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Anna Halprin: Origins of an Innovator
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Movement pioneer Anna Halprin reveals her secret of longevity, and speaks about the past, present, and future of mind-body consciousness
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Anna opens her heart to nature at Mountain Home Studios, where she continues to share a lifetime of passion for improvisation, movement, and the environment
Hand in hand we bounce off together, and I do my best to emulate her actions. Every second step we hit hard, dropping all our weight into our feet and letting out loud grunts. “Hunh!” Step, stomp, “Hunh!”… “See!” she cries, “that’s what I mean by getting grounded on the downbeat.”
So goes the morning with Anna. The nearby sight of Mount Tamalpais framed by towering redwoods inspires me on this clear summer morning. Refining my hip-hop moves with a woman of 87, I’m secretly thrilled every time her attention turns to me. I’m well aware that this woman twice my age has an infinite storehouse of knowledge to share, and as she’s happy to tell you, it’s because she’s never stopped learning. Her life has been a continuous exploration into the mystery of the body as the seat of consciousness. “The body is a microcosm of the cosmos.” When visitors to her studio wince at the sight of the human skeleton hanging in attendance, she smiles. “All of our movements begin with the bones.”
It’s quite reasonable to say that no one dancing today can move a muscle without running into the legacy of movement pioneer Anna Halprin. Without her groundbreaking work that basically defined the term “post-modern dance,” modalities such as contact improvisation and 5Rhythms™ would have found much less fertile ground in which to flourish. The core belief of Halprin’s work is that the body informs the mind and that dance is a consciousness-raising experience accessible to anyone willing to move. Consistently pushing the envelope and breaking boundaries for her entire career, Anna has never been happy to tread where others have gone before. Hailing from the Midwest, at age twelve she was teaching her friends and their parents basic movements and improvisation in neighborhood classes. Education in the progressive schools of Winnetka, Illinois, in the ’30s exposed her to creative learning that incorporated drama, folk dance, painting, sculpture, and music, and emphasized connection with nature.
From these beginnings, Halprin would go on to become an influential and controversial teacher and choreographer. Encouraged by Margaret H’Doubler, her dance instructor at the University of Wisconsin, to think of dance as a tool for self development rather than just performance, Halprin has used her teaching practice to inform her choreography. The title of H’Doubler’s landmark book, Dance: A Creative Art Experience, captures the essence of Halprin’s work. Exposure to modern dance luminaries Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham helped develop Halprin’s preferences early: Humphrey’s work was much more accessible, while Graham seemed to be more concerned with appearances.
Mind, body, and society
Relating consciousness to creativity, Halprin says, “I think that the uniqueness of dance is that you are the instrument. And so whatever you experience is transformative and actually does alter the physical, emotional side of your body. My consciousness does change when I dance. I know that it’s a very special state of being and it’s when everything in your body is integrated. When you are totally integrated you’re not being completely directed by your mental faculties, but you’re being informed by the intuitive intelligence of the body.” Halprin explored the dialectic between mind and body when she spoke on KQED public radio in 2006. “There are essentially two ways of working with the body. One is when mind informs the body. When mind is telling you what to do. Theother is when body itself informs the mind. It becomes your body and you are able to have experiences that go beyond conscious thinking.”
After arriving in San Francisco at the end of World War II with her husband Lawrence Halprin, the Bauhaus-influenced landscape architect, Anna found a freedom of thought on the West Coast that allowed her creativity to flourish. The tumultuous decades of the ’60s and ’70s were marked by the breaking of cultural taboos and by works that challenged the notions of divisions in society. “The dance that really broke the modern dance mold was a particular piece called Parades and Changes in which we did a ceremony of dressing and undressing and introducing the naked body on concert stages…It was because of that I was blacklisted for years here in this country. We did it in New York two years later and I was issued a warrant for arrest for indecent exposure…So anyway, it was upsetting but fun and I felt very rebellious and it just made me want to break more barriers, as many barriers as I could break.”
Years later, in 1968, when Halprin was invited to Watts in the wake of the infamous riots of 1965, it was the racial barrier she would tackle. In Ceremonies of Us, she took a company of 11 white dancers from San Francisco to work with 11 black dancers from Watts to “deal with the racial issue.” Halprin says, “I wanted to deal with it by maximizing our differences and learning what our commonalities are. What we have in common without giving up who we are.” Describing the performance: “I had all the black people line up in front of one door to the theatre, and all the white people line up at another. So when you came in as an audience you thought ‘oooh, which door am I supposed to go into?’ That’s the way we started our performance—a line of black people, a line of white people. And then they saw the process of how we came together, how we fought, how we kicked and screamed, and how we loved. At the very end bowls of water were brought out and the performers just washed each other, stroked each other, loved each other. Then they went out into the audience and formed two lines and went outside. We took our music and our drummers and they danced together with the audience. So that was a healing…not in a hocus pocus way, just reality. It was totally experiential.”
A pathway to healing
Confronting her own mortality after a bout with cancer in the ’70s, Halprin focused much of her later work on the theme of healing. “Before my illness I lived my life for my art. After my illness, I lived my art for my life.”
Life, art, and community merged in her next major project, a workshop series and performance in 1977 entitled Citydance that involved the entire city of San Francisco. The lines were blurred between performers and population in this conceptual piece that used “ready-made” staging and “found” choreography.
The idea of using dance as a healing force was expanded outward into society in 1981 when Halprin organized a dance ritual to reclaim Mount Tamalpais in Marin, California. In and On the Mountain preceded the capture of the “trailside killer” by only three days, and Halprin was advised afterwards by the 106-year-old Huichol shaman Don José Mitsuwa to continue creating healing dance rituals.
Ceremony as community process
As one who has been fortunate enough to witness Anna’s community work firsthand, I’m inspired to think that dance may hold the secret for the longevity of our world. Anna speaks about the essence of her pioneering life in a fascinating biography by Janice Ross, Experience as Dance. “There is a secret to longevity in dance: I found a process, which enabled me to access my creativity through dance…I have been playing for these many years in the open field of dance, where life experience is the fuel for my dancing, and dance is the fuel for my life experience.”
Once again I’m hand in hand with Anna, only this time we’re skipping in the sunshine with hundreds of people of all ages in an open field in west Marin. Twenty-six years after the first healing ritual on Mount Tamalpais, the Planetary Dance continues to focus community energy on a different issue each year. The Planetary Dance has spread to over 300 communities in countries around the world. The score for this celebratory ritual is reminiscent of a Native American circle dance and consists of three segments in which participants are invited to call out their intention, and then run, walk, and finally stand in the center with the drummers and musicians. “Dedicate this to someone close to you who needs healing,” Halprin shouts to the crowd from the center. For the second round she exhorts, “Dedicate this to a condition in the world!” As I stand in the huge circle for the third time catching my breath, contemplating the power of collective intention, Anna speaks simply, clearly, invitingly: “This one’s for the children.”
John Veltri and Marguerite Lorimer of “Earth Alive” are producing “Planetary Dance,” a documentary film about the global impact of Anna Halprin’s annual community dance for peace.
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For more information, visit:
annahalprin.org, tamalpa.org, earthalive.com
1926
Anna Halprin begins her dancing career at age 6, dancing with her family in Wilmette, Illinois. She begins teaching dance to her friends at age 12. Her first major public appearance is a performance at age 14 onstage at the Chicago Worlds Fair.
1954
The _rst year after construction of the famous deck at Mountain Home Studios brings visits from Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. The deck is also the setting of Halprin’s _rst workshops exploring improvisation and the environment.
1965
Succeeds in breaking the modern dance mold and achieves international notoriety with Parades and Changes.The controversial onstage nudity sequences provoked a media outrage after premieres in Stockholm, Sweden, and New York City.
1977
In the upheaval following the Harvey Milk and George Moscone assassinations, the conceptual piece Citydance unites the entire city and population of San Francisco with performers as “virtual” participants on a “found” stage.
1981
The public workshop Search for Living Myths and Rituals through Dance and the Environment leads to the reclamation of Mount Tamalpais from the “Trailside Killer” with the performance ritual In and On the Mountain.
2007
The 26th annual Planetary Dance is celebrated worldwide as a ritual prayer for peace and healing. Perfor- med by communities in 30 countries on six continents, this rapidly grow- ing interactive event focuses on a di_erent theme each year
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Touched by the hand of a legend, Tamalpa graduate Rana Stewart embodies the essence of Halprin’s work.