City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America

NOTES

273 introduction 1. For a good comprehensive review of these evolving performance practices and their early predecessors (Futurists, Dadaists, etc.), see Kirby, “The New Theatre,” 23–43. 2. Of course, Halprin’s participatory methodology may easily be situated as a counterpoint to the paradigms of Modernism, yet it is important to acknowledge that he remained resistant to the term “Postmodern” and unresolved about moving beyond the metanarrative. If one tries to situate Halprin’s work within Hassan’s chart “Schematic Differences between Modernism and Postmodernism” this lack of resolution becomes particularly acute (chart printed as Table 1.1 in Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 43). 3. The unpublished manuscript titled “Environment as Art Experience” was completed in July 1974 and was later revised and retitled as “The New Modernism: Art of the Environment.” The former title is clearly inspired by John Dewey’s Art as Experience, which influenced both of the Halprins tremendously. This manuscript by Larry Halprin is more or less a presentation of all his complex and somewhat convoluted theories on design and reception of the environment. The manuscript’s confused assertions are partially a result of Halprin’s free interpretation of a wide range of fields in these texts—psychology (Jungian and Gestalt), anthropology, religion, music, the history of his own profession (and so on)—to conveniently illustrate or support his theories. 4. Ross, “Anna Halprin’s Urban Rituals,” 57. 5. Halprin, “Intuition and Improvisation,” 11. 6. Ross, Anna Halprin, 154–55, 174–80. In fact, Anna became a regular workshop leader at Perls’s Esalen Institute in Big Sur, according to Ross, “Anna Halprin and the 1960s,” 47. 7. Ross, Anna Halprin, 177. Quotation from Ross’s interview with Anna, July 19, 1999. notes 274 notes to introduction 8. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 183. In Communitas, Paul Goodman and Percival Goodman consider how best to enable a “choreography of society in motion and in rest, an arrangement for society to live out its habits and ideals and do its work” (1). 9. Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, 89. 10. Quotations from Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 188–98. 11. See Halprin, A Life Spent Changing Places, for more on Parades and Changes (128–29) and for more sketches of fountain notations from 1962 (135, Figures 83–84). 12. He does, however, admire the innovative work of Rudolf Laban in “Motation,” 126–33, though more extensively in earlier drafts (see “Insert A” as part of a series of 1964 drafts included in a folder dedicated to Motation in the Lawrence Halprin Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, 014.I.A.6091 [hereafter cited as the Halprin Collection]). Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) studied architecture at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts and soon became interested in spatial dynamics of the moving body, sharing some parallel interests with Oskar Schlemmer. Laban was known for his unique use of the vertical staff to represent the body, a tool that Halprin adopts in Motation. Yet Laban’s system is limited only to the movement of the body—its direction, timing, and simultaneous gestures of its many parts. Thus it lacked the capability to convey the body’s shifting relationship to the environment. 13. “Motation,” 126–28. 14. See Thiel, “Notes on the Description, Scaling, Notation, and Scoring of Some Perceptual and Cognitive Attributes of the Physical Environment,” 594. 15. Since at the time (1967) Thiel was studying in Japan where landscape as sequenced approaches to temples or shrines or gardens of religious significance was an embedded cultural tradition, he proposed they consider a Japanese site. As he states in his letter: “Dear Larry, I’m spending a year in Japan in the further development of this space–sequence notation bit, and have found so far that interest here is very strong on this. Groups at Tokyo University, and at Tokyo Institute of Technology have both done a lot in using this tool: in highway planning, and in planning for new regional parks. It seems now that there are at least 7 systems in use: your ‘Motation,’ Lynch’s, mine, Stuart Rose’s, and 3 systems I have seen here! The thought has occurred to me that it would be worthwhile to all of us, in this healthy situation, to work up a direct comparison: that is, for each of us to notate the same sequence–environment. If I provided you with a detailed topo map and a set of wide-angle photos, would you be interested in...