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INTRODUCTION

Sally Banes

When Anna Halprin turned her back on the dance establishment in the 1950s, modern dance was at its pinnacle of achievement. Among Martha Graham’s dances of that decade were Seraphic Dialogue and Clytemnestra; Doris Humphrey choreographed, taught at the Juilliard School, and wrote The Art of Making Dances. Charles Weidman, José Limón, Pearl Lang, Pauline Koner, Helen Tamiris and Daniel Nagrin, Anna Sokolow, and others had successful companies. Even Ruth St. Denis was still performing, and Ted Shawn still ran the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Generations of younger dancers and choreographers were trained each summer there, at Hanya Holm’s summer dance school at Colorado College, and at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. American modern dance had established itself, but the entrenched and the status quo were not Anna Halprin’s metier.

Educated as a dancer under Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Halprin had moved to California in 1945 with her husband, Lawrence Halprin, making a career as a New York dancer a virtual impossibility, although she had danced in Humphrey and Weidman’s Sing Out, Sweet Land in 1944. She could have made a career for herself as a modern dancer on the West Coast: Lester Horton worked in Los Angeles until his death in 1953, and Bella Lewitzky founded her own company after leaving Horton in 1950. But Halprin chose another path.

Although her way was unique, in the 1950s she was not alone in hewing an individual path, nor was she entirely unprecedented. The tradition of modern dance itself had been founded on individual experimentation—on antiacademic principles. But to Halprin and many of her peers, what had once been a dramatically new and eloquent art form now seemed hidebound. On the East Coast, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, James Waring, and others looked for various methods—chance, technology, collage—to escape the new academy.

At the University of Wisconsin, H’Doubler had stressed personal creativity and the scientific study of anatomy and kinesiology over the values of dance as an art form in performance. Forsaking the stylized, expressive movements and prescribed structures of traditional modern dance choreography, Halprin did not start from scratch; she had the H’Doublerian repertoire of movement studies at her disposal. But her gift was to bring these ideas to a new pitch and to place them in new contexts.

Cunningham and Halprin shared an interest in reflecting in art the arbitrariness of modern life through radical juxtapositions of disparate activities, undercutting narrative logic. Both also reacted against the emotional coloring of the modern dance establishment. If Cunningham rejected the expressionism of modern dance by looking outside the self to chance procedures as a way to generate and structure movement, Halprin at first chose the opposite extreme—going deep inside the self through improvisation. This was not, as she has said, for the purpose of self-expression. Rather, it was to plumb the depths of the human corporeal imagination, to discover capabilities that had been stymied by the conventions of modern dance.¹ Halprin penetrated the interior of the body/mind, guiding her dancers and students to scrutinize individual anatomical workings as well as unconscious needs and desires, in the voice as well as with movement. This led to a surrealistic effect in which untrammeled psychological and movement behavior rubbed against the cool tasklike performances produced by scientific kinesiological explorations.

After thoroughly investigating improvisation with her group, however, Halprin felt the need to discover external stimuli and frameworks. This she found through various approaches, including collaborations with other artists throughout the 1960s, and a crucial abiding framework—the use of scores, which allow for individual input within an ordered collective whole.

Halprin’s interest in community and the rituals that create and sustain it eventually led her away from dance as a theatrical art and toward dance (or simply movement) as a healing art—whether in social terms, as in the healing of racial divisions, or in physical/psychic terms, as in her work with persons confronting cancer and HIV/AIDS. This interest in the creation of community, in turn, led her from the incorporation of ordinary life in her avant-garde dance/theater pieces toward the appreciation of the dancer in every person, whether trained to move or not. Both her commitment to community and her architectural collaborations with Lawrence Halprin steered her to the creation of environmental performances.

In many of these arenas, Halprin has been an unsung pacesetter. She disowned the modern dance world—both its technical apparatus and its production system—early on. She used nondancers in her performances. She forsook the proscenium stage, and even the familiar dance studio. Many of the new generation of iconoclasts who revitalized dance in New York in the early 1960s—including Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk—were inspired by their studies on the West Coast with Halprin. So were important visual artists and musicians of the next generation, including Robert Morris, LaMonte Young, and Terry Riley. Her outdoor performances in both urban and pastoral landscapes prefigured the environmental pieces that swept New York by storm in the 1970s. Since the late 1960s, she has worked with multicultural groups specifically to struggle with racial and ethnic tensions. In the 1980s and ’90s, her work with men and women challenging HIV/AIDS and cancer, as well as her large group dances for the environment and for world peace, once again showed visionary thinking coupled with compassionate action.

This first section of Anna Halprin’s collected writings lays out the history and theory of her lifelong exploration of dance and movement. It shows a lifetime of intelligent analysis, courageous innovation, unwavering commitment, and, above all, a passion for dance, art, and life.

NOTE

This introduction is based, in part, on information gleaned from my conversations with Anna Halprin and Janice Ross, and also from Janice Ross’s forthcoming book, Anna Halprin: Revolution for the Art of It (Berkeley: University of California Press), as well as Anna Halprin s writings.

1. “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin,” this volume, p. 75.