Anna Halprin, this woman understood something fundamental that most of us spend our entire miserable lives trying to avoid: the body doesn’t lie.
A “sensory walk” sounds like the kind of precious California bullshit that would normally make me reach for a cigarette and the nearest exit. But here’s the thing, Halprin wasn’t selling snake oil. She was doing something dangerous. She was asking people to actually feel things. To move through space with intention. To acknowledge that we’re all just meat puppets stumbling around, pretending we’re not terrified of our own mortality.
“Peace is a communal work process,” she said. Most people can’t even share a sidewalk without wanting to murder each other, and this woman believed we could dance our way to something resembling collective grace.
The audacity is almost offensive.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe art, real art, not the gallery approved garbage people hang above their couches, is supposed to be offensive. Uncomfortable. It should grab you by the throat and force you to reckon with the fact that you’ve been sleepwalking through your own existence.
These photographs show ordinary people, bodies in motion, engaged in something that probably looked ridiculous to anyone passing by. And that’s beautiful and awesome. That’s the whole fucking thing right there. The willingness to look absurd. To be vulnerable. To say “yes, there are prospects of survival” when everything around you is screaming the opposite.
Halprin died knowing she’d spent her life trying to wake people up. Trying to make them understand that the dance, this strange, embarrassing, essential act of being present in your own skin, might actually matter.
Anna Halprin Sensory Walk, a site specific performance produced by The Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco
I imagine a future where many of us will call ourselves dancers and collaborate to make an art which concerns itself with primary areas of life… for me, peace is a communal work process, a collective vision. The dance itself tries to exemplify a few of these methods in a truly grounded and practical way so that the people can say: yes, there are prospects of survival.
Anna Halprin