The body is living art.
Your movement through time and space is art.
A painter has brushes.
You have your body.
Anna Halprin
The city that gave us the Beats and the Summer of Love is turning into an open-air dormitory for software engineers who make more in a year than most families see in a decade. Something’s dying. Something important.
And Muriel Maffre is trying to save pieces of it.
She runs the Museum of Performance + Design, this improbable little operation down in SoMa dedicated to preserving things that were never meant to be preserved. Dance. Theater. Performance. The stuff that happens once and then vanishes. She’s protecting an archive of ghosts.
So she calls and asks me to photograph Anna Halprin leading a walk through lower San Francisco. A “sensory walk.” From the California Historical Society over at Mission and 3rd, winding through Yerba Buena Gardens, ending at the museum on Folsom and 5th. Not a long distance. Maybe twenty minutes if you’re walking with purpose. But this isn’t about getting somewhere. It’s about being somewhere.
Anna Halprin is in her nineties. She’s been making dance for longer than most people have been alive. And her whole philosophy boils down to this: your body moving through space is art. You don’t need training. You don’t need talent. You just need to be alive and willing to pay attention.
Which sounds like hippie bullshit until you actually see it happen.
The day of the walk, maybe forty people show up. Dancers, sure, but also civilians. Office workers. Students. Curious locals. Halprin designated leaders guide the group through the city like a pied pipers, but slower. Gentler. They cue these musical moments, these pauses, these invitations to feel the wind or notice the light or move in ways bodies don’t usually move in public.
I’m there with my camera trying to document the undocumentable. Because that’s the thing about performance: it exists in time, in bodies, in a specific moment that can never be repeated. The photograph is always a lie. It flattens everything. Freezes what was meant to flow. But it’s the lie we have. It’s how we remember.
People on the street stop and stare. Some laugh. Some look uncomfortable, the way Americans always look uncomfortable when confronted with bodies doing anything other than moving efficiently from Point A to Point B. A few join in. Most don’t. The city keeps moving around this little bubble of deliberate presence.
This is what Muriel understands. That in a city obsessed with innovation and disruption and moving fast and breaking things, someone needs to remember that people used to make art here. That weird, uncommercial, beautiful things used to happen in public space. That Anna Halprin could lead strangers through downtown San Francisco and for twenty minutes they could all agree that being alive and moving and feeling was enough.
The walk ends at the museum. The exhibition is called “Mapping Dance: The Scores of Anna Halprin.” Scores, like sheet music, but for movement. Instructions for how to be present in your body. How to create meaning without words.
I take my photographs. They’re incomplete, like all photographs of performance. They miss the sound, the temperature, the feeling of being there. But they’re what we have. They’re the record.
They say: this happened. These people were here. This mattered.
In a city that keeps paving over its own past, that feels like radical work.
More pictures? Yeah, ☞ they’re here