They’ve been able to validate those scores in terms of their own personal experience. That’s how it works.

      What happened in Watts was that through the workshop and by doing these movements together and by dancing together and drawing and making our images, we developed into a loyal group. We started out being scared to death of each other. And curious. It’s hard to believe this but in ’67 this was the first time that this particular group from Watts had ever been in any kind of an intimate relationship with a group of white people. And vice versa.

      It was also an issue of economics. I would say that the black group was essentially poor. The white group may not have been individually affluent, but we had resources. It was a totally different economic situation between groups. That was an issue too. And in 10 days we became absolutely loyal as a group. Not separate. We kept saying, “If we can’t solve our differences and our problems, do you think the world out there can? We’ve got to do this and we’ve got to show the world that we can do this.” When we performed it at Mark Taper it was like—See, we can do this. We can live a different life. And we did do it. There was an interracial marriage, there were lifelong friendships.

      That was our first big real political issue, social issue, that had a huge impact. Not only in Watts but up here [in the San Francisco Bay Area]. We started a multiracial company as a result of that, which was called the Reach Out Program and was funded by NEA’s Expansion Arts Program for 12 years. Then we toured all kinds of places, including the American Dance Festival, Soledad Prison, neighborhood theaters, schools and colleges, and began to take on Chicanos and Asians, American Indians. It became very apparent to me that dance had been dominated by an Anglo-Saxon culture. I was just astonished at the prejudices that I didn’t even know I had. I didn’t know a damn about this scope of movement on an ethnic level. The company began to develop classes in black dance. Not like Harlem ballet, but rather out of the origins of black dance.

      Each member of the multiracial company went through a training program, and they developed their own form of dance which came right out of the street—the Asians developed their form of Asian dance, and American Indian dance, and it just was wonderful.

      We had to develop a new criteria for movement, and we did this through a new theater piece called Animal Ritual. Because I found that if we used animal imagery, we could all use our own cultural background and it wouldn’t matter. We did this dance at the American Dance Festival.

      So that went on for 12 years. The impact lasted for 12 years. Until Reagan came in and Expansion Arts guidelines changed completely and we lost our support.

      NANCY: Really! Was that a natural cycle for it or do you think it was cut off?

      ANNA: It was cut off. Prematurely. There was a lot more work we could have done. A lot of these people in the company were developing themselves as artists, they just needed another boost. However, many of them to this day are doing their own thing. Just today somebody called me from the company and said, “I’ve just been reading about the drug warfares that are going on in San Francisco and it’s getting so bad that black people are saying that the young people are killing each other off and I can’t stand this any longer. I’m going to see if I can set up some workshops in the Hunters Point area and start some activities there based on the RSVP Cycles, and see if I can be a force in turning this thing around.” So it seems like it’s recycling.

      There was continuous development and research around our processes that we were constantly sharpening. Every time we’d do something there were always new challenges that we’d then try to incorporate in our training and in our work, try to understand a little better. So we always were having our workshops going on and trying to develop our systems.

      And then I would always have these projects I personally was interested in. Somebody came to me and said, “Would you do something at our gerontology society?” and suddenly I became interested in the whole issue of the aging process and realized that that was a big issue. Economic and political. In preparing for the workshop, I thought, “What are the issues for them?” For me, the issue was that old people, again, are isolated. The same issues come up over and over again: isolation, separation, and fear. It comes down to that every single time. The issues with the blacks, the issues with Citydance, male and female—isolation, alienation, separation, and fear!

      Then for quite awhile I didn’t do anything because I didn’t have anything that excited me, that seemed real, that was a real issue, till we had the murder on the mountain [Mt. Tamalpais]. Then that started this generic cycle which we now call Circle the Earth. It started in 1981 with a two-day and night dance called In and On the Mountain and the issue was the killer on the mountain.

      There was a trailside killer who’d been on Mt. Tamalpais and killed seven women on the trails over the course of two years, and so the trails were closed, and this became a spiritual issue, because the mountain was closed to us. I felt that the issue there was violence in our society, and the attack of our spiritual dimension, because the mountain is the spiritual symbol in our landscape. It’s where people go to meditate, where people go to return to nature, where people go for the sense of returning to their roots, their nature. It’s the highest spot. It has this symbolic shape to it of yearning, of seeking, and that really got to me. I really got enraged over the sense that this was being taken from our community at a time when I felt this is what our search was. In the ’80s, our search was for spiritual meaning, for the purpose of our life. We were facing extinction, on every level. What was the meaning of our life? What did we have to live for? I felt that was the most crucial issue.

      I didn’t start out by saying, “We’re going to dance about the killer on the mountain.” I just said, “What’s the myth in this community?” What are our myths to live by? I just put it out in the community that we were going to do an exploration of, a search for, living myths, and we were going to do it through movement and the environment. One hundred people came, and we worked for nine months and sure enough the mountain kept reappearing in everybody’s drawings. I said, “What is this saying to you?” And all of a sudden, “Phew,” big explosion. We are enraged, we’ve been disempowered, we have no channel to express our feeling. So that became the myth and the issue—the violence on our mountain.

      That first time, the Tamalpa company did the dance for the community, using the resources we developed in the workshop. But we were still dancing in the theater. Then we went up to the mountain with 80 people and did various activities at the top—planted trees, read poetry, sang songs. We defied the killer and we walked down the mountain. Our purpose was to reclaim the mountain. A few days after the performance the killer was caught. The tip came from someone in the community. Now the community felt they were part of it.

      Then Don Jose Mitsuwa, a Huichol Indian, came to me and said, “The healing of the mountain will not work unless you do it for five years.”

      So we did a series for five years. Always with the company. I never particularly felt the performances worked. We would take a different theme every year. The big change came when it became a peace dance. The idea was that we would exemplify a peaceful way of being through the way we created the dance. And also, I said, “We can’t do a peace dance with a company. It’s got to be done with 100 people.” I just knew that it had to be a huge scale. And 100 people had to learn how to work together in nine days. That fast. Because there was urgency behind it.

      What I required was that they find a conflict in their personal life, in their family life, in a community or in a relationship and that they find a way to resolve that peacefully, and find peace in themselves. After the dance they were required to make a specific application, in their life, and in the world. They were to join a group, or make a donation, or they had to do a peaceful act, in the world. It wasn’t enough to just dance it.

      We took the dance to different places in the world and different groups would have different visions and different ideas. I’d pick up an idea from people who did it in Switzerland and share it with the people in Australia. And the people in Australia introduced the didgeridoo and I would bring that back here. So it was wonderful because by the time I’d bring the dance back home it was totally different because of