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. 226 . [  ] The Uses of Action 2 Anna Halprin After race riots in Detroit and Watts, in 1968 choreographer Anna Halprin1 began a piece she would later call Ceremony of Us. Halprin had been approached by James Wood, director of the Workshop at the Studio Watts School for the Arts, who “had recently seen a Dancers’ Workshop2 performance and felt something of the participation, freedom , and involvement between performers and audience which we create .” Wood asked to collaborate with her on a piece that would include black dancers from the school and white dancers from the San Francisco area, and would be performed during the Los Angeles Festival of the Performing Arts. As Halprin recalled, “It was part of [Wood’s] plan that people from the Watts community would come to the MarkTaper Forum, most of them for the first time, and mingle with the affluent whites who attended the Mark Taper regularly. That theater, a status symbol of ‘let me in,’ was to be, as Wood said, ‘a tool for social change’” (1995, 152). Although Halprin had never before worked with explicitly racial themes, in many ways Ceremony of Us brought to fruition her early experiments investigating the inherent efficacy of any body and her personal commitment to civil rights.3 Shuttling back and forth between her company in San Francisco and the group of dancers she assembled from the Studio Watts School, Halprin applied techniques from gestalt therapy to facilitate artistic and social experiments in rehearsal (J. Ross 2006, 267). Eventually Halprin brought the groups together for ten days in early 1969, to rehearse prior to performing in Los Angeles. As Janice Ross has argued, “As much an opportunity for redefinition as healing, the rehearsals offered all participants the chance to examine and possibly begin to re-create not just themselves but the racial attitudes of society.” However, as effective as the work was in bringing the disparate groups together, its ultimate result was inconclusive. As Ross contends, “No so much a dance as a lived experiment in attempting to erase boundaries, prohibitions, and taboos, Ceremony of Us Uses of Action 2: Halprin . 227 would turn out to be in equal measure both daring and timid, both a challenge to the status quo of racial stereotypes and an unwitting reinforcement of the sexual and class myths embedded in them” (2006, 271). Merging the symbolic and the actual in the process of making and performing a dance, Ceremony of Us carried out the cultural work of making artistic, social, and political objectives coincide and of attempting to make them coexist. In Halprin’s words, “You can separate your life from your art, but it is so exciting and full of creative possibilities if you don’t” (Halprin quoted in Ross 2006, 275). The work clearly owed, in its concept and result, to precursors in universalist modern dance, the postwar civil rights movement, and the artistic experiments of the milieu in and around the Judson Dance Theater. My intention here is not to rehearse the significance of the history of the Judson Dance Theater, as others have done so eloquently and so well.4 Instead, I wish to cast backward to the late 1950s and early 1960s and Halprin’s early development as a choreographer predating Judson’s most “prolific” year, 1963 (quoting Banes, 1993, 5–6). My goals are twofold: to probe the dimensions of her work that might have lent themselves to the ends realized in Ceremony of Us and to examine the operational basis of Halprin’s early work refracted through the lens of direct action protest. Since the late 1950s, Halprin had been exploring ways of upsetting the balance of power both within traditional theatrical settings and outside them, breaking expressive conventions and blurring lines between performers and audiences. Her pieces cultivated a sense of unpredictability that made it difficult for doers and viewers to fall into stereotypical patterns of behavior and thinking. Like Cunningham5 and Taylor, she sought to underline the position of dancer as author through an exploration of the quotidian. Halprin, however, departed from them in her use of improvisatory methods to generate performance scores. In this, Halprin stressed the constitutive process involved in the act of moving—what she called “the unfolding” (Halprin quoted in Renouf 1963, 345). While Halprin’s postwar work generated from a different root, her end results shared important characteristics of those of her white colleagues: they were nonlinear and...

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