Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (review)

Anna Halprin's life, now in its ninth decade, has been a ground-breaking journey, which she has recorded in dance event after dance event. Early in her career she rejected dance as the mastery of a specific vocabulary and repertory for performances in a theater and insisted on exploring dance much closer to the movements of everyday bodies in everyday life. Unwilling to accept the boundaries that separate dance from art, ritual, play, Gestalt psychology, healing, exorcism, and social action, Anna's work reads as a radical cultural history of the decades through which she has danced.

Janice Ross's carefully researched intellectual biography traces Anna's development from her enchantment as a child with her grandfather's dancing in a Chicago synagogue to her high school days when she was already "living and breathing dance" to her studies at the University of Wisconsin with the pioneering dance educator, Margaret H'Doubler (Ross has written her biography as well), whose methods inform Anna's teaching to this day. While at Wisconsin she met Lawrence Halprin, who became her husband in 1943 and a major figure in landscape architecture. Their shared ideas about making art in relation to nature and social concerns are an important subtext of Ross's biography.

A stint in New York indicates Anna probably could have had a successful career there, but at the end of World War II she and Larry chose to move to California, where they foresaw the freedom to explore and develop their art forms in their own way. Soon after their arrival, Anna began to ask the questions, which became the foundation of postmodern dance: What constitutes a dance? Where can it take place? Who can be a dancer? What is the role of the viewer? How can dance connect people to their own bodies, to other bodies, and to the environment? Emphasizing process over product, she experimented with improvisation, using everyday actions or "tasks," such as touching, carrying, and undressing, as movement material. She found ways of theatricalizing the tasks and structuring them into performance scores. Among those attending her workshops were Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk, central figures of postmodern dance, who brought her ideas to New York.

Anna has stayed in California energizing and being energized by what has happened there. In the 1950s she collaborated with Beat artists. In the 1960s she created the dance Parades and Changes, which epitomized Free Speech and Hippie culture. In the 1970s as an outgrowth of the Watts riot, she brought together dancers of different races to confront racism. In the 1980s she called upon dance's ancient role as a healing art for her work with AIDS, HIV, and other cancer patients.

Since the 1990s her dialogue with nature has intensified as she explores aging and dying. Along with Ross's heavily contextualized and theorized book, this reviewer recommends that readers seek out the video, "Returning Home" (2003). It reveals Anna's ongoing vitality, curiosity, and daring, and illustrates what she means when she says: "I've been playing 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" (356).