Look at those hands.
Two generations of women who’ve spent their lives insisting that the body means something beyond what commerce wants to sell us, beyond what convention wants to contain. Anna Halprin, 90 something years deep into the radical proposition that movement is democratic, that anybody’s dance matters, holding hands with Tonyanna Borkovi, who’s out there with me staging Aeschylus at water temples and Genet in abandoned mints like some kind of beautiful lunatic committed to the idea that theater should happen where life actually vibrates.
There’s something almost unbearably pure about this image. Not pure like sanitized, but pure like uncut. Two people who never bought the lie that art needs permission or a proper venue or the right credentials. Anna made her mark by putting cancer survivors and housewives and people who’d never danced a step in their lives into circles on mountaintops, declaring that moving together could heal, could matter, could be enough. No virtuosity Olympics, no graduate degree gatekeeping, just bodies in space doing what bodies do when they’re honest.
And here’s Tonyanna, carrying that torch into abandoned architecture, into parks after dark, into places where the ghosts of other purposes still hang thick in the air. Site specific doesn’t begin to cover it. She’s making theater that treats the world like it’s still wild, still available for transformation, still refusing to be just backdrop for our bullshit.
“Every experience I’ve had in my life is a resource in my body,” Anna says. That’s the whole revolution right there. Not rejecting the past, not transcending trauma, not achieving some Instagram perfect enlightenment. Just recognizing that my scars and my joy and my weird Tuesday afternoon revelations are all material. Everything counts. Nothing’s wasted.
These two know something most people spend their whole lives avoiding: that art worth making usually requires you to look like a fool, to work without a net, to believe in something so intensely that the reasonable people will think you’ve lost your mind. Anna dancing with terminal cancer patients. Tonyanna staging Greek tragedy in a crumbling palace. Same impulse. The refusal to let death or commerce or good sense have the last word.
The establishment calls this kind of work “experimental,” which is just another way of saying it makes them nervous. Because what Anna and Tonyanna traffic in isn’t experiment. It’s lived experience converted directly into form. No middleman. No polish to make it palatable. Just the raw insistence that human beings moving through space with intention is inherently meaningful.
That photograph catches them at the Museum of Performance + Design, which is perfect. Because what is performance but the design of ephemeral meaning? What they’re holding between those clasped hands is the thread that connects every weird workshop, every mountain dance, every play staged in an “inappropriate” location. The thread that says: this matters because we say it matters, because we showed up and made it matter.
Kindred spirits. Yeah. Except that makes it sound accidental, like they stumbled into the same energy. But this is deliberate kinship. The kind you earn by refusing every easy out, every comfortable compromise, every opportunity to just do the normal thing and collect your paycheck and let the machine grind on without you.
They’re holding hands like conspirators. Because that’s what they are.