| Main Feature Story - Friday, April 2, 2010
Feature: The dancer from the dance
New documentary puts spotlight back on postmodern dance legend Anna Halprin
by Ronnie Cohen
Anna Halprin stands in the center of her Kentfield dance studio with 16 dancers splayed around her on the wooden floor. Unlike other dance teachers, the revolutionary choreographer does not demonstrate steps or moves for her students to imitate. She is 89 years old. But it is not old age that prevents the spry dance pioneer from modeling positions. Even as a young teacher, Halprin refused to show her students how to move.
Halprin quietly nudges, but never orchestrates the movements of her students, or participants, as she calls them. Her insistence upon allowing the choreography to evolve organically from within the dancers themselves has been part of Halprin's signature. For most of her life, New York dance critics shunned her as a touchy-feely choreographer who once disrobed on stage. As the iconoclastic teacher prepares to celebrate her 90th birthday, the New York Times took note of a new documentary about her life—Breath Made Visible—and hailed her as "the woman who influenced the influential choreographers."
"It's hard to overestimate the influence the dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin has had on New York dance, even though she has made a point of staying far from the city," the March article says. The belated recognition amuses Halprin.
"It took them how many years to figure that one out?" she asks, smiling. "Really, it took them 40 years to figure that out. But that's all right. To tell you the truth, I've been doing my explorations and my delving into the depths of the meaning of dance left alone. I've appreciated the fact that I've had that privilege of not being pressured to prove anything, to be anything, but to be really left alone to make my own discoveries that were meaningful to me, rather than feeling I had to always be producing work that was acceptable.
"It took years for my work to become acceptable. Now that I'm approaching 90, I look back on all those years of experimentation and evolution. I've really come to appreciate that isolation. Not being in the limelight has given me the space to do things that I felt were not only useful but a reaffirmation of the power of dance to educate, to heal, to reach people on many different levels, to bring people together, to help the children."
One recent spring day, Halprin invites me into the Kent Woodlands home her late husband and creative collaborator, world-renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, designed on five acres facing Mount Tamalpais soon after World War II. Just beyond the front gate, she points out a bronze relief of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a leftover from the FDR Memorial, which Larry Halprin designed in Washington, D.C. Anna Halprin walks down steps made of railroad ties to a swimming pool set into the hillside like a sapphire in a ring.
Yoda watches over the pool. Halprin says Star Wars creator George Lucas gave the ancient Jedi master to her husband after he designed the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio. Larry Halprin also designed The Sea Ranch, intended as a utopia at the northern tip of Sonoma County, as well as San Francisco's Embarcadero Plaza and Ghirardelli Square. Halprin says her late husband, who died in October at 93, talked to Yoda when he swam.
Now a grandmother of four adults and a great-grandmother of an infant, Anna Halprin still swims every morning for an hour starting at 5am. She still teaches two dance movement and exploration classes a week—to novices and professionals alike—in her home studio. "I have people who have never danced in their life to some of the most beautiful dancers and performers, and they all dance together," she says.
Does she ever think about retiring? "What would I retire from?" she asks. "I love what I do."
From the pool, we see Halprin's redwood dance deck. Another of Larry Halprin's designs, the expansive deck floats above the steep hillside and meanders around redwoods. When they built it, Halprin says madrone trees shaded the deck. For unexplained reasons, the madrones died. About 20 years ago, they planted the thriving redwoods.
• • • •
CHOREOGRAPHER MERCE CUNNINGHAM, composer John Cage and poets Richard Brautigan and Michael McClure were among countless artists to play on Halprin's famous dance deck. When her two daughters were growing up, they too danced alongside Halprin on the deck. Rows of benches built into the hillside allow for a small audience.
"I just happened to have a place where we could gather," Halprin says. "We didn't even have the indoor studio for years. If it rained, we danced in the rain. If it was cold, we put our coats on. It was a place we could gather and experiment."
We walk upstairs, into her house and through her living room, where she shows off a chair, a bench and an oversized table, each created from a single slab of redwood and made by chain-saw master J.B. Blunk. Then we go through her kitchen and back outside. Sitting at a table in the backyard, the wiry dancer with curly gray hair and a lined face talks about being Jewish in an anti-Semitic world, her 70-year marriage, her cancer, her quest for social justice, her awe over dance's transformative power and some of her career highlights.
Vivacious and in a perpetual state of childlike awe, Halprin wears Old Navy overall jeans on top of a pink man-tailored shirt with a turquoise bolo tie and wire-rimmed glasses. Except for the deep wrinkles on her weathered face, nothing about her appearance hints at her age. Her energy seems shocking for an 89-year-old, let alone for a woman who underwent radical surgery for intestinal cancer 35 years ago.
She discusses the influence of her grandfather, a Hasidic Jew who came from the shtetl, a small Jewish town in Europe, and spoke no English. "My grandfather had a long, white beard," she says. "He was the love of my life. He would dance when he prayed. He looked like my image of what God is supposed to look like. Hasidic Jews jump up and down and throw their arms up in the air, and they form a circle for where the Torah was.
"He really couldn't talk to me. But he was so affectionate and warm. I used to always sit on his lap, and he would kind of sing to me in a nonverbal way. I really thought he was God, and God was [a] dancer. All my adult life, I've been searching for a dance that would mean as much to me, have as much soul and spirit as his dance meant to him."
A dance that might win that distinction is Halprin's "Planetary Dance." The dance began in 1981 during a free nine-month workshop Anna and Larry Halprin offered to address what they saw as the environmental degradation of Mount Tamalpais. "The engineers were coming in and cementing the creeks that led to Mount Tamalpais," Halprin says. "This was wrong. They were doing it for flood control, but it didn't work anyway. We were responding to what was happening to our environment and how can we develop a voice to be heard."
As she does in her dance classes, Halprin had workshop participants draw images in response to their feelings. People kept drawing the mountain but not only out of concern about pollution. They were terrified about a series of murders dubbed the "trailside killings." During 1980 and 1981, six women and one man were killed on trails in Marin and Santa Cruz counties. Many of the slain women had been raped.
"The mountain was closed," Halprin says. "We could not walk its trails. It was off bounds because of the trailside killer. I said to them, 'Let's do a dance to reclaim our mountain.' "
Some participants rode a bus to the top of the mountain. Others ran to the peak. They stopped at each of the murder sites and left offerings. They planted a tree, sang songs, read poems, told stories and danced. A helicopter followed them overhead, and together they hiked down.
"There was a very strong sense of commitment of dedication and a kind of celebration of having reclaimed our voices as a community," Halprin says. "And then the miracle happened. The killer had been on the loose for two years, and he was apprehended a few days after the dance. So it became kind of a little legend."
Today, the trailside killer, David Carpenter, remains incarcerated on San Quentin State Prison's Death Row.
For 29 years, Halprin has led the "Planetary Dance." Each year, participants perform the ritual dance. Each year's dance represents a different theme. One year, it was breast cancer, another year AIDS, another violence in the schools. Last year, promise was the theme. This year, on June 6, to mark the 30th anniversary and to honor Halprin on the eve of her 90th birthday, the theme will be uncertainties. "But we're celebrating," Halprin says. "We're not looking at it from a morbid point of view but from a place of strength, that we can come together as a community and pray together."
Like her grandfather's prayers, people around the world simultaneously perform the "Planetary Dance."
"It's like indigenous dancing," Halprin says. "You do a corn dance so the corn will grow. You do dances for your community to make things happen. If you dance because your grandmother has cancer, you're dancing for everyone who has cancer."
This year, Halprin will lead a training program to teach people from all over the world the "Planetary Dance" so they can bring it back to their own countries. So far, participants from 30 countries have signed up.
• • • •
HAVING FELT THE sting of anti-Semitism as a child and young adult, Halprin believes her Jewish roots compelled her to dance not just for artistic and emotional expression but for social justice.
"I'm very Jewish," she says. "We were the first Jews in Kent Woodlands. You couldn't buy property here as a Jew. I met Larry at Hillel, a campus social gathering place for Jews because we didn't have any other place to go. I couldn't even get housing at college.
"When you're discriminated against like that, it just makes you more stubborn. The Holocaust, of course, was another element that strengthened my commitment to be Jewish. I think being Jewish influenced my whole philosophy about dance. There's a long tradition for Jews to fight for civil rights. Look at Passover; it's all about celebrating freedom. I think it's inbred in our upbringing to have social consciousness."
In the late 1960s, Halprin choreographed and performed a dance called "Lunch." Some observers did not realize they were watching the dance until well into it because the dancers simply turned eating lunch into the dance. One observer called Halprin after watching "Lunch" and asked if she would work with a group of African-American dancers in Watts, the Los Angeles neighborhood still stinging from the 1965 riots. Halprin agreed to work with the Watts dancers for a year while at the same time working with a group of white dancers in San Francisco.
After a year, the two groups came together for what Halprin calls a "Reconciliation Dance."
"We used a real-life situation—the separation between whites and blacks that started the riots—and we used dance as a way to appreciate our diversity but find our common humanity."
Halprin says such a strong familial feeling evolved from the "Reconciliation Dance" that everyone who participated in it attended Larry Halprin's memorial service a few months ago. They came from Los Angeles, Denver and New York. "That's how strong it was," she says, "the feeling of the power of dance to transform."
During a dance class last week, Halprin plays discordant New Age recorded music that leads participants to dance sensually. Some writhe on the floor, alone. Halprin directs the improvisation while carefully avoiding anything that might be interpreted as a command. There are no mirrors in the classroom. Most of the dancers close their eyes. Some dance with the grace of ballerinas. Others look like they might be acting out a scene from One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Halprin offers the dancers pastel crayons and paper along with the option to draw their dance, write their dance or continue to dance. Most draw abstract pictures. One draws a green frog-like creature. They form a circle to admire each other's work.
Halprin wheels a skeleton into the circle and explains the parts of the body on which they have been focusing. "We're going to go through every part of the body," she says. "Of all the art forms, dance is the only one that uses the body as the instrument. When we do movement ritual, it's meant to open you up to the possibilities of the body. We will be taking the body apart and trying to understand the mechanics."
Privately, Halprin explains that someone who cannot completely open his or her chest—and for this she does demonstrate the opening, lifting her head and neck and arching back—cannot fully feel ecstasy.
"Let's do a little closure to integrate all of us," she suggests. Participants break into circles. One circle runs. Another takes leg-length exaggerated steps. The circles fold into other circles, and the dance begins to look like the hora, a circle dance performed at Jewish ritual celebrations. "The hora was done for the same reason," Halprin says, "to create community."
Halprin watches a half-dozen dancers holding hands and creeping forward as though in slow motion in a mystery. "The group mind always amazes me," she says. "I couldn't have choreographed that. There's so much individuality, and they're interconnected. They have total freedom, and yet everyone has their own place. It's a wonderful model for an ideal community."
DON'T MISS
Breath Made Visible opens Friday, April 2, and runs through Thursday, April 8, at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Anna Halprin and director Ruedi Gerber will talk to the audience after the 4:15pm screening on Sunday, April 4. For more information on the documentary, go to www.breathmadevisible.com .
COMING SOON
The 30th annual Planetary Dance will take place at 11am Sunday, June 6, at Mount Tamalpais State Park.
Contact Ronnie Cohen at ronniecohen@comcast.net. | 
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