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THREE DECADES OF TRANSFORMATIVE DANCE

INTERVIEW BY NANCY STARK SMITH

NANCY: Today is April 13, 1989, we’re in Kentfield, California, at Anna’s house. We’re having a talk about work that Anna’s done over the years that relates to social and political issues.

ANNA: Dealing with issues has many layers. It’s only political when it begins to affect our economy. But it can affect us culturally. It can affect us deeply emotionally. We can say that the Watts riots, which I’m going to get into later, was a political issue, but it was much more than a political issue. It was a cultural issue of a dominant Anglo-Saxon society over a subdominant minority culture. It was an issue of prejudice which is a psychological, emotional issue. So when I think of issues I really tend to think of them on all those layers simultaneously. When they are deep enough in our culture they will ultimately affect our economy and then they become political and social. So that’s a good landmark to know when something has gone that deep.

I think of the late ’50s and up to the mid-’6Os as being a very crucial time in the arts for dealing with one of the most prevalent issues of the time which was anti-establishment, and which led to the hippie movement. During that period we were often referred to as avant-garde. Though we were doing things that were new or against the common values, we were really attempting to search out what was authentic, what was real, as opposed to accepting what was the conformity of the time.

NANCY: Artistically or socially?

ANNA: Both. Because they were completely connected. Simple things, like modern dance had become accepted. You had the three or four major dance companies. All the Graham dancers looked alike. All the Humphrey dancers looked alike. You looked like the person who was leading your company, who in a sense was a guru. Your movement style, your philosophy, everything. You wore the same kinds of costumes. And you always went with bare feet. It wasn’t just me who felt that rebellion. Musicians were rebelling, like Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, against Stockhausen or whoever was the traditional modern musician of the time.

NANCY: On what level do you think you were challenging the tradition?

ANNA: Movement, particularly. There was the Graham style, etc. And that became very much a conformity. So all of that had to be reexamined. You had to find new compositional forms as well as new movement. That’s how the whole idea of task-oriented movement and my particular interest in Mabel Todd and her approach in her book The Thinking Body arose at the time. I was interested in going back to my roots with my original teacher, Margaret H’Doubler, where we really looked at movement from the point of view of anatomy and kinesiology with a strong emphasis on creativity. And so I started doing improvisation as a way of getting away from the a-b-a forms. Looking at space differently. Why did we have to be in a proscenium arch? If you did perform in a stage area then you used the aisles, the ceiling, and you used the pit, all the inside and the outside spaces. And along with that you began to take issue with what your role was as a dancer. Who said we couldn’t speak, sing, build environments? You didn’t have to go around with bare feet, you could wear shoes, dresses, or no clothes at all and go naked.

When we did Parades and Changes in New York City and used nudity, I was very surprised when we started getting the kinds of reviews we did. It was made fun of by the New York Times: “The no-pants dancers from San Francisco.” We were not self-conscious about what we were doing. It seemed to us a very natural thing to do. It was very natural to the other artists we were working with. That was a time when there were all these interdisciplinary connections, we were breaking down the narrow role of the dancer. The dancer could be a musician, a musician could be a dancer, the audience could participate. And we were so dead serious about it, it seemed so absolutely normal to us. Also I was surprised because we had gone to Sweden where there was nothing radical about what we did. The use of nudity was accepted as a ceremony of trust.

It occurred to me that we were doing something very anti-establishment in New York when we started taking our clothes off and we could hear people in the audience whisper, “Oh, they’re not going to do it … Oh my God … they did it.” And I saw policemen backstage. Before Parades and Changes, we had done other kinds of smaller performances but this was the first major full-length piece by the Dancers’ Workshop.

We look at movement from the point of view of anatomy and kinesiology. Norma Leistiko teaching in the training program, 1974.

Photographer Unknown.

As we began to perform some of our smaller pieces, we began to notice that the audience was getting very unglued. They either wanted to do it with us, at us, or somehow or other be involved. And so they started throwing things at us, yelling and shouting and really getting very [laughter] involved.

NANCY: What were you actually doing?

ANNA: We were doing things that were very unexpected. Breaking rules without letting them in on it. Going into their territory. I mean I buy a ticket and I sit in my seat, somehow or other I’m buying my space. And what are you doing in my space? What are the boundaries now? You’re getting me all stirred up; does this give me permission to react any way I want? So I began to realize that we were breaking tradition, that we were involving other people who weren’t in on the process. And so as a result of that, they’re telling us something, which led us to do scores for all the people to perform.

In a way, that kind of audience reaction had its own excitement and certainly on a social level was making a statement about “anti”; anti-this, anti-that, react, make your voice felt. What was instructive about that response was that it was part of the times. People rebelling and being very dramatic, saying, “I want to be heard!” But it stopped right there. We felt there was a lot of power there and it wasn’t being channelled in a creative way.

NANCY: Would you say that audience reaction was the issue, the driving force?

ANNA: Absolutely. It was a great driving force. Without that reaction I think we would have gotten stuck in our own indulgent way of just doing our own exploration, forgetting that the audience is who you are performing for.

NANCY: What were you actually exploring in that work?

ANNA: Well, we made everything absolutely visible. The stage was completely visible, stripped of curtains, flats. The light sources were completely visible, movements were everyday movements that everybody could identify with. They were task-oriented. Like “build a scaffold and when you’ve built it, go up to the top.” They were risky and they made people excited and created a kind of a tension. The music was live by people we collaborated with who sometimes became dancers, like sometimes we became sculptors. So that was very unfamiliar, people would get charged up. Emotionally insecure.

NANCY: It sounds like you started out with the kind of mood of the times, of challenging the assumptions that were in your field, and in the process you realized that you were cutting across more than artistic boundaries but also social taboos. Was there political content in any other way?

The automobile created a wonderful environment for movement. I was attracted to it as a prop with so many possibilities—visual, audible, kinesthetic, symbolical. From Automobile Event, A. A. Leath and Lucy Lewis, 1620 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, 1968.

Photo by Rudy Bender.

Automobile Event, Norma Leistiko facing camera, John Graham on car, 1968.

Photo by Rudy Bender.

We began to pay attention to the feedback process between movement and feeling. Circle the Earth, 1985.

Photo by Paul Fusco.

ANNA: In a sense, yes. There were very few grants in those days, and they were very small. One of the reasons we took to the streets, just went outside, was that this was a place to perform. A place where you could have ready-made audiences. You didn’t have to go through the expense and the machinery of putting out brochures, getting the press and renting halls. And audiences would be wherever they were. We wanted to perform. So we went to the streets, to beaches, to bus stops, to abandoned buildings, to anywhere.

Well, this became a political issue as we found ourselves getting arrested over and over again. It became a political issue regarding the right of using the street territory. When were we obstructing the peace? We were behaving in a way people were unfamiliar with and people would get irritated about it. So finally we did a march with blank placards, as a procession through the city. Well there was an ordinance that you have to have a permit if there were more than 25 people in the group. So we would have 24 people go at a time and then we’d leave a space of about a block between us, but we kept it going. We had a hundred people or so doing this.

What we were really trying to build up to was a dance throughout the whole city. You could get permission to perform in a park, but we wanted to be able to use the whole city as we wanted to. So in a way we were rebelling against the restrictions that were put on artists performing in the environment.

NANCY: So it wasn’t that the piece was a political satire, but the doing of it was challenging some political definition. Where did it go from there?

ANNA: Making scores for an audience to perform. We did a series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, open to the public, where we led 100 to 500 people in performing various scores. This led to the development of Citydance, which was performed from sunrise to sunset, in subways, neighborhoods, parks, plazas, hillsides and the ocean. We did Citydance for three years as a statement that the city was a place to be creatively enjoyed by all its inhabitants.

Then in ’64 and ’65 we began to go back to exploring on a personal level, and the workshop modality became very important for us. We wanted to withdraw and look at a more inner world within the person. Really study the social terrain of the person, the whole person. This was at the time of the human potential movement. This was the time also that we began our first serious training program.

NANCY: When you say “whole” person, what do you mean?

ANNA: The emotional life, which dancers rarely study. Dancers studied movement. But movement is related to feeling, and we had no system for looking at those feelings that were evoked through movement. Nor did we have any idea of how the mind was really functioning in relation to movement or feeling.

During that period in the ’60s, there were all these conferences on body-mind-spirit, as if they were separate. But in terms of what we were exploring, we said there is no separation. They’re in a single impulse. There is the mind working in terms of images which think faster than the linear verbal thinking process. But images are like dreams. They go instantaneously with the movement, with the impulse to move, and the feeling. And so we were working with that integrated power. And at the same time realizing that was also taking us to the connection between artistic growth and personal growth, and that the two went hand in hand. And this was, again, part of a larger issue going on: the Human Potential Movement, which has had an incredible impact, all over the world.

Now what that led us to was dealing with real-life issues. And it’s as if all the work up to this point was laying the groundwork to deal with real-life issues. All this was the foundation.

NANCY: You’ve got the context of the society and then you’ve got the individual.

ANNA: And we’ve got the tools. We developed a system of movement, a system of working with emotions. We studied eight years with Fritz Perls, who worked with Gestalt Therapy, which is “the whole is greater than the parts.” He worked specifically with our company. So we had this system for working with emotional material that came up and also with imagery. This is called the PsychoKinetic-Visualization process, which we use now with people challenging AIDS and cancer. But we developed that then.

NANCY: When you say you developed “a system of movement,” what do you mean?

ANNA: Simply that if you do not teach people a traditional or idiosyncratic style and instead you set up a situation to move in, you systematically give people the opportunity to develop a full range of original movement. You set up movement situations that evoke emotional responses, situations in which the movements may be extremely assertive or very passive, or with partners in intimate contact. This will tend to bring up a lot of emotional material, which we then process. We do a lot of drawings of images and dance them. That’s called the PsychoKinetic-Visualization process.

In dealing with real-life issues, we had to find a way of moving, feeling, and making images. These three images show the development of the self-portrait work done by Nicolette Uta, 1987.

Photos by Anna Halprin.

In dealing with real-life issues, to be totally authentic, we had to find a way of moving, feeling and thinking that would become new tools. Like when I got cancer, and I wanted to deal with that issue on a level of healing. I had to have an open-ended vocabulary. How did I know what I was going to do until I worked with it? If I had a stylization of movement, it would have been predictable. I could not have gotten past what I already know.

One of the things about working with real-life issues is that it can be transformative. You work with an issue because it is unresolved, and through the dance, we hope to discover new possibilities. It’s not about the dancers and it’s not an interpretation of a theme, it is real. And by doing it you get to a different place with that issue, and in your life. The dance changes the dancer.

The purpose is to create change. That’s when we started using the word “ritual.” To distinguish that from dance as entertainment, dance as spectacle. Not that it couldn’t be a spectacle or it couldn’t be entertaining, but that is not the purpose. So that became a very important shift for me. And so we developed the RSVP Cycles in which people were able to learn how to score in a very direct and simple way. And this made it possible for us now to deal with groups of people. Because an individual can kind of feel things out, be intuitive, but if you’re dealing with groups of people, you can’t just feel things out and be intuitive.

Through the RSVP Cycles people can validate what they are doing in terms of their own experience. I wanted to create something for a group of people to do in which they’re given the opportunity to explore the theme and find out what’s real for them, find out what our differences are and what our commonalities are. It’s a particular way of being a choreographer. It allows for social impact in process as well as in the final product.

We did ten myths for small audiences. It was really a research process because I wanted to find out what were the natural forms that groups did. If you got a group of 50 people together and you gave them a very open score, what would they do? Because finding order is biologically how we’re made. We can’t exist in a totally random form.

NANCY: What are you hoping to change as people are finding their own creativiy and moving through these various forms that arise?

ANNA: In those exploratory myths, the purpose was to empower people to create together and to impart the experience of the power that comes from cooperating through movement as a collective body and find out what are the collective forms and perhaps even the archetypes.

This led to another issue that was coming up. I was invited to the American Humanist Psychology Conference on androgyny. And this was about the time, about 1967 I think, when the feminist movement was just getting hot. And the whole question of male and female differences or alikeness, the concept of androgyny, was on everybody’s lips. I felt that what was going on at that time was creating a tremendous cultural upheaval. Families were being drastically affected by the feminist movement, the workplace was being affected, people at that time felt that the feminist movement was the biggest cultural and economic and political issue that would hit us in this century.

principles of a creative process.

So I had an opportunity to deal with that issue at this conference. I just had the men dance alone. And had the women just watch. Then I had the women dance alone and I had the men just watch. And after this whole conference in which everybody was intellectualizing about the male and female issues and that we’re alike and that the only reason that we’re different is because of conditioning processes and so forth, we did this dance. They had exactly the same score. And it was just astonishing. I mean, it was funny, we all laughed at ourselves. We cried, we got so excited, because it was such a relief for the men to be together, to do their work and to work as a team, and to do their kind of movement. And the women were so delighted to be together as women and they had a totally different tone about what they did. Then when the men and women came together, they came together with mutual respect. That was truly a transformative experience.

The issues we had been dealing with at the conference were not the real issue. The issue was—we are different and it doesn’t matter that we’re different. What matters is that we’re able to respect our differences and bring those differences together and find our commonality.

NANCY: Where did you go from there?

ANNA: About this same time I got a call from James Woods in Watts asking if I would do a performance at the Mark Taper [Theater] with my company. This was at the time they were having the riots in Watts in 1967. His idea was that the Studio Watts, the black community, would bring us down to the Mark Taper, which is like the Opera House. It’s the big theater in the middle of Los Angeles. And Watts is in the ghetto. And I said, “No, no. Instead of bringing me in as a symbol, we’re going to take on this issue of the separation that you feel in a ghetto from not being part of the mainstream and the cultural life. I will come down and work with an all-black group in Studio Watts for a year.” Which I did, every Saturday. And I said I’d work simultaneously in San Francisco and start a new company, all-white. We’ll start exactly at the same time and it’ll just be two new groups doing the same scores.

At the end of the year I brought the black group up to San Francisco and the two groups essentially spent 24 hours a day together for 10 days. We developed a dance based on our encounter, our prejudice. We performed it at the Mark Taper Theater in Los Angeles. It was called Ceremony of Us.

The dance showed the whole process of how these two groups came together. We started separate and then we showed the conflict and confrontation and so forth. And then at the end, the performers came out and did a procession and gathered the audience. And when we went outside to the Mark Taper Plaza we were all dancing together. So the transformation was not just in the performers. But our purpose was to bring it out into the audience.

NANCY: Do you wait for an actual transformation in the workshop process to show you what forms to use, or do you just lay out a symbolic structural transformation and let it happen in the performance?

ANNA: I know what you’re saying. No, you can’t score a transformation. In the Watts/S.F. workshops, I had each group work separately on the same score. It was a simple follow-the-leader type of score. When we came together for the first time, the Watts group did the black dance for the whites and then the S.F. group of whites danced for the blacks. Then the next score was to do these two lines, the black and the white, at the same time so you both have to use the same space. But what happened is that they started interacting. Cutting through lines. They tried to take the people out of one line and seduce them to their group, and all hell broke loose. It became very competitive but in a charged and creative way. Issues of how far you would go with the movement came up. The degree of outrageousness was a big issue. All the issues came out that first day, and most of them were unresolved. So then we had to deal with setting up situations where we could explore issues of competition, leadership, sexuality, abandonment, issues of self-esteem. We had no notion beforehand what the outcome would be. It took its own form as we danced the issues that emerged.

NANCY: In what way does the RSVP Cycles allow people to participate in the creation of the event?

ANNA: You see, the RSVP Cycles wasn’t developed when I first was doing the black and white Ceremony of Us. We developed it because of that, because we didn’t have a common language for communicating. Our way of speaking, and our language and our images were so different we weren’t hearing each other. We didn’t know how. So we developed this RSVP Cycles so that we could listen to each other and find a way to respect our differences and find our commonality.

The RSVP Cycles is so simple. You take the creative process and you look at it in four different ways. One is collecting Resources, the other is Scoring, the other is Performing, and the fourth is Valuacting. Now, when you collect resources, you collect them objectively or subjectively. That includes what we are trying to achieve by it, what are the changes we want to create, what is the theme? What are our resources, our people resources, our movement resources that we might use in this, our space resources, our prop resources, whatever … it’s like an inventory. What is possible? Everybody chips in. This is my idea. My ideas are resources. And then we take those resources and we start to score them. We score them in relation to activity, over time, in space, with people. Now we know where that score came from. The score is graphic and absolutely visible. We put the score up and we try it. We perform it. And then after we perform it we valuact it. We say, it didn’t work, or it did work. Or I liked this, or I didn’t like that. What new resources do we need, how can we change the score? So we’re very involved in it.

NANCY: How are you making decisions together?

ANNA: There’s always a facilitator. Sometimes in scoring, it’s done totally co-operatively. Other times, I’ll come in with, “These are the resources I got from watching you. This is the score I think will work. Do you have anything to add to that?” And then we will valuact it. But they still feel invested in it because they’ve been able to take those themes and explore them and understand what it means to them on a personal level. They’ve been able to validate those scores in terms of their own personal experience. That’s how it works.

What happened in Watts was that through the workshop and by doing these movements together and by dancing together and drawing and making our images, we developed into a loyal group. We started out being scared to death of each other. And curious. It’s hard to believe this but in ’67 this was the first time that this particular group from Watts had ever been in any kind of an intimate relationship with a group of white people. And vice versa.

It was also an issue of economics. I would say that the black group was essentially poor. The white group may not have been individually affluent, but we had resources. It was a totally different economic situation between groups. That was an issue too. And in 10 days we became absolutely loyal as a group. Not separate. We kept saying, “If we can’t solve our differences and our problems, do you think the world out there can? We’ve got to do this and we’ve got to show the world that we can do this.” When we performed it at Mark Taper it was like—See, we can do this. We can live a different life. And we did do it. There was an interracial marriage, there were lifelong friendships.

That was our first big real political issue, social issue, that had a huge impact. Not only in Watts but up here [in the San Francisco Bay Area]. We started a multiracial company as a result of that, which was called the Reach Out Program and was funded by NEA’s Expansion Arts Program for 12 years. Then we toured all kinds of places, including the American Dance Festival, Soledad Prison, neighborhood theaters, schools and colleges, and began to take on Chicanos and Asians, American Indians. It became very apparent to me that dance had been dominated by an Anglo-Saxon culture. I was just astonished at the prejudices that I didn’t even know I had. I didn’t know a damn about this scope of movement on an ethnic level. The company began to develop classes in black dance. Not like Harlem ballet, but rather out of the origins of black dance.

Each member of the multiracial company went through a training program, and they developed their own form of dance which came right out of the street—the Asians developed their form of Asian dance, and American Indian dance, and it just was wonderful.

We had to develop a new criteria for movement, and we did this through a new theater piece called Animal Ritual. Because I found that if we used animal imagery, we could all use our own cultural background and it wouldn’t matter. We did this dance at the American Dance Festival.

So that went on for 12 years. The impact lasted for 12 years. Until Reagan came in and Expansion Arts guidelines changed completely and we lost our support.

NANCY: Really! Was that a natural cycle for it or do you think it was cut off?

ANNA: It was cut off. Prematurely. There was a lot more work we could have done. A lot of these people in the company were developing themselves as artists, they just needed another boost. However, many of them to this day are doing their own thing. Just today somebody called me from the company and said, “I’ve just been reading about the drug warfares that are going on in San Francisco and it’s getting so bad that black people are saying that the young people are killing each other off and I can’t stand this any longer. I’m going to see if I can set up some workshops in the Hunters Point area and start some activities there based on the RSVP Cycles, and see if I can be a force in turning this thing around.” So it seems like it’s recycling.

There was continuous development and research around our processes that we were constantly sharpening. Every time we’d do something there were always new challenges that we’d then try to incorporate in our training and in our work, try to understand a little better. So we always were having our workshops going on and trying to develop our systems.

And then I would always have these projects I personally was interested in. Somebody came to me and said, “Would you do something at our gerontology society?” and suddenly I became interested in the whole issue of the aging process and realized that that was a big issue. Economic and political. In preparing for the workshop, I thought, “What are the issues for them?” For me, the issue was that old people, again, are isolated. The same issues come up over and over again: isolation, separation, and fear. It comes down to that every single time. The issues with the blacks, the issues with Citydance, male and female—isolation, alienation, separation, and fear!

Then for quite awhile I didn’t do anything because I didn’t have anything that excited me, that seemed real, that was a real issue, till we had the murder on the mountain [Mt. Tamalpais]. Then that started this generic cycle which we now call Circle the Earth. It started in 1981 with a two-day and night dance called In and On the Mountain and the issue was the killer on the mountain.

There was a trailside killer who’d been on Mt. Tamalpais and killed seven women on the trails over the course of two years, and so the trails were closed, and this became a spiritual issue, because the mountain was closed to us. I felt that the issue there was violence in our society, and the attack of our spiritual dimension, because the mountain is the spiritual symbol in our landscape. It’s where people go to meditate, where people go to return to nature, where people go for the sense of returning to their roots, their nature. It’s the highest spot. It has this symbolic shape to it of yearning, of seeking, and that really got to me. I really got enraged over the sense that this was being taken from our community at a time when I felt this is what our search was. In the ’80s, our search was for spiritual meaning, for the purpose of our life. We were facing extinction, on every level. What was the meaning of our life? What did we have to live for? I felt that was the most crucial issue.

I didn’t start out by saying, “We’re going to dance about the killer on the mountain.” I just said, “What’s the myth in this community?” What are our myths to live by? I just put it out in the community that we were going to do an exploration of, a search for, living myths, and we were going to do it through movement and the environment. One hundred people came, and we worked for nine months and sure enough the mountain kept reappearing in everybody’s drawings. I said, “What is this saying to you?” And all of a sudden, “Phew,” big explosion. We are enraged, we’ve been disempowered, we have no channel to express our feeling. So that became the myth and the issue—the violence on our mountain.

That first time, the Tamalpa company did the dance for the community, using the resources we developed in the workshop. But we were still dancing in the theater. Then we went up to the mountain with 80 people and did various activities at the top—planted trees, read poetry, sang songs. We defied the killer and we walked down the mountain. Our purpose was to reclaim the mountain. A few days after the performance the killer was caught. The tip came from someone in the community. Now the community felt they were part of it.

Then Don Jose Mitsuwa, a Huichol Indian, came to me and said, “The healing of the mountain will not work unless you do it for five years.”

So we did a series for five years. Always with the company. I never particularly felt the performances worked. We would take a different theme every year. The big change came when it became a peace dance. The idea was that we would exemplify a peaceful way of being through the way we created the dance. And also, I said, “We can’t do a peace dance with a company. It’s got to be done with 100 people.” I just knew that it had to be a huge scale. And 100 people had to learn how to work together in nine days. That fast. Because there was urgency behind it.

What I required was that they find a conflict in their personal life, in their family life, in a community or in a relationship and that they find a way to resolve that peacefully, and find peace in themselves. After the dance they were required to make a specific application, in their life, and in the world. They were to join a group, or make a donation, or they had to do a peaceful act, in the world. It wasn’t enough to just dance it.

We took the dance to different places in the world and different groups would have different visions and different ideas. I’d pick up an idea from people who did it in Switzerland and share it with the people in Australia. And the people in Australia introduced the didgeridoo and I would bring that back here. So it was wonderful because by the time I’d bring the dance back home it was totally different because of the input I’d gotten from everywhere I’d been. Then that led to the idea of wanting to be able to all connect at the same time. So we began the Planetary Dance.

By 1988, we had 73 groups in 36 countries performing a score called “The Earth Run,” from Circle the Earth, every spring at the same time. That brought up for me the need and the importance of a planetary consciousness as another issue. That we needed to expand and find new ways that we could link together so that never again could we feel ourselves as nation against nation.

Then, this year, 1989, was perhaps the most challenging, the most rewarding performance which I’ve experienced in my whole life. This was dealing with the AIDS issue. It was the AIDS issue, but the myth is—how do we deal with death. This has been my personal issue since I had cancer in 1972. And this is where my personal research and my competence was put to test. Because for me, this dance was the ultimate test of dance. First of all, the alienation and fear around AIDS in this area is intense. People with AIDS are feeling totally isolated and discriminated against and fearful. I said, what we’re going to do is get people with HIV positive, ARC and AIDS, and I’m going to work with them for a year, which I have been doing. I’m working with a women’s group called Women with Wings, Women with AIDS. I’ve been working with the Steps Theater Company, People Challenging AIDS. We’ve been working with the men since last June (’88) and with the women for about six months. Separate, because the women originally were working with the men but they said that they had separate issues.

Then I said, “It’s time now to invite the community to come and dance with us. To join us. To support us.” Up until one week before the event, we only had 40 people. It was like people got cold feet. They’re afraid of getting AIDS. And even the people with AIDS weren’t registering—“Can I trust this process? I’m making myself totally visible.” I was just freaking out, they won’t do it. Only 40 people, I can’t believe this. So I did a massive telephoning. I just called everybody and all they needed was reassurance. Finally, by the last week we had about 35 people with HIV, ARC and AIDS dancing in the workshop with 70 people who didn’t have it, totalling over 100 people.

The issues were so real and so devastating, and so powerful. We were dealing with death as a way of living life fully now. And we were dancing with people who are in fact facing the issues of death. And people who were scared, “Will I get AIDS?” And the dance, which was Circle the Earth—this time called Dancing with Life on the Line, totally changed. You couldn’t recognize it as the same dance.

I asked each person with AIDS to come forward onto the space and call a support person that doesn’t have HIV or AIDS, that you’ve made friends with, call them out. Then I said, “Why did you call them, what are they to you?” Each person had a different issue, and they used it in the performance. For example, a young man called out, “Andy—I’ve fallen in love with you. Will you still love me with the AIDS virus?” One girl called Urike out and said, “Urike, are you still afraid of getting AIDS from me?” And Urike faced her and said, “I was at the beginning, I’m not now. Now I’m afraid that I don’t have any purpose in my life. And that I will die without any purpose.” Somebody else called someone out and said, “Will you be there for me if I get really sick?” and she answered, “I will love you, I will support you, I will not let you out of my sight!”

It was really touching. These were real issues that they were dealing with, put into performance. And at the end of the performance, people felt so empowered, so together. The people in the audience, the witnesses, would cheer them. The performers started the dance by running forward and shouting, “I want to live!” The witnesses were with them and so supportive—crying and laughing and clapping and cheering, tears just streaming from their eyes.

A parent came up to me saying, “We didn’t know our son had AIDS until the performance. It’s his way of telling us.”

And so the dance did work. It transformed. It brought people together, they overcame their fear and isolation. We did a restoration at the end of the dance. We invited any witness who had HIV, ARC or AIDS to come into the center and be restored. And anybody who’d lost a lover or a friend or a member of the family, to come and join in the circle, to be restored. And then anyone who chooses to support it. And gradually everybody joined.

STEPS Theater Company for People Challenging AIDS performs a triumphant dance of the immune system, San Francisco, 1988.

Photo by Margaretta Mitchell.

I have never had an opportunity to do anything that was so bottom line. This is the real stuff. Where do you go from here? You know, this is dying or living. What people are capable of doing when they’re motivated is astonishing. And one man who was scheduled for a blood transfusion didn’t have to have one, his T-cell count went up from 40 to 250 in five days which means his immune system has strengthened. So that dance, in terms of dealing with an issue, was for me the most successful because it worked one hundred percent.

NANCY: How is an event both successful on the level of the issue, and to you artistically? It has to be meaningful and authentic, and at the same time it has to “work.”

ANNA: That’s right. My greatest challenge is to confront issues authentically and at the same time develop scores that generate powerful creativity for the dancers. I want social issues to be expressed imaginatively and in what to me is good art. I’m terribly concerned that when I take on a social issue it should not completely over-shadow the artistic aspect. This has been a problem for me.

I wasn’t excited about the first few mountain series dances, because I was still working with a limited company concept. And I didn’t feel the form was original or sufficiently reflective of the content. I didn’t start getting excited until we started working with groups of 100 people and I could begin working with all kinds of people, dancers and nondancers who were totally committed to the issues of peace and healing. And working under the pressure of five days to create and perform the dance meant that participants were required to cooperate at a very high state of alertness. And by necessity the scores had to be essential and archetypal.

I guess I’m also, at heart, a theater person. I’ve been in theater all my life and I think of myself as an artist, a theater artist. I was at a dance critics conference and I was referred to as doing religious dance. I don’t do religious dance! It’s not religious, it’s not political, it’s not therapy, it’s not anthropology, it’s not sociology, and yet it’s all of those things. I’ve come to trust that because I am an artist, and come from that perspective, that what I make is art.

NOTE

Nancy Stark Smith is the editor of Contact Quarterly in collaboration with Lisa Nelson. She is one of the leading innovators of Contact Improvisation.