Anna Halprin Blank Placard Dance: at the invitation of the De Young Museum, A piece originally performed in 1967 with members of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop in San Francisco as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest of the time. The dance is a walk by some forty dancers who carry blank placards as they silently move through the streets. The Blank Placard Dance is designed to promote audience participation and active involvement in issues that mattered to people and communities.
“We marched down Market Street carrying placards that were blank, telling people to put their protest on the placard,” Anna explained. “So we didn’t say what the protest was, but people would say, ‘Well, what are you protesting?’ Because it was blank. And we would say, ‘What would you like to protest?’”
“The body is living art. Your movement through time and space is art. A painter has brushes. You have your body.”
Anna Halprin
These are beautiful! You captured something about the essence of the performance.