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INTRODUCTION

When I was a little girl, I would go with my parents and my older brothers to visit my grandparents, who lived on the west side of Chicago. When we arrived, I would run as fast as I could down the street to the synagogue to see my grandfather. I sat upstairs in the balcony, where all the women sat. As I looked down at my grandfather, I saw all the men in long black coats, yarmulkes, and white-and-black-striped shawls over their heads. I never saw anything like this in the middle-class, predominantly Anglo-Saxon suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, where I grew up. Everything about the synagogue was awesome and wonderful to me. As my grandfather prayed, he chanted in Hebrew and swayed back and forth. As his prayers intensified, he would clap his hands, fling them into the air, and jump about. Although I didn’t understand what he was saying, I felt his voice and his movements within my body. I felt his passion and his heart, and I understood intuitively that he was dancing.

His dance expressed intense emotions—sadness, anger, exhortation, joy, and ecstasy. I had never seen anyone dance that way before. It was free and wild and uninhibited; it was fun and spontaneous and emotional. I didn’t feel like this when I went to my dance classes, or to Sunday school! After he finished, my grandfather and I would meet at the door. He would be glad to see me and lift me into the air and hug me. Then he would hold my hand and we would walk slowly back to his house. I could tell by the way he touched me that he loved me. I was so happy I would skip and gallop down the street with him at my side. I believed that my grandfather, with his white silky hair and his long white beard, was God and that God was a dancer.

The memories of my grandfather’s love, his dance, and his ritual have been with me all my life. I believe that what I have been doing as an adult is trying to recover the means by which I could experience a dance of such spiritual power and meaning. I didn’t inherit the same customs, community, or clear social roles my grandfather did. I can never live like him or do his dance with that sense of authenticity and devotion, but I have been driven to find a dance that moves me and the communities I work with as much as his dance moved him.

We may no longer have the kind of clear, if unspoken, agreements about the meaning and function of dance that my grandfather and his community did, but I believe we are still drawn to dance as an expression of our humanity. The diversity of dance forms we do have—folk, ethnic, ballet, modern, postmodern, jazz, tap, and street dances of all sorts—is a testament to the enduring human need to express ourselves through movement. As a longtime dance artist, my interest lies in reinvigorating our relationship to dance so that it once again serves our lives in substantive and essential ways. Throughout history, people have danced their most profound needs and struggles as a means of reaffirming harmony with themselves, with each other, and with the natural world. For traditional peoples, dance and all the arts provided an important language, communicating ideas about power, spiritual matters, and the natural world. Before written language, dance was an essential part of the oral tradition, a way of passing morals, ethics, and story from generation to generation. For thousands of years, dance has played an important role in forging collective identities among cultural and ethnic groups throughout the world. Through dance, people have marked major life transitions, from birth through initiation into adulthood to death. Dance has allowed people to vent strong emotions, such as grief or anger, as well as to express love and gratitude; and it has helped motivate community members to cooperate. Dance contributes to social cohesiveness and provides a venue where people can enact spiritual rituals and beliefs. Part of the challenge I have faced in my work is to take our practice of mostly ornamental or performative dance to a place where it can serve multiple community, social, and survival needs. This is a book about creating dances that matter to people in their real lives, repurposing dance as a vehicle for social change and community resilience.

Although dance has to a great extent been emptied of its range of meaning in our modern world, I have been lucky enough to witness how it can still bring communities together to encounter issues that may be overwhelming, unresolved, destructive, or even life-threatening. Over many decades, I have danced with a variety of people—seniors and youngsters, people of different ethnicities and racial backgrounds, the able-bodied and the disabled, trained dancers and everyday movers—using dance as a vehicle to explore our stories, create community, heal our wounds, mourn our losses, and celebrate our victories. I have been searching for dances that can define our values, unite us, and help us express our full emotional range. Through a collaborative process called the RSVP Cycles, which my husband, Lawrence Halprin, and I evolved over many decades of practice, I have tried to create dances that facilitate our search for both an individual and collective identity in the present moment. In essence, that is what this book is about—learning how to create dances that are responsive to the present moment while binding together and healing our communities.

One of my central intentions is to create dances that change the dancer and, in so doing, affect our personal, social, and cultural lives. In this urgent time, it is more important than ever that we use all the resources we have—whether they are artistic, political, service-oriented, or educational—to heal our families, our communities, our land, and ourselves. Dance and art offer primary ways for people to access their inner and collective power. We can use art expressions to contain, express, release, and heal our fears and motivate us toward social change. Movement expresses universal human responses through a vehicle we all share—the expressive, mysterious, complex human body. Dance puts us into relationship with one another and our environment, reaching into the depths of our beings and reflecting this knowledge back to us. Dance is an immediate, direct, and powerful force that bypasses discussion, argument, and difference. We all breathe; our hearts beat; we need air and water to live; we love; we fear; we suffer—all through the vehicle of our sacred bodies. Through dance, we can use our individual resources and our collective experiences and narratives to subvert the isolation of our culture and build a collective response truly answerable to our human needs.

My work and my perspective have been influenced by the dances of indigenous peoples. One event that intrigued and deeply moved me was a Corn Dance I witnessed in the Santo Domingo Pueblo, near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Corn Dance can go on for five days and nights before being completed. The dancers perform their repetitive steps over and over for hours and hours, day after day, until they finish their tasks. Often described as a rain dance, a rite of renewal and purification, its full meaning is known only to the Pueblo participants. What I witnessed was something deeply committed in this dance, the moving fierceness of the dancers’ intent. I am interested in creating participatory dances as captivating as this ceremony, and as essential. The expansion of time in such ceremonies, the commitment to the ritualized activity no matter how long it takes, moves these events out of the realm of the mundane and places them in the realm of the sacred.

My grandfather was fortunate in that he had a ritual that connected him to his people and his community, and in turn sustained his Jewish culture. Many of us do not have this kind of dance ritual or active tradition in our lives. We live in a society fractured by differences and dishonored tribal and cultural affiliations. For many of us, the absence of a solid community base creates a spiritual and social vacuum needing to be filled. This absence cries out for the creation of different kinds of rituals than the ones that functioned for my grandfather and his community. At this point in human history, there is a pressing need to integrate all the cultural, human, and natural resources to ensure our survival. Throughout my lifelong search for dances of deep devotion, I have discovered road maps that have helped many communities. By exploring how we can make dance rituals to facilitate community process, I have learned that many challenging life experiences can be confronted through dance. Some specific ones might be AIDS, child abuse, homelessness, isolation, violence, environmental destruction, racism, death, marriage, initiation, or celebration. It is my intention in this book to present a philosophy and a process that can be used to create dance rituals that apply to any important theme facing you, your community, and our world.

As we confront specific issues in our creation of embodied rituals, we gain a window into the larger, mythic polarities of life and death, male and female, good and evil, culture and nature, self and other. In dances of this sort, it is important to take a leap of faith from the specifics of the situation and look at its larger ramifications. When, for example, we confronted the AIDS epidemic in Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (see chapter 3), we also touched on a variety of bigger contexts: the struggle around life and death, the destruction of the environment, the limitations of human resiliency, the chaos and unraveling of the twentieth century, and the power of nature over culture. As we learn to reweave our personal experiences into the fabric of the larger human experience, we turn a story into a “myth” and a dance into a “ritual.” Just as the astronaut’s first look at the earth from the moon became a symbol for human unity, so too the human body in Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line becomes a symbol of our connection to one another. If one of us has AIDS, we are all ill. The personal body is a fractal of the communal body, each reflecting the other. When we dance from that kind of wisdom we expect the healing of the personal body and the collective body to arise reciprocally.

I have struggled for years to find a name for this approach to dance. I have chosen the words “myth” and “ritual,” even though there are certain problems inherent in doing so. For the purpose of this book, “myth” is defined as a series of symbols, actions, and stories that, when placed together in a certain order, create meaning and give significance to our individual and collective experience. A myth is not a fantasy or an untruth. It is a story we discover in our bodies, and it is both unique and common to us all. When expressed in words, a myth is a story; in sound, it becomes music; in visual images, a painting or sculpture; through the shaping of matter, myth becomes a dwelling, a village, a temple, a garden, or an altar; and through physical movement, a dance or drama. The term “ritual” refers to the enactment or performance of the myth, and either everyone participates or some perform while others witness it. Witnesses are different from audience members in that they have an active supporting role in the ritual; audience members observe a performance with a less conscious intention and empathize in a more passive way. Audience members want to be entertained; witnesses want to participate. In ritual theater, the audience is part of the performance; for this reason, I refer to them as witnesses.

All the myth-making rituals I’ve worked with aim to answer some fundamental questions: Who am I and where do I belong? What do I value? Who are we as a community? What is our collective identity? How can we accept our differences and find our commonalities? What is our connection to the mystery of creation? What are our attitudes about life and death? What spiritual values do we embrace? These are fundamental human concerns expressing themselves over time and place; it is remarkable how community-based dance creates an opportunity for us to learn more deeply about ourselves in relation to one another and to the wider world. Our myths identify and tap into our deeper need to take part in the mystery of life.

Although there are underlying principles governing the rituals of traditional cultures, we cannot borrow or imitate them. We can bow to the enduring power of dance ritual that our ancestors knew in their bones, but we must return to the narratives that are really our own—living in our own bodies, speaking about our own experiences—to forge a new way of honoring our human dignity. The challenge and excitement of making contemporary rituals lie in discovering and exploring what is relevant, necessary, and alive for us today. I am interested in what emerges from our present personal and collective experiences, as opposed to borrowing from other cultures and traditions outside our experience. It is our task to discover who we are as individuals and who we are in relation to earth and one another. We live in a changing world, where traditional structures are falling away. Yet, as humans, we hunger for rituals to mark the pivotal experiences of our lives. Our need to make sense and meaning out of our lives is perhaps the thing that is most specifically human, empowering us in the task of responding to the randomness of experience.

This book reveals how, when we personalize a universal experience such as living or dying and translate it into dance, the “dancing” of this experience can transform our lives. This goes beyond simply presenting real-life issues as performative images and moves into the realm of creating dance experiences that have the potential to change the dancer. A contemporary dance ritual should address the needs of the participants and attend to each individual’s personal story as well as to the universal problem the myth addresses. Encompassing diversity is one of the challenges in making this kind of ritual. We are a culture of many people from many places, and we often do not know how to bridge the distances between us. A contemporary ritual that speaks to our differences will encompass this diversity and place an equal value on everyone’s story. A contemporary ritual that speaks to our differences will acknowledge our individual responses to the universal problems facing us. In political terms, ignoring individual input and fabricating a collective view is coercive and dangerous. In ecological terms, privileging one kind of awareness to the exclusion of another creates a monoculture, which is unsustainable over time. It’s too late in the history of the world to dismiss the contributions of every individual to the strength of the whole. If we are to rebuild our culture, we must learn, experientially, how each individual story weaves into and strengthens the fabric of our collective body.

I believe we can create new dance rituals at this juncture between the individual and the collective body. But it doesn’t work to start from preconceived ideas or concepts of who we are and what rituals we think we need. We need to work with the essential language of the body and movement, a language that hasn’t been shaped so specifically by our censoring minds. This will show us what we really need, not what we think we need.

At the heart of this book are accounts of two dances: the Planetary Dance, which continues to be performed in different communities throughout the world, and Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line, which evolved from a series of community dances and affirmed that, after years of searching, my collaborators and I had found a path toward a dance that mattered. For many years I had been asking these questions: Can dance be used as an effective tool in healing social divisions? Can dance reveal myths and enable us to enact purposeful rituals? Can dance be for everyone and still be art? Can we find ways to sustain our search for our own myths and rituals? Can dance once again be a participatory and creative act of an entire community, an integrated part of its life? With the evolution of these two dances, I offer an enthusiastic “Yes!”

Today there is a large community of dance artists who are exploring how to create dances that catalyze social change. This book offers just one perspective among many possibilities. It is about all that I have discovered so far, about the different ways I have learned to release the secrets of the body and create individual and collective dances that evoke emotions and images. These are dances that facilitate change, dances that matter. It describes how I have worked to create a cultural, social, and artistic form to shape a dance of necessity. Both Circle the Earth and its offshoot, the widely performed Planetary Dance, provide an opportunity for people to come together over issues of great concern and to communicate across the borders that may separate us in our ordinary lives.