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The Life/Art Process
An Approach to Making Dances That Matter
Over the many years of my career, I have evolved a series of maps to outline the territory my dances traverse. They are all rooted in a search for meaningful movement connected to somatic experiences, emotions, and our encounter with the environment. Over time, the processes I have worked with have evolved into multistep “instructions,” which can be applied by anyone wanting to create dances and rituals with community groups. Because these instructions derive their power from our individual and collective life experiences, and an inquiry into how to transform them, I call this approach the Life/Art Process.
The Life/Art Process is a theoretical framework for dances like Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line, the dance detailed in chapter 3.1 This process is based on the notion that movement, sensations, emotions, and images are interactive and that cultivating and exploring the interactions between them allows participants to connect with an authentic experience, free from their preconceived ideas about “Art.” Through this process, people have an opportunity to experience what is real for them, and the expression of this authentic experience is their art. This method stresses differences in human experience and individual expression, while acknowledging the inherent biological and psychological characteristics common to all human beings. The Life/Art Process therefore supports diversity as well as commonality. The process encourages exploration and experimentation, and generates new and effective responses to life situations. Through it, people can creatively identify life concerns, resolve conflicts, and support integration, both personally and within a larger context.2
The evolution of the Life/Art Process reflects the development of my work in the dance field, from comic dancer to theater artist to someone who strives to make dances that matter to the people who dance them. As I began to incorporate real-life situations into my work, I moved from making small personal and interpersonal pieces mostly designed for the theater, to pieces that focused on larger social issues and took place in venues outside the theater. One of my most important projects in developing the Life/Art Process explored the issue of racism. After the shock and horror of the Watts riots in 1965, I launched a project with an all-black group of ten dancers from Watts, Los Angeles, and an all-white group of ten from San Francisco. Culturally, there was tension in the air, emotions were running high, the risks were great, and it was clear that we needed a new way to communicate with one another across racial lines. By creating a situation where members of these two groups had to reach out and listen to one another, we placed ourselves in a microcosm of the larger social context. There was no escaping the cultural portent of the process.
The two groups worked separately on the same “scores” for nine months (see “The RSVP Cycles” later in this chapter for an explanation of scoring). I traveled to Watts every Saturday to work with the African American group, and during the week I worked with the white group. After working this way for nine months, the two groups came together in San Francisco and, using our real-life situations, we built a dance to confront our prejudices and learn from our differences. It was a difficult, challenging process. There were times that seemed like open warfare. We fought, struggled, cried, laughed, loved, and cared for one another. We evolved a piece called Ceremony of Us and performed it at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. It was a miraculous experiment in human contact, difference, and confrontation. In retrospect, I believe this piece was about our desperate need and struggle to survive and to learn to love the “other” as ourselves.3
This experience demonstrated to me that if my purpose in theater and dance was to deal with individual experience, with what was really going on in people’s lives, I was going to be dealing with monsters and passion and fear, and I needed some solid and trustworthy ways to get there. I began a more conscious search for new techniques. Not the kind of physical techniques that would enable us to lift our legs higher, turn faster, fall and rebound more smoothly, or invent more dance “moves.” Instead, I was looking for techniques that would include emotional, visual, theatrical, and kinesthetic experience and offer new ways to explore human nature, individually and collectively. These new techniques needed to maximize differences and commonalities, as well as allow for mutual creation and the integration of body, mind, and emotion. I wanted new ways to listen to emotions through movement and for collaborating with other artists and interfacing with the environment.
Ceremony of Us workshop, 1965. Photographer unknown. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.
A few guidelines arose from my search for a dance that would meet human needs on so many different levels. The underlying principle is that as life experiences deepen, art expression expands, and vice versa: as art expression deepens, life experiences expand. This idea, when applied to groups of people, is centered around six intentions:
1. Maximize participation. This approach is open to all people. No formal dance training is required. All movements are potentially dance, and we are all dancers.
2. Encourage diversity. Honoring the differences in human experience, respecting individual expression, and encouraging cultural and ethnic input are essential.
Ceremony of Us workshop, 1965. Photographer unknown. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.
3. Search for commonality. Despite our cultural differences, there are inherent biological characteristics common to us all as human beings—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. This creates the basis for a shared language of expression.
4. Generate creativity. A high value is given to involvement, experimentation, and exploration leading to the discovery of new and effective ways to respond to life situations. The process is free of judgmental reactions or an attachment to a preconceived outcome.
5. Encourage life change, growth, and healing. Criteria for success are based on the impact of the work in your life, the lives of others, and the environment surrounding you.
6. Develop aesthetic standards. This is achieved when a balance is struck between life experience and art expression.
Expressing your experience while experiencing your expression, moving your senses while sensing your movement—that is what makes any life movement a dance. That is living your life “art”-fully.
ORDINARY MOVEMENT
A fundamental tenet of the Life/Art Process is that we begin with the common language of movement. Everyone has a body and every body moves. None of us has to be taught how to move because we are all already moving. The language of movement is our most fluent tongue and a language all human beings hold in common. This is the key to its power to communicate, create relationships, evoke emotion, and influence our experience. For many cultural, religious, and moralistic reasons, many people today, especially in white Western culture, have shut down the full range of sensation, motion, and emotion. We emphasize sight and hearing almost to the exclusion of our other senses, especially the kinesthetic sense, but the totality of what we know comes to us through all of our senses, not just our eyes and ears. As we devalue our senses, we diminish what we know and can possibly know about one another, the world, and ourselves. We abandon our capacity to fully experience ourselves and the world in which we live.
Because many of us live at such a distance from our bodies, the use of ordinary, intrinsic movement is at the core of my approach to dance. I am committed to reconnecting people to their dancing bodies, even if they have no identification with being a dancer. I want a dance that any body can do—young or old, able-bodied or disabled, trained or untrained. This means the most efficient language for dance is pedestrian, common, quotidian movement. Despite how we have been culturally conditioned to ignore the signals of our bodily wisdom, we nonetheless live in our bodies every day and rely on them to participate in every aspect of our lives. So in referring to “ordinary movement,” I literally mean the movements that make up the tasks we do every day: the way we walk, sit, stand, and run. The way we pick things up and put them down, the way we hold a child, the way we relax, the way we lift and drop, the way we wash the dishes. The ways we encounter one another—our voices, our songs, and our simple caresses—also are included in my dance vocabulary. We often move without thinking, yet everything we know and have experienced is reflected in the movement of our bodies. Ordinary movements of the body structure our experiences and our expression. And this kind of movement belongs to all of us, regardless of our political beliefs, our racial or religious heritage, even our individual lived experiences. This commonality is perhaps the most open-ended opportunity for us to meet across the social barriers that so often constrain our human interactions.
When we open ourselves up to all of our senses and learn to listen to what our bodies are telling us, we often find ourselves at odds with dominant cultural injunctions against feeling and responding authentically. Reclaiming ordinary movement as something important and meaningful is a resistance to routine disregard of the body. Working with people using dance to express issues that are central to us brings us quickly to a place of commonality, empowerment, and the possibility of transformation. Activating the kinesthetic sense and experiencing our bodies as resources, rather than liabilities, can help move us across outdated social boundaries that limit our compassion and our love. We can reinhabit the whole body, and in so doing, gain a dimension of understanding, creativity, and connection to the mystery of the universe that is unavailable to us when we try to understand our lives only through mental analysis.
AWARENESS OF YOUR EMBODIED SELF
I think of “the body” as a multilayered energetic form, comprised of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies. The patterns of the body reflect and influence all the patterns of our lives. The physical body is the material aspect of the form—muscles, bones, tendons, blood. It is the site of sensation, and an awareness of this body gives us a continual experience of intrinsic motion. We can experience the physical body in the pulse of our blood and the wave of our breath, in our locomotor movements, and in the physical tasks we do. An awareness that we are constantly in motion is available to all of us and is at the root of what I call “dance.” As we explore and work with task-oriented, natural movements to create a common language for the physical body, we are deepening our capacity to feel what our bodies naturally do: breathe, pulse, flow, stop, start, and so on.
The emotional body is that part of us which responds with anger, happiness, sadness, concern, empathy, or any other emotion. There is a feedback process between physical movement and emotion that both illuminates and motivates our bodies. The emotional body is not separate from the physical body, but its responses are different. Emotions form a particularly human language and need to be understood on their own terms. This can often be read on the surface of our bodies. For example, a tightly contracted, pounding fist might give rise to anger, while a softly contracted chest might generate sadness. If you change the movement to a tensely contracted chest, your emotion might change to fear. Try throwing your arms into the air with an expanded and open chest and say, “I am so depressed.” It’s incongruent. There is a profound relationship between how we move and the emotions we feel. This indivisible relationship forms the common language of the emotional body. I have found that working with simple instructions that direct dancers to the connection between movement and emotions helps deepen our capacity to feel our emotional versatility and range.
I draw a distinction between feelings and emotions. The word “feeling” refers to a physical sensation and our awareness of it. The word “emotion” refers to our reactions to our experience and our mental associations with it. So the “feeling” of a particular movement might be of contraction while the emotion might be “scared.” Or the sensation of a gentle touch may give rise to the emotion of being loved and cared for. Being able to distinguish between feelings and emotions increases our somatic literacy and helps us know ourselves that much better.
When we work with movement and emotions, associations and images inevitably arise. These images, associations, and thoughts arise through the actions of the mental body. In my workshops, we take time to draw these images and create stories from them. The content—the meaning—of our movement surfaces in these drawings and provides us with an externalized reflection of our subjective experience. This is one way we turn our experience into something we might commonly call “art.” Visualizations form a common language of the mental body. We reflect, write, and share the meaning of our drawings with one another, and this level of communication makes us more visible to one another and to ourselves. This method, called the Psychokinetic Visualization Process, is one way to articulate the mental body without losing connection to the nonverbal nature of movement. (See “The Psychokinetic Visualization Process and Healing Through Dance” later in this chapter.)
The spiritual body is the most mysterious body of all, and it may be that the spiritual body always exists beyond the reach of words to describe it. It is the body that is endowed with the capacity to experience our connections to each other and the natural world. It is the body that is not only aware of the mystery of existence, but is most completely part of it. The spiritual body is, in one profound sense, our constant, fluctuating relationship to the life force. My deep commitment to dance stems from its ability to place me more consciously in touch with feelings of love, compassion, and the timelessness of being—the spiritual aspects of my self.
WHEN ORDINARY MOVEMENT BECOMES DANCE
What is the connection between ordinary, everyday movement and “dance”? How do we make the shift from one to the other? I believe this shift happens when we choose our movement for reasons other than the purely functional. When our awareness is focused on the expressive qualities of movement, we begin to experience it as dance. This awareness is available to anyone, regardless of any specific movement training. Dance, in these terms, is about intention, and not about the specific movements or actions themselves. Deep breathing can be a dance if we come to it with a quality of awareness and curiosity. Setting the table or sweeping the floor can be a dance. Imagine the possibilities for invigorating our lives when we bring this kind of awareness to movements we do every day.
The “techniques” I want to impart are ones that cultivate the whole person as a dancer rather than ones that make the dancer into a physical technician. When the four main levels of awareness—physical/kinesthe-tic, emotional, mental, and spiritual—are equally included in the process of creative expression, a bridge is made between unconscious and conscious awareness connecting the individual’s inner experience with external expression. It is because of the connections between movement, emotion, image (content), and spirit that we are able to uncover our personal stories and myths, as individuals and in community. The discovery of the personal myth and its relationship to the collective myth is the first step in creating a dance that will speak to the real-life situations and needs of the dancers and witnesses.
I want to make dances in which the movement itself is so real and direct that it will create an experience in the present that does not need to be mediated by an act of interpretation. It is not so much a matter of inventing interesting, clever, or evocative movements to access the body’s inner wisdom. It is more a process of finding an ordinary movement that is essential, one that serves the intention of the dance. Reaching, stretching, backing up, turning around, running, falling, rising are all ordinary movements, but when they are selected in relation to an intention and you notice the emotions and images they evoke, they transform into an artistic expression of who you are. When done with self-awareness, these ordinary movements create a visceral response in both dancer and witness. This kind of dance is filled with meaningful movements that serve a special intent.
Try this experiment. Put your arm out in front of you with your palm facing up. Notice what emotions arise. Then twist your hand so the palm is facing forward. Notice if this evokes a different response. Another experiment: Bow your head with the image of prayer. Then bow your head with the image of shame. How is that different?
This kind of movement can be generated in two different ways. You can generate a movement and see what experience it evokes. This can be as simple as enacting the instruction “Extend your arm and hand from the shoulder blade, and notice what happens.” By following this direction, you are allowing the mind to lead the body. What is important is that you are not being prescriptive about movement—you do not seek a movement to evoke a specific state. Rather, you notice what state the movement evokes.
A different approach is to just sense how your body wants to move, without any preset ideas. You don’t choose the movement; the movement chooses you. Think of some of our common descriptions of movement in relation to emotion. We jump for joy. We wring our hands in grief. We stomp in anger. When emotional states are intense and images clearly defined, the appropriate movements will arise.
One of the great attributes of movement is that it is malleable. You can be guided into discovering movements you would never think of doing yourself because of all your conditioning. Our belief systems have so shaped our responses that we tend to repeat the same habitual, inhibited patterns over and over again. Yet, in a safe and trusting atmosphere, you can be guided into doing movements that are totally fresh and new, that would never have come out of your own stimulus-response patterns. These movements may not seem to match the way you think you feel, yet when you do them, they open up a whole new vocabulary, a whole new possibility in life that you didn’t know was there.
When leading a workshop, I try to create the conditions for this kind of movement to arise. It’s important to establish a nonjudgmental atmosphere, where people understand that nothing they do is wrong. We’ve been loaded down with so many shoulds and shouldn’ts that we’ve lost the capacity to fully experience ourselves and our truths through our bodies. I am not interested in teaching a particular style of movement; rather, I want people to get in touch with how they move naturally, without aiming for a particular effect.
My teaching involves a balancing of structure and freedom. Imagine that you’ve come to my studio for a class. We might begin with the physical body, with the question: Where am I in my body? Here’s what I might instruct you to do: Lie down on the floor, then start to roll very slowly. To heighten your awareness, pay attention to the shapes, feelings, and sensations in your arms. Whenever I give a cue, stop and appreciate your position in space, as if you were a piece of sculpture. What emotions come up? Is there an image? Now roll the other way, this time paying attention to your head. What are the physical sensations? And what is the relationship between your head and the other parts of your body? When you move your head, what happens to your arms, for example?
Next I might focus on the ribs in relation to rolling. I make sure there are lots of pauses, so people can really appreciate the sculptural quality of their movement. In this way the class is developing resources, exploring movement possibilities and deepening their awareness. We spend a lot of time doing this, so people can really relax. The directions are simple, but they require connecting the brain to the body. I also call attention to the breath, how it is generated in the ribs and moves through the body. Dance, I believe, is breath made visible.
After the ribs we might look at the spine in relation to rolling. What happens when you move your sacrum? How does it connect to your pelvis, your legs, your arms, and your head? Now go to the lumbar region and discover how much range of movement there is. When I teach, the way I speak is important: I’m not telling people what movement to expect but asking them to explore, engaging them in the process rather than dictating, so I ask a lot of questions like, “When you do this, what do you notice?” This allows people to continue to deepen their internal awareness of sensation and emotion, rather than understanding what they are doing only through their cognitive awareness.
Now I might introduce movement dynamics, asking people to notice what happens if they start moving slowly but then shift and move quickly, then stop. Adding dynamics shapes movement in a different way. It may stimulate an emotional response. Compare, for instance, the emotional quality of a slow, flowing roll to suddenly tightening up all over. As people continue to develop their movement with dynamics, they may find themselves carried to a different level, perhaps even to standing. I encourage them to explore where the movement takes them in space.
At a point when participants seem comfortable with their own creativity and are beginning to generate their own personal responses to my simple questions, I might introduce music. Music will profoundly affect the space, often suggesting common emotions and associations. This helps facilitate our interactions with one another. I encourage these interactions with directives such as: “Notice who you are with. How might other people be influencing your movement? Notice how interacting with another person can expand your movement vocabulary. You may find yourself doing a movement you would never have thought of by yourself.”
In this kind of exploration every movement that arises is part of a process of listening for what best expresses who you are and how you are feeling in that moment. I believe that our bodies hold stories about who we are, and all of us, because of our different experiences, have our own stories to tell. When we take the time to listen, without overthinking what we are doing, we open the door for our physical and emotional bodies to share their wisdom with us. We almost always discover unexpected stories that have been there all along, below the level of conscious awareness. Much has been written in recent decades about how the body holds our stories—some authors say “the body never lies”; others say “the body bears the burden” or “the body keeps the score.” Research reveals that our stories live deep within our muscles and bodies, affecting our neurobiology, our relationship patterns, and our expectations for love and for strife. Isn’t it time we turned to face ourselves and learned to listen?
THE POWER OF BODY WISDOM
Let me give you an example of how body wisdom can remain dormant for decades until we become open to it. One time when I was getting some bodywork done, the masseuse got right underneath my shoulder blade, and all of a sudden I started seeing a scene from my past. It was something I hadn’t ever really thought about; people had told me about it, but I didn’t identify with it. As a young child, I used to go every evening with Hugo, our chauffeur, to pick up my father at the station, and I would run across the street to meet him at the train. One evening I ran across the road and a car came out of nowhere and hit me. It had apparently hit me right where the masseuse touched me, evoking a memory lodged for decades in my body. I saw myself being hit by the car and dragged for half a block. The terror of that experience was something that had been totally blocked. I started screaming and then just sobbing. And then I remembered how Hugo picked me up and cared for me. It wasn’t my father, it was Hugo who held me in his arms and comforted me and carried me. Why was it Hugo, and not my father? Emotions of shock and sadness, of always wanting to be held by my father, arose from this one pressure point in my body.
This story provides a good example of how an experience can live on in the body, long after that experience has occurred. Talking about it may not fully clear trauma—it often needs to be processed on a kinesthetic level. As you can see from this story, the kinesthetic sense was connected to my capacity to remember and to feel emotions about what had happened to me, even though so many decades had passed. This is what is meant by “the body bears the burden.” The body is the one map you always carry with you, and it is shaped by all of your life experience, both positive and negative. As a guide and teacher, reference text and tool, it is vast and matchless. A good map may show many different ways to get where you want to go, and it will also show the way to places you’ve never been before. All the information we need to make a new choice, to take another road to another place, is encoded in our bodies. But we have forgotten how to really read the map. We have limited ourselves to just a part of the picture and mistaken this part for the whole. An important function of the Life/Art Process is the practice it gives us in listening to the multiple levels of meaning within our bodies, even—or especially—when hard or unpleasant memories and sensations are found there. The skill of tapping our body wisdom gives us a more complete experience of all the things that have happened to us, deeply affecting our capacity to direct our lives in the present and the future.
As my daughter Daria Halprin has written: “The entire repertoire of our life experiences can be accessed and activated through the body in movement. Since movement is the primary language of the body, moving brings us to deep feelings and memories…. Whatever resides in our body—despair, confusion, fear, anger, joy—will come up when we express ourselves in movement. When made conscious, and when entered into as mindful expression, movement becomes a vehicle for insight and change.”4
THE PSYCHOKINETIC VISUALIZATION PROCESS AND HEALING THROUGH DANCE
When movement is liberated from the constricting armor of stylized, preconceived gestures, an innate feedback process between movement and emotions is generated. This feedback process is an essential ingredient of expressive movement. When you understand this, movement becomes a vehicle for releasing emotions that are essential in a healing process. The feedback process operates on a level that may not be verbal. It is not always possible to express in words the content of what we feel, where our emotions are coming from, and how to work with the emotions that arise in our personal lives. In trying to understand the messages our bodies are giving us, rather than analyzing or interpreting in a cognitive way, I have found it helpful to use a technique that comes from my years of working with children. After some movement practice, I ask participants to draw the images generated in their mind’s eye by their movements and emotions. These drawings, made on paper or canvas, are what I call visualizations. They are intuitive in the same way that movement is when it taps into a deep primal source. What’s important is that these drawings reveal stories that we wouldn’t otherwise be in touch with, much as dreams do.
Such visualizations provide an opportunity to symbolize an experience, giving you something to refer back to. A symbol may contain many layers of significance, and it remains there in front of you to contemplate, whereas movement is very immediate and fleeting—you move and it’s gone. A visualization is more like a totem, a reflection. You look at it and that reconnects you with the experience, allowing you to feel the moment again. In addition, you may gain insights about what the drawing is saying to you. The process doesn’t end with the drawing, however. I have discovered that it is then necessary to dance your visualization, to connect its images to your movements and emotions through dance. Once you draw an image and dance it, the visualization you create after this dance will be different from the one you did before. So the dance is changing the dancer. It is clear that through this process we can receive messages from an intelligence within our bodies that is deeper and more unpredictable than anything we can understand through rational thought. This process—the Psychokinetic Visualization Process—supports the transformation of the dancer.
These ideas have been reinforced by a personal experience with healing that influenced the creation of Circle the Earth. In 1972 I was diagnosed with cancer. While a cancer diagnosis is sadly not unusual these days, the circumstance of my diagnosis was unusual. As a dancer working from a holistic approach, I had always been concerned with the relationship between the mind and the body. I understood the connection between movement and emotion, but perceiving how the mind works in relation to the body wasn’t so simple for me. At the time of my diagnosis, I was actively exploring the use of visualizations as a way of making that link between mind and body.
One day while I was participating in the Psychokinetic Visualization Process, I drew an image of myself I was unable to dance. This was a signal to me. Why couldn’t I dance it? What was blocking me? I had drawn a round ball in my pelvic area. I intellectualized that it was a symbol of an embryo pointing the way to new beginnings. But some part of me was sure that this interpretation of my drawing was wrong, because I didn’t want to put the drawing into motion. That night, when my mind was quiet, I had intimations that the image I had drawn had something to tell me, and that I was not listening.
The next day I made an appointment with my doctor. I asked him to examine me precisely where I had drawn this round ball. He diagnosed cancer.
I went through traditional operation procedures, and radical ones at that, altering my body for life and leaving me with feelings of real uncertainty about my future. Would I ever dance again? The doctor assured me I was just fine, which was odd because I didn’t feel fine! He also added that if I didn’t have a recurrence within five years, I would be totally out of the woods. Three years after my operation, I had a recurrence. I knew then that I was going to have to make some very drastic changes in my life and my art.
After my recovery from the first operation, I began intensive research. I wanted to understand how it was possible to receive an unconscious message about something in my body through a drawing. For a period of three years, I collected slides of drawings done by students in my classes and I studied them, trying to find a coherent visual language I could understand. I thought perhaps certain colors and shapes meant something or that certain symbols had a particular meaning. But if there was a system in this, I could not find it. What I did find was that none of these questions could be answered in a rational, logical, or systematic manner. It just didn’t work that way for me. What seemed to work was the process: when people danced their images and moved back and forth between dancing and drawing, the messages would be made clear through their movements and drawings. The visual images couldn’t be codified in rigid terms because each person had a unique story and expressed it in a personal way.
At the same time, certain symbols and principles seemed to repeat themselves. For example, in a whole classroom of self-portraits, which often took weeks to create, I might notice that almost every drawing had a snake or a tree or a water image. Or that the drawings indicated polarities and opposites—a dark side and a light side. In conjunction with the intense individuality of each drawing, certain common themes seemed to appear again and again. I learned that until these images were personally experienced through dance and movement, their messages remained mysterious. It became apparent how some of the repeating images and polarities had to do with the ways we are all connected to our common environment—the natural world—and the elements that make our lives similar to one another’s. This is what Jung refers to as the “collective unconscious,” a collection of images that we, as human beings, share. It could be that these images are lodged in the cells of our bodies and that they connect us to one another across time and across culture.
Let me describe how I learned something about my life story, the mystery of my own personal imagery, and my connection to the natural world by dancing a self-portrait created at the time of the recurrence of my illness. When I first drew myself, I made myself look “perfect.” I was young and brightly colored. My hair was blowing in the wind. I was the picture of health and vitality. When I looked at the image after drawing it, I knew I couldn’t even begin to dance it; it just didn’t feel like me. I turned the paper over and furiously began to draw another image of myself. It was black and angular and angry and violent. I knew that this back-side image of me was the dance I had to do. When I did it, I was overwhelmed by the release of rage and anger. I kept stabbing at myself and howling like a wounded animal. Witnesses said it sounded like I spoke in tongues. I had to have witnesses because I knew that unless I did, I would never be able to go through this ordeal. My witnesses were my family, my colleagues, and my students, and they kept me honest, urging me to go deeper, reinforcing my sounds, calling out parts of the picture I was to dance. I danced until I was spent, until I collapsed and began to sob with great relief. Now I was ready to turn the picture over and dance the healing image of myself.
As I danced this image, I imagined my breath was water and that my movements flowed through my body just as water would flow. I imagined that the water was cleansing me. I had an image of water cascading over the mountains near my home, of water flowing through me and out to the endless vastness of the sea, taking with it my illness. I believe I was experiencing the forces of nature as they are imprinted onto my body, which gave me a deep sense of the real connection between my body and the world around me. The movements of this dance started soft and small, and as I continued to dance, I added sound. My witnesses again reinforced these sounds as the movements grew and grew, until my whole body was engaged in the image of cascading water. When I finished, I invited the witnesses to join me in a circle; I felt ready to return to my friends and family.
Something happened in this dance that I can’t explain. I felt I had been on a mysterious journey to an ancient world. Time and place were suspended; I was in a timeless blue void. The experience left me shaken and cleansed. Later, as I gained distance from the experience of my dance, I began to notice a pattern in it that seemed relevant to other healing processes. Much later, while developing theory and methods to apply to my teaching, I saw how this experience was the source of a healing process. This experience gave me a new way of looking at healing, which I have used ever since as a guide to working with others and in developing my dances, including Circle the Earth. I have mapped out the touchstones of that journey and have found that they apply not only to my own healing, but also to the healing journey in general. These touchstones—the “Five Stages of Healing”—underlie my work with other people with life-threatening conditions in Circle the Earth. Admittedly, the Five Stages of Healing, like all systems, draw lines of black in places that are really gray. Healing, although it has different aspects and stages, is both more seamless and circuitous than any system can articulate fully. But I believe the Five Stages of Healing can offer guiding choreographic structures for a dance workshop and performance like Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (detailed in chapter 3).
Anna dancing the light side of her 1974 cancer self-portrait. Photo by Lawrence Halprin; courtesy of Anna Halprin.
1. Identification. The first stage is simply to look and see and identify the issue, noticing the polarity between the light side and the dark side. In my personal journey, this stage was my discovery that I had cancer and realizing that the issue was whether I would live or die.
2. Confrontation. This stage entails the enactment of emotions and images responsive to the life-or-death issue. In my cancer experience, it involved dancing my fears, my rage, and my anguish. I had to confront the dark side of my being.
3. Release. After I danced my rage and fear about my illness, my body softened and relaxed, and I wept.
4. Change. After the release, the next step is to find a way to integrate the new changes. This stage takes place when an individual or group is ready to move to another level of awareness. It was the stage when I did the water dance in my own healing process, transforming my repressed rage into positive strength and power.
5. Assimilation. The final step is an assimilation of the experience into one’s ongoing life. For me, this entailed a coming back to my community and my family and my life with new purpose and understanding. The learning I gained in my healing dance made it possible for me to teach and score with others using this same process. I assimilated my experience into my work and use it now to serve others.
Taken together, these Five Stages of Healing constitute a rite of passage, a series of activities marking moments of significance in a person or a community’s life. Traditionally, rites of passage acknowledge the passage of time—birth, entrance into adulthood, marriage, and death are all marked by rites of passage. In the Jewish culture, for example, a bar or bat mitzvah marks a child’s entrance into the adult world; sitting shiva with family and friends to mark the death of a loved one is another rite of passage. There is a strong human urge to mark these moments, both as individuals and within the context of community. My self-portrait and my dance served as a personal rite of passage; Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance offer rites of passage for an entire community.
I become so excited by the discoveries of the visualization process and the road map for a healing journey that I often forget to tell people that, after doing my healing dance with my family and friends, my cancer went into remission. I don’t say that I was cured. A cure is an event, neither predictable nor always available. The process of healing interests me more, because healing is available to all of us, all the time. I am not discounting the importance of doctors’ interventions, but I believe healing also involves our attitudes toward our bodies and our illnesses, our willingness to challenge our values and lifestyles and points of view.
Changing our relationship to illness has to do with changing our relationship to our experience of living and dying. When we approach healing as an ongoing dialogue with our body and our mortality, surrender to what is beyond our control, and grasp an understanding of the power we have in our own living and dying, I believe our relationship to healing, and death, will change. The creation of Circle the Earth is grounded in the belief that the process of the dance is as relevant as its outcome, just as the process of illness is as relevant as its outcome.
THE RSVP CYCLES
In developing a community ritual like Circle the Earth, we are asking people to share very personal, deep-seated concerns and emotions; we are asking them to expose themselves. So it is critical to have a process that feels safe and clear. An integral component of this process is a method of collective creativity called the RSVP Cycles, which my husband, Lawrence Halprin, developed and which I began using with dancers in the early 1970s.5 This method welcomes and incorporates the personal stories of each participant. The core of the RSVP Cycles lies in the separation of the four elements of creativity.
R stands for Resources. These are the basic materials we have at our disposal, including not only physical resources but also human ones, encompassing movement possibilities, mental imagery, emotions, motivations, aims, and more.
Drawing of RSVP Cycle by Lawrence Halprin. Courtesy of Anna Halprin.
S stands for Scores. The word “score” is derived from music and refers to a visual and/or verbal plan that instructs a group of people to carry out prescribed activities to fulfill a particular intention. In addition to the activities, a score delineates place, time, space, and the cast of people, as well as sound and other related elements. It guides performers in what to do, who does it, when to do it, and where to do it. To varying degrees, it may indicate how to do the activities, but this can range from being very closed (with all the actions precisely defined, leaving little room for improvisation) to being very open (emphasizing improvisation and exploration).
V stands for Valuaction. This coined term is short for “the value of the action” and allows for analysis, appreciation, feedback, value-building, and decision-making to accompany the process of creation.
P stands for Performance. This is, quite simply, the enactment of the score.
These four component parts of the RSVP Cycles are not connected in a linear way. Once a cycle begins, the development of a dance might move from performance to valuaction to a new score to valuaction to gathering resources and so on, back and forth. My method is to use a workshop setting to provide opportunities for participants to discover their own resources, thereby ensuring that the performance that evolves will be both a personal and a collective one. The RSVP Cycles are a highly responsive structure encouraging creative participation at all levels. Exploring resources can help performers discover greater personal meaning in the activities they do in performance. If our concern is how to connect movement to emotion, we might try a contractive movement and explore how it makes us feel emotionally. We might try that movement with a lot of intensity and see what arises. Fear? Anxiety? When we then move with less intensity, we have a different experience. Using our sensations, we can expand our resources in movement. As a workshop leader, if you want your participants to be able to express a range of emotions through movement, you need to help them develop a vocabulary they can draw from by experimenting with different values, intensity, and duration in movement.
One of my “tests” for a good score is: Does it generate creativity in the performers? A simple score might be: “Everyone go to the other side of the space now.” It tells who (everybody), what (go), where (other side), and when (now). But in this score, “how” is completely undefined. The movement options open to performers are endless—walk, run, crawl, spin, go quickly or slowly. Other choices include going across directly, on a diagonal, and so on. If I wanted to make a score extremely open, I might say: “Do whatever you want whenever and however you want.” This kind of score encourages improvisational spontaneity, but too much freedom can be as paralyzing to creativity as too little. A very closed score might be the choreography for a ballet, where there are precise models for the performance of each step. My scores generally fall in between these two extremes.
The scores for the community rituals detailed in this book are open enough to allow different individuals and groups to embody them in unique ways, so the culminating performance will never be exactly the same. The diversity of the performers, the dynamics of the group, and any cultural differences that exist will all affect how a score is performed. Although the score provides an overall framework, it does not exclude new input and change. Instead, it promotes creativity and growth. A score is like a living thing, constantly shaped by our experience. The image of a tree comes to mind: it remains a tree in essence even as it responds to such forces as wind, rain, and sun.
People sometimes ask how closely participants need to follow the score, how committed to it they need to be. What happens if they “break” the score, if they take an element of the score that’s closed and open it? If you feel that an important aspect of the score is being lost, you may want to step in and gently remind participants of the score by modeling the activity it calls for, as I sometimes do when participants stray from a unifying drumbeat. At times people break a score because they don’t understand it or aren’t clear about its purpose. Some people may break a score because they’re feeling rebellious or bored. Still others may believe that, because the score doesn’t match their emotions, they can’t do it. Part of one’s role in presenting a score is to understand the score well enough to communicate it to others, to help them embody it.
The score for the Planetary Dance (see chapter 4) calls on participants to declare what they are dancing for in relation to peace among peoples and with the earth. Someone once said to me that she needed to dance for her own needs. This might be a fine intent for a different score, but the Planetary Dance score instructs people to dance for the needs of others. One challenge for Planetary Dance leaders is how to help people hone their focus within the score. Often people say they intend to dance for “love.” My response to this is always to ask for more specificity. What do you love? Take the mirror away from yourself and show it to the world around you.
In workshops like the one detailed in chapter 3, we don’t do scores because they match our emotions. We do scores to see what emotions they will evoke. If you come to one of my workshops, I would ask you to commit to the scores of the workshop, to give yourself to the scores without preconceptions of how they will make you feel. At one point we may be doing a score of celebration, and you may feel angry, sad, tired, or depressed. You may not want to have anything to do with anyone. The challenge, then, is to find a way to follow the score and see what emotions it brings up. What is it like to stay within a score when your mood is in a completely different place from everyone else’s? That’s the challenge—to stay within the score, not to break it. Really committing to a score is one way to get the most out of it.
Another thing that can interfere with getting the most out of a score is closing a previously open element. Especially in the beginning of a workshop, I use scores in which the intention is to explore, research, find out different possibilities, so closing parts of the score that are open will close down innovation and avenues of discovery. A simple score might ask you to investigate rising and falling movements. If you start out with a strong idea of what rising and falling are about, you will limit yourself. There could be more than a hundred different ways of rising and falling, so if you restrict yourself to one idea in the beginning, you’re closing a part of the score that’s open and you won’t get the most value from it. So when a score is open, be mindful about making choices that close it down.
Open scores give us a chance to express our differences, while closed scores help us express our commonalities. Most scores have both open and closed elements. When you have a sequence of scores over the course of a workshop or a dance, it’s important to have a balance, with some scores more open and some more closed. In our culture we place a high value on individualism, so we often need to express our differences first, to know that we are honored and recognized for who we are. As modern people tempered in the forge of individuality, we seem to need to find our own personal content before we can make a commitment to our commonalities.
It’s important to remember that scores can (and should) evolve. That’s where valuaction plays a critical role. Valuaction allows people to share their experiences. It is a way of analyzing the score and its enactment to help a group make decisions and selections regarding the material and the creation of a final performance. Making this creative process visible and encouraging the input of the participants fosters mutual involvement, support, and enthusiasm. Valuactions tell us what works and what doesn’t according to the core intention of the dance. This process facilitates redesigning and recycling aspects of the score to more clearly meet its intentions. Through valuactions, an ongoing process of growth and change can occur.
In the kind of community ritual described in chapter 3, the final performance is a presentation of the group’s experience as it happens before invited witnesses (our audience). Unlike in ballet or other strictly choreographed dance forms, we are not performing a “known” experience or set of steps. In contrast to open improvisation, which is often done without concern for its effect, we dance with the specific intention to create change. The kind of performance described in this book is about bringing as much of our real lives onto the stage as possible and being witnessed in that act. There is something magical about performing, and being witnessed by other people has a focalizing effect. This magical boost offers each of us the chance to stretch beyond our ordinary limits. This performance is predicated on the belief that the expression of our experience connects us with others and that this connection helps to create a community with the collective power to enact change.
One of the greatest benefits of using the RSVP Cycles is the completely positive, nonjudgmental attitude inherent in its process. We give feedback (or valuactions) along the lines of the score; we have either completed the objectives of the score or we haven’t. There is no blame. If we find we haven’t met the score’s objectives, we can ask questions about what happened and why. The process provides for recycling the best ideas and composting the ones that have no place in the dance. There is no hidden or higher authority dictating the way. All participants are involved in the creation of the culminating performance.
Over the course of seventy years in dance, I have honed some simple and direct approaches to movement by focusing on embodied awareness, ordinary movement, how ordinary movement becomes dance, and the power of embodied wisdom. In my search for living myths and rituals, I have evolved powerful processes for helping groups of people make dances that make a difference. These are the Life/Art Process, the Psychokinetic Visualization Process, the Five Stages of Healing, and the RSVP Cycles. All of these processes provide maps to the territory of the self; they help us make authentic art expressions derived from real life experience. To more clearly illuminate these maps and the scoring process that gives rise to individual expression around common themes and enables groups of people to focus their concern and care around issues that matter to them, this book focuses on two community rituals: Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line and the Planetary Dance. But before entering into in-depth descriptions, I’d like to recount briefly how these dances evolved.
