Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Anna Halprin didn't give a damn about what dance was supposed to be. She stripped it down to the studs, took all that precious ballet bullshit and all those modern dance pretensions and said, basically, "What if we just moved like human beings who are actually alive?"
This was radical. This was dangerous. Because when you tell people they can use their own bodies as their own instruments, without the tyranny of technique as virtue, you're threatening the whole edifice. You're saying the emperor's got no clothes and maybe that's the point.
She worked on a deck. An outdoor dance deck in Marin County, which sounds very California and it was, but what happened there was primal. She had people rolling around, breathing, touching the ground, discovering that their spine remembered things their conscious mind never knew. She collaborated with musicians and architects and regular people who'd never danced before, because she understood that movement isn't something you earn through years of punishment at the barre. It's your birthright.
When she got cancer, she didn't retreat into victimhood or therapeutic euphemism. She made dances about it. She gathered other people with cancer and they moved together and it was probably awkward and definitely not pretty by any classical standard, but it was real. It was flesh confronting mortality with the only tool we really have: presence.
Halprin understood something the avant garde often forgets: that transgression without humanity is just posturing. She broke rules not to be shocking but because the rules were preventing something essential from happening. She wanted healing. She wanted community. She wanted the body to have its say before the critics and the theorists carved everything up into digestible concepts.
Her scores, those written frameworks for improvisation, were like jazz three-chord structures: simple enough that anyone could play them, complex enough that they could contain real discovery. She proved that democracy and rigor aren't opposites. That ordinary gestures, walking, standing, falling, contain entire universes if you're paying attention.
The establishment eventually caught up, gave her the awards, wrote the books. But by then she was already somewhere else, probably still on that deck, still asking the question that mattered: What does your body want to do right now, in this moment, with these people, in this light?
No bullshit. No metaphor. Just move.
Industries 2018
The Planetary Dance by Anna Halprin in 1980 was created as a call to enact a positive myth in dance. “The Planetary Dance is a dance that transcends cultural and temporal barriers, a dance that speaks to the community that makes it, and a dance that addresses contemporary issues as they are experienced by all […]
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Speculation 2018
Our culture is in the throes of crisis: I have a vision of dance working in the service of healing. I invite you to join me in this quest. Anna Halprin I caught something most people can’t see even when they’re staring right at it. Not the performance, fuck the performance, anyone with a decent […]
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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 […]
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Individualism 2016
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 […]
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Industries 2016
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 […]
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Industries 2015
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
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