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A History of Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance

Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance have two histories: a long one and a short one. The long story begins in the 1950s. At that time I was researching ways for individuals and groups to tap into their personal and group mythologies through dance and movement. Later, in the sixties and seventies, I created group events that enabled people to invent their own stories rather than sitting back and watching mine. It was important for me to use dance as a way to help people connect with their own experiences and their own sense of power. I focused on inventing ways for each individual to access his or her personal mythology. Out of these experiments and explorations, a series of road maps, a technology of methods, evolved.⁶

Until then, I had used some of that technology with specific groups, but never really had the opportunity to amplify this personal process to a community level. My 1969 dance Ceremony of Us, which focused on racism, was confrontational, raw, and challenging, both for us as individuals and for our audience. Throughout the process, I felt the potential for causing harm when addressing hot topics like racism without a strong road map. An objective process for working with groups of people was needed if we were actually going to deal with issues that mattered. I started practicing ways to apply what I knew about dance to people’s real-life experiences and to do this for larger and more diverse communities.

It is against the backdrop of these previous explorations with people’s direct experiences, and their individual experience in relation to the collective, that the story of Circle the Earth begins. My husband, Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect and urban designer, had been working with groups of people around issues of community development in relation to the environment using the RSVP Cycles. I found that this process could be transferred to movement experiences, enabling participants to infuse a dance with emotions and images connected directly to their own stories. My husband and I were curious to know if these processes, which we had been using in our respective fields, could be applied to entire communities to help them identify meaningful stories or “myths” related to their lives. In 1980 we envisioned a series of workshops called “A Search for Living Myths and Rituals through Dance and the Environment” and invited people to join us in an exploration of relationships to each other, our surroundings, and ourselves. We wanted people of different backgrounds and ages to have a chance to interact and become familiar with one another through movement, dance, and the environment. The series was set up as a search for a myth with a community vision. We offered free workshops in the gymnasium of the local college in our town. “A Search for Living Myths and Rituals” was planned as a series of dance and environmental workshops over nine months, culminating in a performance.

We believed that movement, art, and nature could provide focal points for a community’s activities and wanted to experiment with how these elements could serve in the creation of a collective story. Everything developed intrinsically from the medium of the art experience and our experience of the natural world. We didn’t start out trying to solve problems. That came later, once we had evolved a common language and a way of working together. We did this by gathering and defining the physical and imagistic symbols from our dances, our drawings, our environmental-awareness walks and studies, and our dialogues with one another.

At the time of the workshop, four women had been murdered on the trails of Mount Tamalpais, a beautiful mountain in the center of our community, and the bodies of three more women and a man had been found in nearby Point Reyes. The “Trailside Killer” was still at large, and Mount Tamalpais was no longer considered a safe place; its trails and campgrounds had been closed because of the killings. As the workshop progressed, the image of the mountain kept reappearing in people’s drawings, and by the end of the series we realized that the story of the Trailside Killer and the mountain was the present-time myth of our community. We uncovered our need to reclaim the mountain and cleanse it of the destructive force that was holding it—a need to reinhabit this place that was part of our experience of home.

Larry and I provided a container for the emergence of a group myth, but in the beginning we had no idea what that myth would be. And this is how it should be—a community myth is seldom determined by only two members, and never by two members who risk taking on a leadership role. It must evolve from interactions among the collective, from their own inner lives and connections with one another, the creative process, and the natural world that supports us.

The participants in the workshop joined with dancers from the Tamalpa Institute⁷ to present a culminating series of ceremonies, events, and performances, titled In and On the Mountain (1981), which took place over a period of two days. The first day featured a performance at the College of Marin at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. The dance included ritual reenactments of the trailside murders, with friends and families of the slain women in the audience. A series of ceremonies and rituals lasting all night and into the next day’s sunrise followed that performance. On the second day, we went up the mountain. Eighty people, including some children, braved their fear of the Trailside Killer, riding in buses to the top of the mountain. There we took part in a series of offerings at each place where a woman had been murdered. People read poems and told stories; children danced spontaneously; somebody planted a tree. We were marking these tragedies and affirming our connection to the mountain. A week after our performance, an anonymous phone call helped police locate the killer. Three weeks later, the killer was caught.

Did this community dance help to catch the killer, or was it just a coincidence? Does the collective mind and spirit have the power to bring about a change of this magnitude? It doesn’t really matter who gets credit for catching the killer: the dance, the mountain, the police, or the spirit. In and On the Mountain was a prayer, a prayer said not with words alone, but by the whole body of the collective through dance. When you say a prayer and your prayers are answered, that’s not the time to start questioning whether or how prayer works. When your prayers are answered, that’s the time to give thanks. And pray again.

In that spirit of gratitude and awe, the next year we created another dance, an offering of thanks that the killings had stopped and that the mountain had been reclaimed. We called it simply Thanksgiving. We had built a sense of community and felt we had begun to uncover a myth with both an immediate, personal meaning and a larger, more universal one. On the immediate level we were reconnecting with our mountain; more broadly we were reconnecting with the environment, restoring our place in nature and our deep appreciation of the value of aligning with one another in community.

This might have been the end of the story were it not for a visit from a 107-year-old Huichol shaman, Don Jose Mitsuwa, who came to Tamalpa Institute during the following year to present a deer dance ceremony. When we told him about our previous performances on the mountain, he said, “The mountain is one of the most sacred places on earth. I believe in what your community did, but to be successful in purifying this mountain, you must return to it and dance for five years.” As with the Corn Dance that so moved me in Santo Domingo, New Mexico, I was confronted again with indigenous wisdom that directed us to focus our intent, ignite our enthusiasm, and repeat the motions of our dance. What had started out as an experiment had had such far-reaching results that we were committed to fulfilling Don Jose’s near-directive. His words made me see that our experiment had connected to something essential. The experience had a momentum of its own, and I wanted to see where it would go and how it could integrate into the ongoing myth of my community.

Score for In and On the Mountain, 1981. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.

By this time it was clear that one intrinsic theme of these dances was the struggle of life against death. In 1983 the dancers and participants in our workshops presented Return to the Mountain, in which we used images from the animal world in a dance and ceremony for peace between people and the natural environment. The next day, Don Jose joined us and members of the local community for a ceremony on the top of Mount Tamalpais. He planted a feather he had received on a Himalayan peak and then led us around the top of the mountain, so we could look out and see the four directions. This moment in Return to the Mountain signaled a broadening of our view from our specific community needs to their connection with the larger world around us.

For the following year, 1984, we decided to use running as our theme and called our dance Run to the Mountain. Our intention was to dance for peace among the peoples of the world. Peace rose up as an issue of importance to us during our preparatory workshops, and we chose to highlight running because it is a movement common to all people and it symbolized the urgency of our hope for peace. A month before the performance, we began running with banners through our neighborhoods and on the Golden Gate Bridge, both to get in physical condition and to arouse curiosity about our upcoming event. The hardiest of our group ran up the mountain from four different directions. An eighty-five-year-old participant, Jack Stack, led us on the first mountain run. For many subsequent years, running continued to be an integral part of our day on the mountain.

As Don Jose pointed out, Mount Tamalpais, where the dance originally took place, is historically the sacred ground of the local Miwok tribe. I wanted to honor their connection to this land as we honored our own connection to it. However, in no way was I attempting to imitate or replicate Native American rituals. I seek to honor the values of this culture, not appropriate them for my own uses.

In 1984 religious leaders from different faiths led participants around the peak, stopping in each of the four directions—north, east, south, and west—to offer inspirational words. As we made our procession, I looked out from the mountain toward the ocean and deeply felt how important it was to relate our dance not only to our mountain but to the larger world as well. At that time the greatest threat to peace on the planet was the tension between the Soviet and American superpowers and the proliferation of nuclear arms. I imagined our dance becoming a peace dance on a larger scale.

In envisioning a global scope for our dance, I realized that a local group of dancers would not be strong enough to match this vision. The power of the performance needed to match the power of the intention. I imagined one hundred people joining together to perform this dance. I thought that if enough of us danced together with a common intention it would have the potential to create change.

For our 1985 ritual, we decided to go beyond our immediate community and open the dance to anyone who wanted to perform. We sent out a call for participants: “One hundred performers to create a spirit voice strong enough so that our peaceful song is heard and our peaceful steps felt. The weapons of war have a critical mass. So, too, do the hopes of peace. We need 100 performers, 200 feet, to dance upon the planet for its life and its healing—to find a dance that inspires us to keep the earth alive.” Even though one person acting alone might not make much difference, we hoped that working with a large group of people would gather more and more energy around the intention of peace and increase the possibility of creating change.

Over one hundred people came together in a high school gym, which had been transformed with banners, flowers, fruits, and special objects. I offered a weeklong workshop to ready the participants for the performance of Circle the Mountain: A Dance in the Spirit of Peace. We began with a run to the mountain, to gain inspiration for the dance, and then engaged in a workshop experience, preparing a performance for friends and the community. This was our fifth year of dancing in our quest to purify the mountain. Curiously, it also took exactly five years for the killer to be convicted. One cycle had ended, and another cycle begun.

I renamed the dance Circle the Earth, and where it was once danced to reclaim a small measure of peace on our mountain, now it was danced to reclaim peace on the planet. This is how it was described: “Circle the Earth is a peace dance. Not a dance about peace, not a dance for peace, but a peace dance: a dance in the spirit of peace. It is a dance that embodies our fears of death and destruction, a dance that becomes a bridge and then crosses over into the dynamic state of being called peace. Circle the Earth is a dance of peacemakers. A dance that makes peace within itself, makes peace with the earth on which it moves. In a world where war has become a national science, peacemaking must become a community art in the deepest sense of the word: an exemplification of our ability to cooperate in creation, an expression of our best collective aspirations, and a powerful act of magic.”

As with Circle the Mountain, Circle the Earth evolved from an intensive workshop process, involving movement and sound exercises, along with drawn visualizations. Although I had already developed an overall series of scores for the culminating performance, the workshop allowed the performers to find their own responses to these scores and bring their personal experiences to bear on the final creation. The nine performance scores had evolved out of my own healing process with cancer as well as years of observing participants in very open scores and noting which results were repeated over and over. Essentially, the dance progresses from starting alone to joining another person in relationship and eventually forming a group. Once we get a feeling for our own strength and the strength of the community, we are able to look at our dark side and take on the most challenging issues of our lives. Out of that effort, which inevitably entails an expression of fear and anger, comes a release, tears, and, with comforting help from others, peace. Then, we are ready to connect with the world and send this message out.

Requests began coming in to do the dance in places other than my local community. The dance and its living myth started to travel, first to other sites in California, and then across North America to the United Nations Plaza in New York City. Using the structure developed for Mount Tamalpais, different people performed the dance in their own communities. In 1986 Circle the Earth crossed the Atlantic to Europe and the Pacific to Australia. By 1987 queries were arriving from interested parties worldwide. Although it wasn’t possible for me to travel to all of these places to create Circle the Earth, it did occur to me and to one of my Swiss students that the Earth Run, a section of the dance that we do each year on Mount Tamalpais, was a simple score that many people could adapt to their own community, no matter where they lived. If each community were to frame that dance with their own symbols and add to it out of their own community needs, the Earth Run would be a dance we could all do together, no matter where we lived. As a social species, I believe we need to come together and celebrate our unity and alignment, and to connect with the larger body of our culture and our planet. We need stories that tell of our oneness and our connection with the earth. And we need hopeful stories about living in an age threatened by pollution, nuclear devastation, overpopulation, hunger, ethnic war, and disease.

Confronting the dark side in Monster Dance from 1985 Circle the Earth. Photo © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos.

The Earth Run, which is designed for people of all ages and abilities, calls on participants to run (or walk) for others and to see their actions as influencing the larger whole. The point of the run is that people dedicate themselves to the health and healing of the planetary body. Embracing the overall intention of peace, each participant announces a personal intention for the run—declaring, for example, “I run for Alice and all children suffering from violence in our cities,” or “I run to bring Israelis and Palestinians together.” Moving to the musicians’ steady beat, participants run or walk in concentric circles, creating a moving mandala. Each step becomes a call for peace. When a large number of people move together in a common pulse with a clearly defined purpose, an incredible force takes over. It is a power that can renew, inspire, and heal. The dance provides a way to symbolize our commitment to peace, mobilizing people to take action in the world.

Circle the Earth in Zurich, Switzerland, 1986. Photo © Lisa Schaublin. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.

The Earth Run transports us from a place of individuation to an experience of collective oneness. The constant repetition of one beat after another, one circle after another, helps us to see our separate lives in a community context. This repetition and connection is the essential metaphor of Circle the Earth, a dance we perform to create peace and healing through community action. The evolution of the Earth Run recapitulates this truth. In excerpting the Earth Run from the whole of Circle the Earth, I intended for each community to add its own beginning and ending, thereby personalizing the dance to suit its own needs. At this time I renamed it the Planetary Dance and sent a letter asking former students, dancers, and participants in Circle the Earth to join us on April 19, 1987, wherever they lived, in this dance of peace and healing. Instructions for the Earth Run were sent to interested people in communities around the world—in Switzerland, Australia, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Israel, England, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, and many places within the United States. That year, two thousand people in thirty-seven communities performed the Planetary Dance, and it continues to be performed each year around the world.⁸

Letter describing Planetary Dance in Japan, 1987.

Planetary Dance in Melbourne, Australia, 1987. Photographer unknown.

In 1988 we performed Circle the Earth: Dancing Our Peaceful Nature in an outdoor setting in the Marin Headlands. Influenced by local and world concerns, many of us began to become increasingly aware of what was happening to the environment. My attention shifted from the threat of nuclear arms to a fear for the earth herself. This was around the time of the Chernobyl devastation, when many of us were becoming more conscious of the human threat to the natural world. We decided to dance outside in an environment of sand, ocean, meadow, forest, and cliffs. The workshop participants camped in a redwood grove near the ocean. Near our campsite were military barracks from World War II, a reminder of war and the military spirit. Witnesses walked for twenty-five minutes to get to our performance site. Along the way, they could see open hillsides and the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Golden Gate Bridge and the city of San Francisco on the other. The performance took place in a redwood grove with a giant tree at its center. The central quest of that dance was to come into a balance with the abundance of earth and the awesome technology of society.

Planetary Dance score. Graphic design by Stephen Grossberg (continued on pp. 44–45).

During the late 1980s, I was asked to apply my work in the healing arts to people with cancer and HIV infection. From this experience, I saw the fear surrounding AIDS, a disease that seemed to have no boundaries and no cure. Rampant mostly in the gay community at that time, AIDS brought up the need for work that would confront social and internalized homophobia. There was a lot of ignorance about how the disease was transmitted. Many people feared being in contact with those who had been infected. The disease held a frightening taboo, and my extended dance community was in real crisis. My collaborators and I decided to dedicate the 1989 dance to people living with HIV and AIDS.

We sent out an invitation to participants from previous Circle the Earth dances, students, dance colleagues, Positive Motion (a special AIDS-related group with which I was already working), and a group of people with cancer who also were working with me. We asked them to join us in a different kind of healing dance. We stated that the intention was to heal the fear, isolation, and prejudice surrounding the AIDS crisis. Over one hundred people from all walks of life came. Despite this diversity, we had one common goal: to see if, through movement and art, we could heal our community and ourselves. Could we dance to break through the prejudices and fears that separated us? Could we learn to trust the wisdom of our bodies as much as the wisdom of our minds? What followed was Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (detailed in chapter 3).