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PREFACE

As I leaf through these pages of Collected Writings, I’m sitting on a bench overlooking my dance deck and studio, surrounded by redwood trees and shadowed by the constant presence of Mount Tamalpais. I realize I have been here a very long time. Each tree, each flight of a bird, rustle of a deer, feel of the breeze, or sound of a foghorn holds a memory of a dance born in this place. My life and work are interwoven with the rhythms, changes, and subtle shifts of this land.

I left the Midwest of my childhood and my budding professional dance career in New York City to move to California in 1945. World War II was over, and I set off to San Francisco to join my husband who had just returned from the Pacific. I was twenty-five years old. Six years later, we had two daughters, Daria and Rana, and our young family had moved into a new home designed by Bill Woorster in collaboration with my husband, Lawrence. Both men are primary influences in the Bay Region style of architecture and landscape architecture, a movement that influenced me and my art on a daily basis. Their style allowed for a free-flowing connection between inside and outside, a major theme in my own work which would develop through explorations of dance both inside and outside the theater. At my new house, sliding glass walls opened onto tan-bark terraces and led into the surrounding redwood groves, and the views reached to the bay and the slopes of the majestic mountain. My new house in the country felt like an integral part of nature, and increasingly it was a contemplative environment, free of the distractions of the city. At this time I shared a dance studio with Welland Lathrop in San Francisco, but I felt a gradual and steady pull to spend more and more time at my home studio.

Lawrence and the modern-dance lighting designer Arch Lauterer designed a dance deck that meandered among the redwood trees below our house. The pull was getting stronger. I did not want to be away from my two daughters, and I was ready to make the final break. I left the city and began to dance in this invigorating outdoor environment. I cut my ties with modern dance and began to search for new directions. I offered experimental workshops for dancers and invited visual artists, musicians, actors, architects, poets, psychologists, and filmmakers to join. I called the group Dancers’ Workshop, an idea from the experimental Bauhaus school of pre-Nazi Germany. At Dancers’ Workshop we were looking for ways to rediscover the basic nature of our materials free of preconceived associations and concepts. We were interested in avoiding the predictability of cause and effect. As a result of our many experiments, we created theater pieces and gave performances on the dance deck and the surrounding wooded area for invited audiences. As people became interested in our work, we were invited to international art festivals, both here and abroad.

The three aspects of my work I wish to illuminate are, I believe, unique trajectories; they have been of the greatest importance to me over the years. The first is that the experiments Dancers’ Workshop and I did in the 1960s and ’70s with new forms of dance led to new uses of dance. Dancing outside the confines of the proscenium theater and in the environment—the street or the natural world—had unexpected results. As it came closer to the environments where people lived, dance became more connected to people’s lives and more responsive to people’s needs. The image-making and sleight of hand common to the theater dropped away and we were left with the raw material of our lives to make our art. The boundaries between art and life, and between performer and audience, shifted and expanded, and the uses and applications of dance followed suit. Some larger force, which I believe has to do with the ancient roots of dance and its primary importance to human beings, was set into motion.

A second aspect developed as we researched new uses of dance and movement, and our forms became accessible to more people and began to exist outside the theater and in the daily lives of ordinary people. As the forms expanded, the kinds of people who participated became more diverse, which brought about profound changes in dance. New methods of communication and a creative process encouraging pluralistic involvement developed as we sought to create an art form speaking directly to various ethnic groups and nationalities, and people of different economic backgrounds, age levels, or physical abilities. Just as we had discovered a total, holistic theater, we needed a well-trained holistic dancer-performer. I began to generate forms in which the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies functioned in greater relationship to one another. My search was for the whole person, and my criterion was the meaning in each individual’s life.

My early work focused on new forms and uses for dance; later I became concerned with the meaning of the works I was creating, in order to reinvest these forms with emotion and personal motivation. In the process of stripping away all pretense in the theater and then engaging the whole person, we found that an unexpected synthesis occurred. We began to work with real-life themes, so now the dances we made had a real purpose in people’s lives. We were tapping into our own personal stories, and the dances we made had transformative powers. I began to call them rituals and identified the materials that created them as myths. This was a turning point for me in terms of how I viewed dance and its potential uses.

The third aspect of my work, and the part that has challenged and nurtured me all these years, has been the ways dance has been instrumental in developing community through the expression of these myths and rituals. It seemed an inevitable direction—the experience of community—and as community became my theme, larger symbols, or archetypes, emerged. The driving, pulsing life force that motivates us all became the inspiration of my later works. The shock of having cancer and the changes it wrought on my life and my work led me to explore the relationship between dance and healing. I began to work with dance as a healing art, and with people who are challenging life-threatening illness. Compassion, health, love, catharsis, life, death—the full spectrum of humanity’s striving—needed to be contained in my evolving forms. And over and over again, returning to the mountain, or to the sea, I was fed with images and resources and power which I recycled back into the work of making vital community.

As many of us struggle to find our spiritual identity, we can, I believe, return to dance to recover an ancient tradition that will serve us in today’s culture. The wisdom of dance and the body contains resources that can provide us with tools for the survival of life on this planet. Our connection to the earth and to one another as forms of the earth is our crucial next step. I believe that this is the wonderful possibility for dance today. Through dance we can rediscover a spiritual identity and community we have lost, and the work of making this dance current, immediate, and necessary continues to be of the greatest importance. At the moment, nature is the greatest teacher for me, the clearest voice guiding my dance. To feel and experience the earth helps me find my own deepest human nature, and I am directing much of my dancing toward this timeless, infinite theater.

As I sit on the bench overlooking my dance deck, a flood of questions arises. What next? Where am I going? What is my work now that I am seventy-five? What do elders in other cultures do? Teach the young, heal the sick, care for the land, hold the rituals, speak with the ancestors, maintain the family. I take all these actions, and call upon the spirits, wherever they may be, whatever that might mean, and however they may appear, to lead me further into this evolution of dance to which I have committed my life. I continue to believe in the shining potential set forth by all of this work, in its evolution from rebellion to expansion to community to healing and back again to the natural world.

Anna HalprinKentfield, CaliforniaJune 1994