Moving Toward Life. Anna Halprin

Dance.

      By 1988, we had 73 groups in 36 countries performing a score called “The Earth Run,” from Circle the Earth, every spring at the same time. That brought up for me the need and the importance of a planetary consciousness as another issue. That we needed to expand and find new ways that we could link together so that never again could we feel ourselves as nation against nation.

      Then, this year, 1989, was perhaps the most challenging, the most rewarding performance which I’ve experienced in my whole life. This was dealing with the AIDS issue. It was the AIDS issue, but the myth is—how do we deal with death. This has been my personal issue since I had cancer in 1972. And this is where my personal research and my competence was put to test. Because for me, this dance was the ultimate test of dance. First of all, the alienation and fear around AIDS in this area is intense. People with AIDS are feeling totally isolated and discriminated against and fearful. I said, what we’re going to do is get people with HIV positive, ARC and AIDS, and I’m going to work with them for a year, which I have been doing. I’m working with a women’s group called Women with Wings, Women with AIDS. I’ve been working with the Steps Theater Company, People Challenging AIDS. We’ve been working with the men since last June (’88) and with the women for about six months. Separate, because the women originally were working with the men but they said that they had separate issues.

      Then I said, “It’s time now to invite the community to come and dance with us. To join us. To support us.” Up until one week before the event, we only had 40 people. It was like people got cold feet. They’re afraid of getting AIDS. And even the people with AIDS weren’t registering—“Can I trust this process? I’m making myself totally visible.” I was just freaking out, they won’t do it. Only 40 people, I can’t believe this. So I did a massive telephoning. I just called everybody and all they needed was reassurance. Finally, by the last week we had about 35 people with HIV, ARC and AIDS dancing in the workshop with 70 people who didn’t have it, totalling over 100 people.

      The issues were so real and so devastating, and so powerful. We were dealing with death as a way of living life fully now. And we were dancing with people who are in fact facing the issues of death. And people who were scared, “Will I get AIDS?” And the dance, which was Circle the Earth—this time called Dancing with Life on the Line, totally changed. You couldn’t recognize it as the same dance.

      I asked each person with AIDS to come forward onto the space and call a support person that doesn’t have HIV or AIDS, that you’ve made friends with, call them out. Then I said, “Why did you call them, what are they to you?” Each person had a different issue, and they used it in the performance. For example, a young man called out, “Andy—I’ve fallen in love with you. Will you still love me with the AIDS virus?” One girl called Urike out and said, “Urike, are you still afraid of getting AIDS from me?” And Urike faced her and said, “I was at the beginning, I’m not now. Now I’m afraid that I don’t have any purpose in my life. And that I will die without any purpose.” Somebody else called someone out and said, “Will you be there for me if I get really sick?” and she answered, “I will love you, I will support you, I will not let you out of my sight!”

      It was really touching. These were real issues that they were dealing with, put into performance. And at the end of the performance, people felt so empowered, so together. The people in the audience, the witnesses, would cheer them. The performers started the dance by running forward and shouting, “I want to live!” The witnesses were with them and so supportive—crying and laughing and clapping and cheering, tears just streaming from their eyes.

      A parent came up to me saying, “We didn’t know our son had AIDS until the performance. It’s his way of telling us.”

      And so the dance did work. It transformed. It brought people together, they overcame their fear and isolation. We did a restoration at the end of the dance. We invited any witness who had HIV, ARC or AIDS to come into the center and be restored. And anybody who’d lost a lover or a friend or a member of the family, to come and join in the circle, to be restored. And then anyone who chooses to support it. And gradually everybody joined.

       STEPS Theater Company for People Challenging AIDS performs a triumphant dance of the immune system, San Francisco, 1988.

       Photo by Margaretta Mitchell.

      I have never had an opportunity to do anything that was so bottom line. This is the real stuff. Where do you go from here? You know, this is dying or living. What people are capable of doing when they’re motivated is astonishing. And one man who was scheduled for a blood transfusion didn’t have to have one, his T-cell count went up from 40 to 250 in five days which means his immune system has strengthened. So that dance, in terms of dealing with an issue, was for me the most successful because it worked one hundred percent.

      NANCY: How is an event both successful on the level of the issue, and to you artistically? It has to be meaningful and authentic, and at the same time it has to “work.”

      ANNA: That’s right. My greatest challenge is to confront issues authentically and at the same time develop scores that generate powerful creativity for the dancers. I want social issues to be expressed imaginatively and in what to me is good art. I’m terribly concerned that when I take on a social issue it should not completely over-shadow the artistic aspect. This has been a problem for me.

      I wasn’t excited about the first few mountain series dances, because I was still working with a limited company concept. And I didn’t feel the form was original or sufficiently reflective of the content. I didn’t start getting excited until we started working with groups of 100 people and I could begin working with all kinds of people, dancers and nondancers who were totally committed to the issues of peace and healing. And working under the pressure of five days to create and perform the dance meant that participants were required to cooperate at a very high state of alertness. And by necessity the scores had to be essential and archetypal.

      I guess I’m also, at heart, a theater person. I’ve been in theater all my life and I think of myself as an artist, a theater artist. I was at a dance critics conference and I was referred to as doing religious dance. I don’t do religious dance! It’s not religious, it’s not political, it’s not therapy, it’s not anthropology, it’s not sociology, and yet it’s all of those things. I’ve come to trust that because I am an artist, and come from that perspective, that what I make is art.

       NOTE

      Nancy Stark Smith is the editor of Contact Quarterly in collaboration with Lisa Nelson. She is one of the leading innovators of Contact Improvisation.

      THE MARIN COUNTY DANCE CO-OPERATIVES:

      TEACHING DANCE TO CHILDREN

      I began to teach dance to children in 1940 as a student intern at the University of Wisconsin where I was getting my undergraduate degree. In Boston (1942-43) I taught children again, both at a settlement house for impoverished youth and at a private school for children from wealthy families. I learned an important lesson during these years about the environmental influences on movement, socialization, and childhood development. When I moved to Marin County I became instrumental in developing the Marin County Dance Co-operatives (1947), and through the Dance Co-op I taught dance for the next twenty-five years to children in the community where I lived. I loved teaching children, although I did not value it in the same way I valued my life as a performing artist, and I learned many things about creativity and spontaneity from children, which later found their way into my work as a performer and teacher of other artists.

      The following text is excerpted from my writings of 1949-57.

      THE MARIN COUNTY DANCE CO-OPERATIVES

      The Marin County Dance Co-operatives are a collective