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Reviewed by:
  • Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance
  • M. Candace Feck (bio)
Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance. By Janice Ross; foreword by Richard Schechner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; 445 pp.; illustrations. $34.95 cloth.

Anna Halprin's profound influence on the often separately considered histories of dance, environmental theatre, landscape architecture, and the expressive healing arts has spanned much of the previous century and promises to extend well into the present one. Through all of these boundary crossings and still others where she has left her imprint, a prominent throughline has remained Halprin's inexorable habit of challenging the basic assumptions that govern any given discipline. The signature pattern for her might be described as engagement through interrogation, and in so doing, a dismantling of the outer wrapping of the discipline, allowing her to penetrate it until she reaches, and embraces, its core. Questions that have stood her well over time are those that are most fundamental: Who can engage in this practice? Who is served by it? What are its limits? What is its social value? What are its inherent benefits to the practitioner herself? Certainly, this precise tack has characterized her enduring relationship to dance, leaving, among other footprints, her unquestionable implication in the postmodern dance movement of the 1960s that flourished at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, a venue in which she never even performed.

Janice Ross has produced an exhaustive book that chronicles nearly nine decades of Halprin's life and work, establishing, as the title promises, her reverence for life experience at the center of artistic practice, and the reciprocal power of the two to inform and transform each other. Ross's approach is to install her subject within a sweeping cultural history of the times. As she develops her narration of Halprin as daughter, student, Jewish American citizen, teacher, artist, wife, collaborator, activist, and healer, she provides a cross-section of each slice of her historical era as well. Progressing through its pages, readers encounter such relevant and vivid landmarks as VJ-Day in 1945, when Anna and her husband Lawrence sat on a hill above the Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard, enthralled spectators of the citywide celebrations below them; a portrait of the nation's fascination with the television program Candid Camera, in which the ordinary is framed as theatrical; an intimate view of the civil rights movement by focusing on the Watts riots of 1965, through an observation of Halprin's process in making her Ceremony of Us (1969); a tumultuous ride through the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco on the Gray Line Bus Tour, illuminating dual notions of social protest as theatre and everyday life as a spectator sport; and a feminist consideration of Halprin's most recent dances about aging and death, viewed against the dominant discourse of the beauty industry with its championing of cosmetics and elective surgery for the aging female body. Throughout the extensive range of Halprin's interests and engagements, Ross deftly unfolds a social history germane to that topic, and continually returns to her titular claim, revealing the recursive essence of Halprin's work as the transformation of lived experience into dance and the investigation of dance as lived experience.

The book opens with an authoritative foreword by Richard Schechner, who was inspired as a young director by Halprin's Parades and Changes (1965),1 and is followed by a compelling preface [End Page 174] in which Ross recounts a story once told by Halprin during a 1961 lecture-demonstration at Stanford University (xii). It is a telling and effective introductory parable, featuring the shattering of a teacher's teacup as a metaphor for the iconoclastic artist who is the book's subject; it also constitutes a discreet frame of personal reference, for although the excerpt predates the author's involvement with Halprin, it gestures toward Ross's present role as a professor at Stanford. In the middle of these book-ends lies the trajectory of the author/subject relationship: an early and sometimes ambivalent association with Halprin, first as student spectator, later as aspiring dance critic, eventually as the author of an important work on Halprin's teacher Margaret H...

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