Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance
298
Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance
298eBook
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Overview
Anna Halprin is one of the most important innovators in the history of modern dance, performance art, and post-modern dance. Moving Toward Life brings together for the first time her essays, interviews, manifestos, and teaching materials, along with over 100 illustrations, providing a rich account of the work that radicalized an entire generation of performers.
Since the late 1950s, Halprin has been at the forefront of experiments in dance, from improvisation and street theatre to dances in the environment and healing dances. A brief overview of Halprin's career shows how her work has prefigured — and transfigured — crucial developments in postmodern dance. In the 1960s, Halprin invented the "workshop," and in the wake of the Watts riots, her multiracial company broke boundaries in their confrontational political performances. In the 1970s, she organized "community rituals" to explore how individual creativity feeds positively into group dynamics. These healing social events led to her current work with cancer survivors and people challenging AIDS and their caregivers.
Depicting Halprin's deep commitment to social change, Moving Toward Life presents an engaging, critical document of the life of one of the most influential and least known luminaries of American dance. Sally Banes and Janice Ross join Rachel Kaplan in providing introductory essays to sections of the book.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819575937 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 298 |
| Sales rank: | 801,782 |
| File size: | 44 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Award-winning choreographer, dancer, and writer Rachel Kaplan tours and teaches her performance work both here and abroad, and is a contributor to such dance-art journals as Contact Quarterly and High Performance Magazine.
Anna Halprin founded the groundbreaking San Francisco Dancers Workshop in 1955 and the Tamalpa Institute in 1978 with her daughter Daria Halprin. She is the author of several books including, Making Dances That Matter with Rachel Kaplan and Moving toward Life published by Wesleyan University Press in 1995.
Rachel Kaplan is a psychotherapist specializing in somatic healing. She has co-authored, Making Dances That Matter with Anna Halprin in 2019.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE HALPRIN LIFE/ART PROCESS: THEORY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE
INTRODUCTION
Sally Banes
When Anna Halprin turned her back on the dance establishment in the 1950s, modern dance was at its pinnacle of achievement. Among Martha Graham's dances of that decade were Seraphic Dialogue and Clytemnestra; Doris Humphrey choreographed, taught at the Juilliard School, and wrote The Art of Making Dances. Charles Weidman, José Limón, Pearl Lang, Pauline Koner, Helen Tamiris and Daniel Nagrin, Anna Sokolow, and others had successful companies. Even Ruth St. Denis was still performing, and Ted Shawn still ran the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. Generations of younger dancers and choreographers were trained each summer there, at Hanya Holm's summer dance school at Colorado College, and at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. American modern dance had established itself, but the entrenched and the status quo were not Anna Halprin's metier.
Educated as a dancer under Margaret H'Doubler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Halprin had moved to California in 1945 with her husband, Lawrence Halprin, making a career as a New York dancer a virtual impossibility, although she had danced in Humphrey and Weidman's Sing Out, Sweet Land in 1944. She could have made a career for herself as a modern dancer on the West Coast: Lester Horton worked in Los Angeles until his death in 1953, and Bella Lewitzky founded her own company after leaving Horton in 1950. But Halprin chose another path.
Although her way was unique, in the 1950s she was not alone in hewing an individual path, nor was she entirely unprecedented. The tradition of modern dance itself had been founded on individual experimentation — on antiacademic principles. But to Halprin and many of her peers, what had once been a dramatically new and eloquent art form now seemed hidebound. On the East Coast, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, James Waring, and others looked for various methods — chance, technology, collage — to escape the new academy.
At the University of Wisconsin, H'Doubler had stressed personal creativity and the scientific study of anatomy and kinesiology over the values of dance as an art form in performance. Forsaking the stylized, expressive movements and prescribed structures of traditional modern dance choreography, Halprin did not start from scratch; she had the H'Doublerian repertoire of movement studies at her disposal. But her gift was to bring these ideas to a new pitch and to place them in new contexts.
Cunningham and Halprin shared an interest in reflecting in art the arbitrariness of modern life through radical juxtapositions of disparate activities, undercutting narrative logic. Both also reacted against the emotional coloring of the modern dance establishment. If Cunningham rejected the expressionism of modern dance by looking outside the self to chance procedures as a way to generate and structure movement, Halprin at first chose the opposite extreme — going deep inside the self through improvisation. This was not, as she has said, for the purpose of self-expression. Rather, it was to plumb the depths of the human corporeal imagination, to discover capabilities that had been stymied by the conventions of modern dance. Halprin penetrated the interior of the body/mind, guiding her dancers and students to scrutinize individual anatomical workings as well as unconscious needs and desires, in the voice as well as with movement. This led to a surrealistic effect in which untrammeled psychological and movement behavior rubbed against the cool tasklike performances produced by scientific kinesiological explorations.
After thoroughly investigating improvisation with her group, however, Halprin felt the need to discover external stimuli and frameworks. This she found through various approaches, including collaborations with other artists throughout the 1960s, and a crucial abiding framework — the use of scores, which allow for individual input within an ordered collective whole.
Halprin's interest in community and the rituals that create and sustain it eventually led her away from dance as a theatrical art and toward dance (or simply movement) as a healing art — whether in social terms, as in the healing of racial divisions, or in physical/psychic terms, as in her work with persons confronting cancer and HIV/AIDS. This interest in the creation of community, in turn, led her from the incorporation of ordinary life in her avant-garde dance/theater pieces toward the appreciation of the dancer in every person, whether trained to move or not. Both her commitment to community and her architectural collaborations with Lawrence Halprin steered her to the creation of environmental performances.
In many of these arenas, Halprin has been an unsung pacesetter. She disowned the modern dance world — both its technical apparatus and its production system — early on. She used nondancers in her performances. She forsook the proscenium stage, and even the familiar dance studio. Many of the new generation of iconoclasts who revitalized dance in New York in the early 1960s — including 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.
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.
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, antithat, 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: Well, we made everything absolutely 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?
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Moving Toward Life"
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Copyright © 1995 Wesleyan University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface
I. Acknowledgements
2. Editor's Note
3. The Halprin Life/Art Process: Theory History and Practice
4. The Work in the Community
5. Leaning into Ritual
6. Appendixes
What People are Saying About This
“I could not have believed, before studying the materials gathered here, that a judicious selection of writings and key interviews could so efficiently gather up more than forty years of the work of Anna Halprin, and make it present in such a fully dimensional and freestanding fashion. After all, among the issues addressed are dance, improvisation, exploration, ‘scoring’, performance, myth, ritual, community and art as life processes, and stages of healing in cancer and AIDS (the connections traced between all these are both dense and convincing)…And the very best thing about this book is that the ideas are presented in such a way that the reader can immediately begin to move them into life and practice.”
“Here, all in one place, are documents of the theory and practice that have made Anna Halprin a magnet for generations of experimental dancers. Working in a field obsessed with surfaces, she plumbs the motive for movement, seeking and finding ways to heal the world.”
"Anna Halprin is one of the most important and original thinkers working in performance, as she has been since before the 1960s. Her impact on dance, theatre, and ritual is immense, positive, and life-giving. The only thing better than reading Halprin is working with her."—Richard Schechner
"Here, all in one place, are documents of the theory and practice that have made Anna Halprin a magnet for generations of experimental dancers. Working in a field obsessed with surfaces, she plumbs the motive for movement, seeking and finding ways to heal the world."—Elizabeth Zimmer, Dance Editor, Village Voice
"I could not have believed, before studying the materials gathered here, that a judicious selection of writings and key interviews could so efficiently gather up more than forty years of the work of Anna Halprin, and make it present in such a fully dimensional and freestanding fashion. After all, among the issues addressed are dance, improvisation, exploration, 'scoring', performance, myth, ritual, community and art as life processes, and stages of healing in cancer and AIDS (the connections traced between all these are both dense and convincing)And the very best thing about this book is that the ideas are presented in such a way that the reader can immediately begin to move them into life and practice."—Robert Ellis Dunn
"Anna Halprin is one of the most important and original thinkers working in performance, as she has been since before the 1960s. Her impact on dance, theatre, and ritual is immense, positive, and life-giving. The only thing better than reading Halprin is working with her."
