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Anna Halprin à l’origine de la performance:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Editions du Panama - 2006
169 pages
ISBN-10 : 275570148X
ISBN-13 : 978-2755701487
This book co-published with the Musée d’Art
Contemporain de Lyon and the Editions du Panama
has received the financial support of the city of Lyon
and of the DRAC Rhône-Alpes.
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Introduction :
Sitting in the undergrowth, under some high trees, a naked body is entirely covered in blue paint, the headdress an improbable tangle of branches. One hand reaches out for some mud amassed in a crevice and, very slowly, starts to spread it over the face, the arms and the legs... The body, now entirely covered with humus and dead leaves, slowly crawls over the ground. It is as if a painting by Arcimboldo has come to life. At first the eyes are closed and when suddenly they open we are at the same time frightened and fascinated by the way they glow... Later, this same body, now all wrapped up in a white tulle chrysalis rolls around in the surge of the ocean waves... Later still, covered in ears of corn, it goes off into an impish dance and waving its arms around, invites us to follow it into a warm circle of light... This body, these dances, this is Anna Halprin today, alone in the midst of nature rehearsing the ritual of her impending return to earth. These death rituals express neither sadness, nor melancholy nor despair, but, rather, are vibrant odes to the movement of the body, to dance, to creativity, to life.
Anna Halprin’s work as an artist, at all times inventive and uncompromising, is interwoven into that explosion of creativity - not yet sufficiently recognized as such, yet to the initiated already part of history - that took place on the West Coast of the United States. This was the case with John Cage’s revolution of noise and chance, and with that of La Monte Young and Terry Riley’s minimalism and repetition, not to mention the microtones tuned to a system of « just intonation » dear to Harry Partch, whose work, together with that of Lou Harrison and Ray Johnston is still today, of great interest to many young composers of that region. For the fine arts, the non-figurative Pacific School of which Mark Tobey was a forerunner was born in California. As for dance, it was here that the profoundly original approach of Anna Halprin was conceived and developed. Her work, just as radical and almost antagonistic to that of Merce Cunningham, was to considerably influence the « Post Modern Dance » movement, which gained recognition in New York in the sixties. Although not always aware of the fact, many young avant-garde choreographers of today owe much to this crucial movement, undeniably initiated by Anna Halprin. All those who have been lucky enough to work with her, and this includes dancers and choreographers, agree that her influence was of capital importance. One of the main reasons dance historians have not yet taken the full measure of Anna Halprin’s work is that it developed in California, far away from the hue and cry of New York media.
Ann - she changed her name to Anna in 1970 - Halprin was born on July 13, 1920 in Winnetka, Illinois. She grew up in the suburb of Chicago and since 1945 has been living in Kentfield, California. Her first memories linked to dance are of her grandfather in synagogue, raising his arms, nodding his head, clapping his hands in joyous fashion. When she was still very young her mother send her to dance class. As a child she did her bar exercises in the style of Isadora Duncan, sat amazed through a performance of a Ruth Saint-Denis ballet, then took lessons at the Denishawn School, founded in 1915 by Ruth Saint-Denis and Ted Shawn. This school had put together a very eclectic teaching method: dance classes based on the technique of François Delsarte, oriental dance directed by Mi Chio Ito, yoga, music composition classes taught by Louis Horst.
These innovative methods helped to develop the American « Modern Dance » movement created first by Isadora Duncan, then by Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey - who later taught at the Juillard School and published « The Art of Making Dance » - and also Charles Weidman whose ballets were taken from real situations, even autobiographical ones, and wrote « Every little movement ». All these artists had totally broken away from classical ballet, they combined non-western ritual dance with early 20th century modernism, which incorporated the idea of machines. Antique myths were a subject, as was contemporary drama.
From 1938 to 1941 during the flowering of « Modern Dance », Anna studied both the theory and the practice of improvisation as well as kinesthesia at the University of Wisconsin with Margaret H’Doubler, who was not only a brilliant biologist but also an expert on dance. During one year Anna dissected corpses - an unusual activity for a dancer - in order to study the human skeleton and how the muscles work.
In 1940 she married Lawrence Halprin, an architect and land artist. Thanks to him she met the leading personalities of the Chicago New Bauhaus such as Walter Gropius and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy who, when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in Germany in 1933, went into exile and settled in Chicago in 1937. From them she learned the notion of « Total Art » which aims to invite all art forms in a single project. Their work was not deliberately provocative like that of the Futurists and Dadaists but was nevertheless extremely inventive. « To question the how of a creation and not the why » was one of Joseph Albers’ axioms that Anna Halprin adopted as her own, and so did all the choreographers of Judson Church who were influenced by her work. The Bauhaus philosophy refuted the notion of the artist as an individual or a genius and this idea was at the core of Ann Halprin’s work. Joseph Albers founded the « Black Mountain College » experimental center in North Carolina and this is where John Cage developed the ideas that he wrote about in 1937 in his manifesto « The Future of Music » in which he said « Wherever we happen to be, what we hear is mostly noise which we can use as musical instruments ». Thirteen years later, in the early fifties, he advocated « non-intentional » « indeterminate music » based on chance. It was in this center that, in 1951, Merce Cunningha presented his first work based on this principle « Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of three » and it was there that John Cage staged his first « Happening » « The Black Mountain Untitled event » in 1952.
In 1942, when her husband Lawrence went off to fight in the Second World War, Anna went to New York where she worked for two years in the show by Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman « Sing Out Sweet land ». In New York she met John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and many other avant-garde artists. She participated in their debates with great passion.
After the war, in 1945, Anna Halprin settled with her husband in Kentfield near San Francisco and there her experiments took her far away from all previously known forms of dance. She worked on the open-air stage Lawrence had built for her below their house. Still today she gives performances there and invites other avant-garde artists to show their work there.
From the beginning Anna refused to direct a company of which she would be THE choreographer. In a spirit of democracy combined with a refusal to create an institution, she founded the « Dance Cooperative » which, in 1955, became the « San Francisco Dancers Workshop ». With this group she worked continually, more preoccupied with the work in progress than in putting on performances. Keeping will away from any of the established institutions, for four or five years - with never a public performance - she went on with her radical experiments, engendered by incessant improvisation. It was during this period that she broke away from all the usual codes and experimented with a different approach to the body. She left the Theater building and took to dancing on building sites, on the streets, on parking lots, wearing either trainers or high heeled shoes and ordinary everyday clothing... She refused all artifice - which to her spelt convention - and went in for immediacy, group work, and collaboration with young artists: musicians, painters, sculptors and poets whose work, in their own domain, was as radical as her own.
Why this urgent need to break away from the recent past?
« After Second World War, and also because of it, some artists felt a strong urge to do away with all the old conceptions and to take a new look at all the possibilities of life, in order to find new meaning. For me, the meaning lay in finding new movements, I had to break old habits and references, in which I felt encased as if I were wearing too tight clothes... Also, one of the reasons for leaving the theater and going off to dance in the streets was a lock of subsidies. By doing things in this manner, we didn’t need to find money to promote our work and we had a « ready-made » audience... We were often arrested by the police, so that our action became political, simply because we were breaking the law by performing in the street without permission. »
Anna Halprin’s main resolve was to break away from the search for the « beautiful movement » and all that it may imply. Her work with Margaret H’Doubler had led her to be essentially interested in the inner feelings of the body dancer and how this feeling translates into movement. That is why, for instance she always refused to have mirrors in her dance studio.
« If you are totally aware of what is happening in your body, then you understand that the reactions of the body come directly from the nervous system. This can happen so quickly that you don’t have time to prepare the next step; the reaction is already taking place. If the mind interferes and tries to create a beautifulî movement, then this is no longer an improvisation. Natural movements arise from a state of relaxation and not from tension. Tension belongs to classical ballet as well as to « Modern Dance ». During four years our work focused only on the notion of articulation. Each dancer had to create their own ìinner necessity and their own personal way of dealing with the body... »
In 1955 John Graham, A.A. Leath, Simone Forti and her then husband, performance artist and sculptor Robert Morris, where there to work with her. They were very influenced by her ideas as were in fact all those who were her co-workers at the time, be they dancers, poets or musicians.
In 1957 Anna’s work underwent a major break thanks to the very significant notion of the « Task » with this concept she defined one of the fundamental elements of what was to become « Post Modern Dance» and, that was the introducing of every day gestures into the field of dance. This induced a gentle yet determined revolution that led to the notion of « looking at the body in a different way, just as John Cage and La Monte Young, each in their own way had advocated that one should ìlisten to the sound in a different way ». With this new approach she allowed herself to take into account such mundane activities as washing, eating, dressing, undressing... This concept led her to work with « impure » themes, in which ordinary gestures took on the same value as those supposed to glorify the body and its movements. This notion of « task » gave rise to movements stripped of subjectivity and also of the cumbrous stylistic preoccupations they had been subject to. This concept removes dance from its pedestal by negating the notion of effort and work most often associated with it. It removes the idea of virtuosity by literally rendering everything visible. Thank to « Tasks » she broke away from her predecessors whom could be seemed too emphatic, too conventional, and, in fact, too much in tune with dominant western. thought processes, in order to emphasize, in an original, passionate and entirely personal manner, the most natural movements of the body. Anna Halprin allows herself the same critical stance vis-à-vis « Modern Dance » as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham had vis-à-vis classical ballet. She recognizes that in their time the creators of « Modern Dance » had broken new ground, but she feels that their creations, based on their own personalities, one valid only for themselves and this they become prone to subjectivity and idiosyncrasy. « Their students and followers imitated them and grouped themselves into companies of clones who had lost sight of their original objectives she says, and with a smile adds, ìthen come along the new trend of « Post Modern Dance » which soon rise to its very own army of clones ».
For Anna Halprin it is essential to turn one’s back on origins, references, rules and habits in order to develop an analytic approach to improvisation, using one’s own body like an instrument. Her work demands total concentration while remaining foreign to that tension so characteristic of « Modern Dance ». These apparently contradictory propositions allow her to avoid the instinctive blindly emotional outpourings that can happen in an uncontrolled improvisation, while demanding of the dancer an acute awareness brought about by developing a sort of floating attention that then results in an apprehension of free associations and of all the sorts of feelings that the movements of the body itself can arouse.
In 1957 with « Airport Hangar » she used the structure of a hangar-building site near an airport to free herself from the restraints of space and to tackle the notion of verticality. Thanks to her action and the fragile presence of her dancers, this piece of urban landscape was transformed into an immense vibrating sculpture, and an immense performance place.
In 1959 Simone Forti suggested that Yvonne Rainer join Anna Halprin’s research studio in Kentfield. Trisha Brown was already there. Meredith Monk, Josephine Landor, Kei Takei soon joined them...
The same year, in 1959, Anna, together with Simone Forti presented « Rites of Women », then in 1960 « Birds of America or Gardens Without Walls » with a score by La Monte Young. During these two years La Monte Young, together with Terry Riley was music co-director of the « San Francisco Workshop ». The score for the choreography « Trio for Strings » was the very first historic piece of American Minimalism Music. La Monte Young composed it in 1958 in Los Angeles. This music alternates long drawn out sounds with more or less long moments of silence. Anna also worked with other pieces by la Monte Young such as « Two Sounds » which came about as a result of long months of work with these two musicians, who conjured up incredibly high sound levels by rubbing objects such as beer cans, rubbish bins and tables against the windowpanes, walls or floor of the dance studio... Although taking a passionate interest in this research, Anna, at heart, never considered herself to be essentially a minimalist.
« ìI didn’t always focus my work on slowness of movement. It’s time that it could take me an hour to go around a room and more than twenty minutes to climb down a rope, but I didn’t went to be tied to any kind of movement. I didn’t want to found a school of aesthetics. I was searching for all possible ways of breaking the rules; this could include slow repetitive or very rapid movements, together with the whole range of variations. La Monte Young and Terry Riley were into the same sort of research, they absolutely refused any music that could possibly sound like anything they’d ever heard. They were looking for a new way of hearing sound, as I was searching for a new way of moving. Like me, they were totally radical, they banged doors, shook windows, dragged chairs along the floor, all this on an incredibly loud sound level. They literally wanted to take hold of sound in the same way as I wanted to take hold of the body ».
La Monte Young, in his interviews has always expressed his admiration for the creativity and the incredibly open-minded approach to all possibilities that the dancers participating in Anna Halprin’s collective performances enjoyed. It was while working with her, that during the summer of 1960 he wrote the historic text of his « Lecture 1960 », before leaving for New York, where, together with Georges Maciunas, he was to become for a short time one of the leading figures of the Neo-Dadaist movement Fluxus.
The path of Ann Halprin also crossed that of Fluxus. She appreciated the humor, the radical propositions, the debates and the keen sense of communication inherent to this movement. Nevertheless, during these years of fundamental soul searching Anna never became a Fluxus artist. But, she felt closer to artists who performed happenings, such as Allan Kaprow or theater directors such as Grotowski, Julien Beck of the « Living Theater », Lee Breuwer of the « Mabou Mines Theater », and of experimental film makers such as Stan Brackage, or poets such as Allen Ginsberg or James Broughton...
In 1962, she presented « The Three Legged Stool » which in course of rehearsal became « The Four Legged Stool » with a score by Terry Riley « Mescalin Mix ». It was for that piece that Terry Riley, started his experiments with the principles of repetitive music, using loops of magnetic tape. Then Anna added another leg « The Five Legged Stool » with a score of Morton Subotnick and David Tudor. In this latter piece Anna’s « task » was to place forty empty bottles of wine on the stage during a time lapse of forty minutes. She also explored the whole theater - the corridors, the garage and the entrance hall - and moved around the spectators so as to include them in the action.
« I don’t like the notion of spectators, it implies entertainment. Also a spectator often has preconceived ideas, their own criteria. I prefer the notion of witness, or, even better participant ».
Later she went on to conceive scores for the audience, thanks to which, in the manner of a Greek Chorus, it participated in and enhanced the action.
For the piece in the form of an opera in 1963 « Esposizione » with a score by Luciano Berio, that she presented at the Venice Festival she went on experimenting with verticality with the help of a large cargo net usually used for lifting containers onto cargo ships. This net that she had bought on a San Francisco dock, was set up on the stage of the Venice Opera. It enabled her to carry out several concrete « Tasks ». Some of her dancers climbed onto the highest balconies of the theater and one of her girl swing over the heads of the audience on a rope... It was at that time that she and her company were invited to perform in Rome, Venice, Zagreb, Helsinki, Warsaw, Stockholm and Vancouver.
She soon began to associate « tasks » and improvisations with real psychological situations with « Apartment 6 » of 1965 she began to examine, through movement, the complex psychological relationships that had built up between her and the people she had been working with so intensely for the last few years. The question she asked herself was: how to express emotion without going in for the usual melodramatics implied by this notion. Her answer was to use everyday gestures, « ordinary » activities such as listening to the radio, reading the paper, making pancakes on stage...
She showed nudity for the first time in 1965, after having experimented with it together with her dancers in her open-air dance deck for years. The piece was « Parades and Changes » with a score by Morton Subotnick and the Swedish composer Folke Rabe. Well received in Sweden, the piece caused a scandal in New York where the police fined Anna for « Indecent exposure »... In 1967 after the performance of this « scandalous » piece at Hunter College, the newspapers, who where on her side, organized a friendly and temporary « conspiracy of silence ». To avoid any more police intervention, the journalists waited till Anna had left town, before publishing their articles about the performance. The piece was nevertheless banned in the United States for more than twenty years.
Anna Halprin continue on experimenting with everyday gestures, such as washing: in « The Bath » in 1967 with a score by Pauline Oliveros, a piece in which Bob Morris took part. Or else eating: in « The Lunch » in 1968, with a score by Charles Amirkanian. These works aroused a great deal of interest still now... After the Watts riots, Anna went once a week during a year to that tough Los Angeles neighborhood to work with a group of black dancers, who then joined her group of white ones. This anti-segregationist encounter did not pass off without some friction. However, in 1969 they performed « Ceremony of US » which shocked the establishment. Then, the group performed « Initiations and Transformations and, Animal Rituals » in 1971. « It was the first time such an encounter had taken place. It was at the same time political and social. Then we started to work with a multi-racial group and performed in all sorts of places, festivals, prisons, schools... ».
Deciding that improvisations, even associated with « tasks » has its own limits and even gives raise to its own codes: « Improvisation can’t be taught, one can only choose and control. Certain ideas and movements are constantly recurring ». Anna turned to what she called « Exploration » a term favored by her teacher Margaret H’Doubler. This was a more focused and controlled work method, which makes greater demands on the dancer. Exploration is different from improvisation in that the ideas or instructions are more clearly defined so as to delve deeper into the notion of « task ». « The score I’m working on, tell you what to do but not how to do it. I’m neither a guru nor a fascist dictator. Setting out what to do is important to me because it defines limits, and the more limits there are, the harder you have to work to control your tools and carry out your tasks. Not setting out how to do it leaves each person free to find their very own means of expression ».
Already with the « Task » the experiment could be structured: the movements were not unmotivated, they had a purpose, however absurd these may have seemed. Yet the manner in which the « task » was carried out remained subject to improvisation. Thanks to this concept of « Exploration » and the work methods developed by Anna and her husband - who helped her to write up the charter « RSVP - Cycles »: Resources, Scores, Valuation, Performances - the research was maintained within certain restraints which compelled each participant to further his or her own experimentation and to confront the stimulating contradiction between freedom of imagination and rigor.
Audience reaction, in the United States and also in Europe was often very violent. Soon established choreographers began to consider that what Anna Halprin was doing was no longer dance, in the same manner, as composers considered that John Cage’s work had no longer anything to do with music.
« Just as John Cage considered that every sound is music, she says, I considered that every movement is dance. I used to say to Yvonne Rainer: if dance is the rhythm of a body moving in a context and an environment, then what I do is truly dance. What do you have to do to be accepted as Modern or Post Modern? In 1965 I did « Apartment 6 » in which the dancers wore high heels! How awful! From then on I wasn’t Modern any more, and then I wasn’t even a dancer... When the work of an artist doesn’t fit into any form recognized by the establishment, then those artists ignore it whose work does fit in and is recognized. At best one is labeled ìavant-gardeî and set apart ».
And yet, during the sixties, many dance performances took place in museums, art galleries or in the open air... Together with Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Bob Morris, Trisha Brown at the Judson Church in New York, they walked, they ran, they eat, they climbed up the sides of buildings, while the audience was invited to participate in one form or another. In 1960, Simone Forti - who had been working with Anna Halprin for several years - together with Yvonne Rainer and Bob Morris created a dance called « See Saw » which was a sort of game with objects and tasks. In 1961 Steve Paxton created « Proxy » which takes as its theme everyday tasks such as eating or drinking. In 1962 Trisha Brown choreographed « Trillium » in which she « only » stood, sat or lay down. The same year Yvonne Rainer, working with everyday movements such as walking and running presented « Ordinary Dance » and « We Shall Run ». In 1963, in « An Anthology » by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, a collection of Fluxus scores and performances, Simone Forti published an article about her meticulous analysis of the mechanics of the body. In 1966, Yvonne Rainer created « Trio A » which included the famous « The Mind is a Muscle » inspired not only by minimalism and repetition but also by the work of Anna Halprin: The body is used like an object, the body and the object become interchangeable. And Trisha Brown with « Motor » in 1965 danced on a parking...
In the beginning of the seventies, a « style » designated as « Post Modern » by Yvonne Rainer as early as 1962 developed and asserted itself, together with all its variants. This « style » largely took its substance from the abstraction and the notion of chance inherent to the work of Merce Cunningham on the one hand, and on the other hand, from the concrete, simplified, objective, everyday, yet precise movements inherent to the work of Ann Halprin.
In 1972, a new element entered Anna Halprin’s work. That year it was discovered that she was suffering from cancer, of which there was a recurrence in 1975. This led her to a decision characteristic of her strong personality: she had dedicated her life to art, from now on she would dedicate her art to life. For near than thirty years she devoted a large part of her time to dancing with cancer patients and then, from the eighties on, with AIDS patients, so as to help them, thanks to the creative process she developed, to reconquer the body that was letting them down.
In 1976, with « City Dance » she went back to working in the community and, together with all her group, took to the streets of San Francisco, from sunrise to sunset, twenty five people, to the Cemetery, to Embarcadero Plaza, to the South Park ghetto... A feeling of collective work, work with different ethnic groups, work relating to illness and death, art as catharsis... All these themes led her to take a new interest in the notions of « Myths » and « Rituals » which were at the very origins of dance.
« I was interested in the ways movement, feeling and imagination interconnect. It was at that time that I developed the idea of the « Myth », using movement not only as a physical experience but also as a symbol ».
It was at that time that she created « Male and Female Rituals » in 1978, « Celebration of Life » in 1979, « Search For Living Myths and Rituals Trough Dance and The Environment » in 1980, and « Circle the Earth » in 1988.
She has recently conceived new creations, which are a direct result of her long familiarity with sickness and death. In the midst of nature, she paints her naked body, cover it with mud, enter into some arrow... These solo dances that she created in 2000, together with the body artist and photograph Eeo Stubbelfield, they calls them « Still Dance ». She also performed those exciting improvisations for Andy Abraham Wilson’s film « Returning Home ». During that same period she participated in the dance performance « Be With », together with the Japanese artists Butô Eiko and Koma. In 2000 too, she created a major work, astonishing and disturbing because of its strength « Intensive Care », in which she plays with drapery reminiscent of those used for his photography by the psychiatrist Gaëtan De Clérambault. It also evokes 17th century paintings of the Descent from the Cross and The Entombment of Christ. We, the audience, are at the same time frightened and spellbound and we have to summon up all our intellectual and aesthetic capacities so as to try and shield ourselves from this direct confrontation, shattering yet fascinating with death.
Anna Halprin and Merce Cunningham, friends and contemporaries, initiators of two fundamentally different attitudes to dance that are still being developed today, have scrutinized everything that they felt to be arbitrary in « Modern dance ». They rejected emotional excess, expressionist hypertrophy, too easily foreseeable themes and variations and the too direct relationship between « Cause and Effect » that Modern Dance is not quite exempt from. Very much in harmony with the thinking of John Cage, they have incorporated into their work the juxtaposition, dear to the composer, of the disparate activities that make up our lives. But where Merce Cunningham chose to work with collage, chance and technology while making use of the usual ballet aesthetics, Anna Halprin for her part, sought to « penetrate » the human body - just as La Monte Young sought to « penetrate » sound - so as to be able to work with all of its anatomical characteristics. She hasn’t made use of technology, as Merce Cunningham has, she hasn’t even questioned it. On the contrary she has chosen to favor the notions of the relationship to nature, nudity, sexual impulses, subconscious desire, ritual, ethic communities, social conflict, sickness, death...
In the manner of Nadia Boulanger who, - quiet at the same time - at the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau taught such widely different composers as Aaron Copland, Elliot Carter or Philip Glass, Ann always vigorously encourages those who work with her to search for their own individuality. « Tell what to do, not how to do it » is her motto.
She imparts her methods in such a way as to help each one find their own rules. This is at the very heart of her teaching: the belief that the other is really other, not a mirror image, nor, even worse, the mirror image of a mirror image...
Anna’s quest as an artist is based on her knowledge of human anatomy, together with the utterly original way has incorporated the ideas of the Bauhaus, especially those relating to the notion of group work, the challenge to the glorification of the artists’ ego, and the importance of the mode of procedure. All these ideas are associated with her refusal to found a company and to set up a repertory, which might have found her to repeat herself again and again... For her, art must be useful to the society we live in and that is why it must be free from any sort of preconceived idea. That is also why the notion of inclusion is so important to her. The work must include the less noble gestures of every day life, the audience, the sick, different ethnic groups and also the environnement... For a large part it is this philosophy of inclusion that underwrites the whole of her approach.
Furthermore, she feels that the mere fact of the presence in space of that high-precision « machine », the body, is in itself a statement to which nothing more need to be added, it need not be inflated with artificial gestures. To explore the reality of the body is the work of a lifetime. Anna Halprin has chosen to question, to re-examine, to rethink everything, so as to redefine once again everything the body can express through the medium of dance. This questioning can be so radical as to provoke a fracture that can be described as paradigmatic...
Many of the dancers who worked with Anna Halprin towards the end of the fifties formed the hard core of the « Judson Dance Group » in 1962 and, later on, from 1970 to 1976 that of the « Grand Union ». These groups developed and experimented, each in their own manner, the fundamental questioning initiated by her. Thanks to these artists her ideas became known, so that though she remained on the West Coast, her work has had a great impact on the orientation of New York choreographers and, by ricochet, on European one. Her students incorporated into their productions, the radical innovations that she had been working with in her own world, far away from the power structures of the dance establishment. They all recognize that work and teaching of Anna Halprin as a source of inspiration for the « Post Modern Dance - performances ». At « Judson Church », Yvonne Rainer formulated once again one of the axioms already present in the fundamental thought of the Californian choreographer: « No to entertainment, no to virtuosity, no to magic and trompe l’oeil, no to transcendence, no to the star system, no to grandiloquence, no to manner on, no to the seducing of the spectator by means of stylistic devices »
As already stated, we find the influence of Anna Halprin in the experimental work of a number of young choreographers, especially in France and Belgium. Most of them have never even heard of her and their references is to the founders of the « Judson Dance Theater » and the « Grand Union ». It is true that she never meant to create a following, but in spite of this, many generations of dancers, performers and other creative artists, have worked with her ideas and her fundamental questioning of nature and the meaning of movement, of the dew to earth functions of the human body and of the utter strangeness of ordinary daily life. Anna Halprin, a pioneer and essential figure of « Post Modern Dance », is, in fact, not well known to the general public, and, mist of the time, only briefly mentioned in dance anthologies and specialists works. Why? Because, as already stated, she chose to live in California, but also and above all, because after, as early as 1957, having originated a new approach to dance, after having participated in numerous international festivals, she chose to pursuer her experimental work far away from any kind of institution that could bring her acclaim. She never wanted to have anything to do with their latter land, furthermore she didn’t want to take her work on tour, she felt that too many engagements take up too much time. For her, several years were not too long to develop a view concept in. It was more important to delve deeper in order to constantly renew her work, than to make herself known by performing too much in public. To the question of fame, she could answer: « I wasn’t a candidate ».
And, finally, the serious illness with which she became afflicted led her to propose decisive answers, trough dance, to group of patients. To her, placing art at the service of life is not a vain formula. Though this approach was devoid of any kind of conventional displays of emotion and, devoid also of dubious sentimentality, it was, nevertheless incompatible with the demands of the international stage. Yet it was these decades of unrelenting work witch engendered and nourished Anna’s recent breathtaking creations which exemplify the powerful link that exists between her work with everyday, objective tasks, on the one hand, and that other part of her work which, in a profoundly striking way embraces philosophy, even metaphysics and the vertigo the latter can induce.
« I was a rebel, says Anna Halprin and, I think, an explorer. I wanted to break away from all the conventional roles. Who says I have to dance in a theater, who says I have to dance on points wearing a tutu? I never felt I had to explain what I was doing or why I was doing it. After my cancer I asked myself the question: What am I doing with my life? It was then that I decided to work with cancer and aids sufferers... I’am neither a therapist nor a social worker, I am an artist and I feel I must find an imaginative way out of these situations. Because that is what art is about: to integrate propositions which are imposed or suggested into the core of the creative process. »
If, in the middle of the 20th century Anna Halprin has installed a fertile center of revolutionary experimentation, right at the heart of contemporary dance, it is because for her, it is all important, to be ever on the lookout for new beginnings. Her aim was not to develop a style, as one would unroll a ball of string, it was on the contrary to break any link, however flimsy, that could hinder her research for something else.
Anna Halprin is in that tradition of artist who, like Marcel Duchamp or John Cage aim to show how extraordinary the ordinary can be, and thanks to them, the ordinary becomes a work of art. For John Cage and the space of his « 4’33 » of silence, the sole function of music is to make us aware of the miracle that is life. For Anna Halprin who shares the same feeling of wonder, it is obvious that such a miracle cannot be better celebrated than by dance, that art which is able to embrace, in the full richness of plenitude, the agility of man’s body, the mobility of his mind and the mystery of the universe that surrounds him.
Jacqueline Caux
Sitting in the undergrowth, under some high trees, a naked body is entirely covered in blue paint, the headdress an improbable tangle of branches. One hand reaches out for some mud amassed in a crevice and, very slowly, starts to spread it over the face, the arms and the legs... The body, now entirely covered with humus and dead leaves, slowly crawls over the ground. It is as if a painting by Arcimboldo has come to life. At first the eyes are closed and when suddenly they open we are at the same time frightened and fascinated by the way they glow... Later, this same body, now all wrapped up in a white tulle chrysalis rolls around in the surge of the ocean waves... Later still, covered in ears of corn, it goes off into an impish dance and waving its arms around, invites us to follow it into a warm circle of light... This body, these dances, this is Anna Halprin today, alone in the midst of nature rehearsing the ritual of her impending return to earth. These death rituals express neither sadness, nor melancholy nor despair, but, rather, are vibrant odes to the movement of the body, to dance, to creativity, to life.
Anna Halprin’s work as an artist, at all times inventive and uncompromising, is interwoven into that explosion of creativity - not yet sufficiently recognized as such, yet to the initiated already part of history - that took place on the West Coast of the United States. This was the case with John Cage’s revolution of noise and chance, and with that of La Monte Young and Terry Riley’s minimalism and repetition, not to mention the microtones tuned to a system of « just intonation » dear to Harry Partch, whose work, together with that of Lou Harrison and Ray Johnston is still today, of great interest to many young composers of that region. For the fine arts, the non-figurative Pacific School of which Mark Tobey was a forerunner was born in California. As for dance, it was here that the profoundly original approach of Anna Halprin was conceived and developed. Her work, just as radical and almost antagonistic to that of Merce Cunningham, was to considerably influence the « Post Modern Dance » movement, which gained recognition in New York in the sixties. Although not always aware of the fact, many young avant-garde choreographers of today owe much to this crucial movement, undeniably initiated by Anna Halprin. All those who have been lucky enough to work with her, and this includes dancers and choreographers, agree that her influence was of capital importance. One of the main reasons dance historians have not yet taken the full measure of Anna Halprin’s work is that it developed in California, far away from the hue and cry of New York media.
Ann - she changed her name to Anna in 1970 - Halprin was born on July 13, 1920 in Winnetka, Illinois. She grew up in the suburb of Chicago and since 1945 has been living in Kentfield, California. Her first memories linked to dance are of her grandfather in synagogue, raising his arms, nodding his head, clapping his hands in joyous fashion. When she was still very young her mother send her to dance class. As a child she did her bar exercises in the style of Isadora Duncan, sat amazed through a performance of a Ruth Saint-Denis ballet, then took lessons at the Denishawn School, founded in 1915 by Ruth Saint-Denis and Ted Shawn. This school had put together a very eclectic teaching method: dance classes based on the technique of François Delsarte, oriental dance directed by Mi Chio Ito, yoga, music composition classes taught by Louis Horst.
These innovative methods helped to develop the American « Modern Dance » movement created first by Isadora Duncan, then by Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey - who later taught at the Juillard School and published « The Art of Making Dance » - and also Charles Weidman whose ballets were taken from real situations, even autobiographical ones, and wrote « Every little movement ». All these artists had totally broken away from classical ballet, they combined non-western ritual dance with early 20th century modernism, which incorporated the idea of machines. Antique myths were a subject, as was contemporary drama.
From 1938 to 1941 during the flowering of « Modern Dance », Anna studied both the theory and the practice of improvisation as well as kinesthesia at the University of Wisconsin with Margaret H’Doubler, who was not only a brilliant biologist but also an expert on dance. During one year Anna dissected corpses - an unusual activity for a dancer - in order to study the human skeleton and how the muscles work.
In 1940 she married Lawrence Halprin, an architect and land artist. Thanks to him she met the leading personalities of the Chicago New Bauhaus such as Walter Gropius and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy who, when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in Germany in 1933, went into exile and settled in Chicago in 1937. From them she learned the notion of « Total Art » which aims to invite all art forms in a single project. Their work was not deliberately provocative like that of the Futurists and Dadaists but was nevertheless extremely inventive. « To question the how of a creation and not the why » was one of Joseph Albers’ axioms that Anna Halprin adopted as her own, and so did all the choreographers of Judson Church who were influenced by her work. The Bauhaus philosophy refuted the notion of the artist as an individual or a genius and this idea was at the core of Ann Halprin’s work. Joseph Albers founded the « Black Mountain College » experimental center in North Carolina and this is where John Cage developed the ideas that he wrote about in 1937 in his manifesto « The Future of Music » in which he said « Wherever we happen to be, what we hear is mostly noise which we can use as musical instruments ». Thirteen years later, in the early fifties, he advocated « non-intentional » « indeterminate music » based on chance. It was in this center that, in 1951, Merce Cunningha presented his first work based on this principle « Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of three » and it was there that John Cage staged his first « Happening » « The Black Mountain Untitled event » in 1952.
In 1942, when her husband Lawrence went off to fight in the Second World War, Anna went to New York where she worked for two years in the show by Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman « Sing Out Sweet land ». In New York she met John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and many other avant-garde artists. She participated in their debates with great passion.
After the war, in 1945, Anna Halprin settled with her husband in Kentfield near San Francisco and there her experiments took her far away from all previously known forms of dance. She worked on the open-air stage Lawrence had built for her below their house. Still today she gives performances there and invites other avant-garde artists to show their work there.
From the beginning Anna refused to direct a company of which she would be THE choreographer. In a spirit of democracy combined with a refusal to create an institution, she founded the « Dance Cooperative » which, in 1955, became the « San Francisco Dancers Workshop ». With this group she worked continually, more preoccupied with the work in progress than in putting on performances. Keeping will away from any of the established institutions, for four or five years - with never a public performance - she went on with her radical experiments, engendered by incessant improvisation. It was during this period that she broke away from all the usual codes and experimented with a different approach to the body. She left the Theater building and took to dancing on building sites, on the streets, on parking lots, wearing either trainers or high heeled shoes and ordinary everyday clothing... She refused all artifice - which to her spelt convention - and went in for immediacy, group work, and collaboration with young artists: musicians, painters, sculptors and poets whose work, in their own domain, was as radical as her own.
Why this urgent need to break away from the recent past?
« After Second World War, and also because of it, some artists felt a strong urge to do away with all the old conceptions and to take a new look at all the possibilities of life, in order to find new meaning. For me, the meaning lay in finding new movements, I had to break old habits and references, in which I felt encased as if I were wearing too tight clothes... Also, one of the reasons for leaving the theater and going off to dance in the streets was a lock of subsidies. By doing things in this manner, we didn’t need to find money to promote our work and we had a « ready-made » audience... We were often arrested by the police, so that our action became political, simply because we were breaking the law by performing in the street without permission. »
Anna Halprin’s main resolve was to break away from the search for the « beautiful movement » and all that it may imply. Her work with Margaret H’Doubler had led her to be essentially interested in the inner feelings of the body dancer and how this feeling translates into movement. That is why, for instance she always refused to have mirrors in her dance studio.
« If you are totally aware of what is happening in your body, then you understand that the reactions of the body come directly from the nervous system. This can happen so quickly that you don’t have time to prepare the next step; the reaction is already taking place. If the mind interferes and tries to create a beautifulî movement, then this is no longer an improvisation. Natural movements arise from a state of relaxation and not from tension. Tension belongs to classical ballet as well as to « Modern Dance ». During four years our work focused only on the notion of articulation. Each dancer had to create their own ìinner necessity and their own personal way of dealing with the body... »
In 1955 John Graham, A.A. Leath, Simone Forti and her then husband, performance artist and sculptor Robert Morris, where there to work with her. They were very influenced by her ideas as were in fact all those who were her co-workers at the time, be they dancers, poets or musicians.
In 1957 Anna’s work underwent a major break thanks to the very significant notion of the « Task » with this concept she defined one of the fundamental elements of what was to become « Post Modern Dance» and, that was the introducing of every day gestures into the field of dance. This induced a gentle yet determined revolution that led to the notion of « looking at the body in a different way, just as John Cage and La Monte Young, each in their own way had advocated that one should ìlisten to the sound in a different way ». With this new approach she allowed herself to take into account such mundane activities as washing, eating, dressing, undressing... This concept led her to work with « impure » themes, in which ordinary gestures took on the same value as those supposed to glorify the body and its movements. This notion of « task » gave rise to movements stripped of subjectivity and also of the cumbrous stylistic preoccupations they had been subject to. This concept removes dance from its pedestal by negating the notion of effort and work most often associated with it. It removes the idea of virtuosity by literally rendering everything visible. Thank to « Tasks » she broke away from her predecessors whom could be seemed too emphatic, too conventional, and, in fact, too much in tune with dominant western. thought processes, in order to emphasize, in an original, passionate and entirely personal manner, the most natural movements of the body. Anna Halprin allows herself the same critical stance vis-à-vis « Modern Dance » as Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham had vis-à-vis classical ballet. She recognizes that in their time the creators of « Modern Dance » had broken new ground, but she feels that their creations, based on their own personalities, one valid only for themselves and this they become prone to subjectivity and idiosyncrasy. « Their students and followers imitated them and grouped themselves into companies of clones who had lost sight of their original objectives she says, and with a smile adds, ìthen come along the new trend of « Post Modern Dance » which soon rise to its very own army of clones ».
For Anna Halprin it is essential to turn one’s back on origins, references, rules and habits in order to develop an analytic approach to improvisation, using one’s own body like an instrument. Her work demands total concentration while remaining foreign to that tension so characteristic of « Modern Dance ». These apparently contradictory propositions allow her to avoid the instinctive blindly emotional outpourings that can happen in an uncontrolled improvisation, while demanding of the dancer an acute awareness brought about by developing a sort of floating attention that then results in an apprehension of free associations and of all the sorts of feelings that the movements of the body itself can arouse.
In 1957 with « Airport Hangar » she used the structure of a hangar-building site near an airport to free herself from the restraints of space and to tackle the notion of verticality. Thanks to her action and the fragile presence of her dancers, this piece of urban landscape was transformed into an immense vibrating sculpture, and an immense performance place.
In 1959 Simone Forti suggested that Yvonne Rainer join Anna Halprin’s research studio in Kentfield. Trisha Brown was already there. Meredith Monk, Josephine Landor, Kei Takei soon joined them...
The same year, in 1959, Anna, together with Simone Forti presented « Rites of Women », then in 1960 « Birds of America or Gardens Without Walls » with a score by La Monte Young. During these two years La Monte Young, together with Terry Riley was music co-director of the « San Francisco Workshop ». The score for the choreography « Trio for Strings » was the very first historic piece of American Minimalism Music. La Monte Young composed it in 1958 in Los Angeles. This music alternates long drawn out sounds with more or less long moments of silence. Anna also worked with other pieces by la Monte Young such as « Two Sounds » which came about as a result of long months of work with these two musicians, who conjured up incredibly high sound levels by rubbing objects such as beer cans, rubbish bins and tables against the windowpanes, walls or floor of the dance studio... Although taking a passionate interest in this research, Anna, at heart, never considered herself to be essentially a minimalist.
« ìI didn’t always focus my work on slowness of movement. It’s time that it could take me an hour to go around a room and more than twenty minutes to climb down a rope, but I didn’t went to be tied to any kind of movement. I didn’t want to found a school of aesthetics. I was searching for all possible ways of breaking the rules; this could include slow repetitive or very rapid movements, together with the whole range of variations. La Monte Young and Terry Riley were into the same sort of research, they absolutely refused any music that could possibly sound like anything they’d ever heard. They were looking for a new way of hearing sound, as I was searching for a new way of moving. Like me, they were totally radical, they banged doors, shook windows, dragged chairs along the floor, all this on an incredibly loud sound level. They literally wanted to take hold of sound in the same way as I wanted to take hold of the body ».
La Monte Young, in his interviews has always expressed his admiration for the creativity and the incredibly open-minded approach to all possibilities that the dancers participating in Anna Halprin’s collective performances enjoyed. It was while working with her, that during the summer of 1960 he wrote the historic text of his « Lecture 1960 », before leaving for New York, where, together with Georges Maciunas, he was to become for a short time one of the leading figures of the Neo-Dadaist movement Fluxus.
The path of Ann Halprin also crossed that of Fluxus. She appreciated the humor, the radical propositions, the debates and the keen sense of communication inherent to this movement. Nevertheless, during these years of fundamental soul searching Anna never became a Fluxus artist. But, she felt closer to artists who performed happenings, such as Allan Kaprow or theater directors such as Grotowski, Julien Beck of the « Living Theater », Lee Breuwer of the « Mabou Mines Theater », and of experimental film makers such as Stan Brackage, or poets such as Allen Ginsberg or James Broughton...
In 1962, she presented « The Three Legged Stool » which in course of rehearsal became « The Four Legged Stool » with a score by Terry Riley « Mescalin Mix ». It was for that piece that Terry Riley, started his experiments with the principles of repetitive music, using loops of magnetic tape. Then Anna added another leg « The Five Legged Stool » with a score of Morton Subotnick and David Tudor. In this latter piece Anna’s « task » was to place forty empty bottles of wine on the stage during a time lapse of forty minutes. She also explored the whole theater - the corridors, the garage and the entrance hall - and moved around the spectators so as to include them in the action.
« I don’t like the notion of spectators, it implies entertainment. Also a spectator often has preconceived ideas, their own criteria. I prefer the notion of witness, or, even better participant ».
Later she went on to conceive scores for the audience, thanks to which, in the manner of a Greek Chorus, it participated in and enhanced the action.
For the piece in the form of an opera in 1963 « Esposizione » with a score by Luciano Berio, that she presented at the Venice Festival she went on experimenting with verticality with the help of a large cargo net usually used for lifting containers onto cargo ships. This net that she had bought on a San Francisco dock, was set up on the stage of the Venice Opera. It enabled her to carry out several concrete « Tasks ». Some of her dancers climbed onto the highest balconies of the theater and one of her girl swing over the heads of the audience on a rope... It was at that time that she and her company were invited to perform in Rome, Venice, Zagreb, Helsinki, Warsaw, Stockholm and Vancouver.
She soon began to associate « tasks » and improvisations with real psychological situations with « Apartment 6 » of 1965 she began to examine, through movement, the complex psychological relationships that had built up between her and the people she had been working with so intensely for the last few years. The question she asked herself was: how to express emotion without going in for the usual melodramatics implied by this notion. Her answer was to use everyday gestures, « ordinary » activities such as listening to the radio, reading the paper, making pancakes on stage...
She showed nudity for the first time in 1965, after having experimented with it together with her dancers in her open-air dance deck for years. The piece was « Parades and Changes » with a score by Morton Subotnick and the Swedish composer Folke Rabe. Well received in Sweden, the piece caused a scandal in New York where the police fined Anna for « Indecent exposure »... In 1967 after the performance of this « scandalous » piece at Hunter College, the newspapers, who where on her side, organized a friendly and temporary « conspiracy of silence ». To avoid any more police intervention, the journalists waited till Anna had left town, before publishing their articles about the performance. The piece was nevertheless banned in the United States for more than twenty years.
Anna Halprin continue on experimenting with everyday gestures, such as washing: in « The Bath » in 1967 with a score by Pauline Oliveros, a piece in which Bob Morris took part. Or else eating: in « The Lunch » in 1968, with a score by Charles Amirkanian. These works aroused a great deal of interest still now... After the Watts riots, Anna went once a week during a year to that tough Los Angeles neighborhood to work with a group of black dancers, who then joined her group of white ones. This anti-segregationist encounter did not pass off without some friction. However, in 1969 they performed « Ceremony of US » which shocked the establishment. Then, the group performed « Initiations and Transformations and, Animal Rituals » in 1971. « It was the first time such an encounter had taken place. It was at the same time political and social. Then we started to work with a multi-racial group and performed in all sorts of places, festivals, prisons, schools... ».
Deciding that improvisations, even associated with « tasks » has its own limits and even gives raise to its own codes: « Improvisation can’t be taught, one can only choose and control. Certain ideas and movements are constantly recurring ». Anna turned to what she called « Exploration » a term favored by her teacher Margaret H’Doubler. This was a more focused and controlled work method, which makes greater demands on the dancer. Exploration is different from improvisation in that the ideas or instructions are more clearly defined so as to delve deeper into the notion of « task ». « The score I’m working on, tell you what to do but not how to do it. I’m neither a guru nor a fascist dictator. Setting out what to do is important to me because it defines limits, and the more limits there are, the harder you have to work to control your tools and carry out your tasks. Not setting out how to do it leaves each person free to find their very own means of expression ».
Already with the « Task » the experiment could be structured: the movements were not unmotivated, they had a purpose, however absurd these may have seemed. Yet the manner in which the « task » was carried out remained subject to improvisation. Thanks to this concept of « Exploration » and the work methods developed by Anna and her husband - who helped her to write up the charter « RSVP - Cycles »: Resources, Scores, Valuation, Performances - the research was maintained within certain restraints which compelled each participant to further his or her own experimentation and to confront the stimulating contradiction between freedom of imagination and rigor.
Audience reaction, in the United States and also in Europe was often very violent. Soon established choreographers began to consider that what Anna Halprin was doing was no longer dance, in the same manner, as composers considered that John Cage’s work had no longer anything to do with music.
« Just as John Cage considered that every sound is music, she says, I considered that every movement is dance. I used to say to Yvonne Rainer: if dance is the rhythm of a body moving in a context and an environment, then what I do is truly dance. What do you have to do to be accepted as Modern or Post Modern? In 1965 I did « Apartment 6 » in which the dancers wore high heels! How awful! From then on I wasn’t Modern any more, and then I wasn’t even a dancer... When the work of an artist doesn’t fit into any form recognized by the establishment, then those artists ignore it whose work does fit in and is recognized. At best one is labeled ìavant-gardeî and set apart ».
And yet, during the sixties, many dance performances took place in museums, art galleries or in the open air... Together with Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Bob Morris, Trisha Brown at the Judson Church in New York, they walked, they ran, they eat, they climbed up the sides of buildings, while the audience was invited to participate in one form or another. In 1960, Simone Forti - who had been working with Anna Halprin for several years - together with Yvonne Rainer and Bob Morris created a dance called « See Saw » which was a sort of game with objects and tasks. In 1961 Steve Paxton created « Proxy » which takes as its theme everyday tasks such as eating or drinking. In 1962 Trisha Brown choreographed « Trillium » in which she « only » stood, sat or lay down. The same year Yvonne Rainer, working with everyday movements such as walking and running presented « Ordinary Dance » and « We Shall Run ». In 1963, in « An Anthology » by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, a collection of Fluxus scores and performances, Simone Forti published an article about her meticulous analysis of the mechanics of the body. In 1966, Yvonne Rainer created « Trio A » which included the famous « The Mind is a Muscle » inspired not only by minimalism and repetition but also by the work of Anna Halprin: The body is used like an object, the body and the object become interchangeable. And Trisha Brown with « Motor » in 1965 danced on a parking...
In the beginning of the seventies, a « style » designated as « Post Modern » by Yvonne Rainer as early as 1962 developed and asserted itself, together with all its variants. This « style » largely took its substance from the abstraction and the notion of chance inherent to the work of Merce Cunningham on the one hand, and on the other hand, from the concrete, simplified, objective, everyday, yet precise movements inherent to the work of Ann Halprin.
In 1972, a new element entered Anna Halprin’s work. That year it was discovered that she was suffering from cancer, of which there was a recurrence in 1975. This led her to a decision characteristic of her strong personality: she had dedicated her life to art, from now on she would dedicate her art to life. For near than thirty years she devoted a large part of her time to dancing with cancer patients and then, from the eighties on, with AIDS patients, so as to help them, thanks to the creative process she developed, to reconquer the body that was letting them down.
In 1976, with « City Dance » she went back to working in the community and, together with all her group, took to the streets of San Francisco, from sunrise to sunset, twenty five people, to the Cemetery, to Embarcadero Plaza, to the South Park ghetto... A feeling of collective work, work with different ethnic groups, work relating to illness and death, art as catharsis... All these themes led her to take a new interest in the notions of « Myths » and « Rituals » which were at the very origins of dance.
« I was interested in the ways movement, feeling and imagination interconnect. It was at that time that I developed the idea of the « Myth », using movement not only as a physical experience but also as a symbol ».
It was at that time that she created « Male and Female Rituals » in 1978, « Celebration of Life » in 1979, « Search For Living Myths and Rituals Trough Dance and The Environment » in 1980, and « Circle the Earth » in 1988.
She has recently conceived new creations, which are a direct result of her long familiarity with sickness and death. In the midst of nature, she paints her naked body, cover it with mud, enter into some arrow... These solo dances that she created in 2000, together with the body artist and photograph Eeo Stubbelfield, they calls them « Still Dance ». She also performed those exciting improvisations for Andy Abraham Wilson’s film « Returning Home ». During that same period she participated in the dance performance « Be With », together with the Japanese artists Butô Eiko and Koma. In 2000 too, she created a major work, astonishing and disturbing because of its strength « Intensive Care », in which she plays with drapery reminiscent of those used for his photography by the psychiatrist Gaëtan De Clérambault. It also evokes 17th century paintings of the Descent from the Cross and The Entombment of Christ. We, the audience, are at the same time frightened and spellbound and we have to summon up all our intellectual and aesthetic capacities so as to try and shield ourselves from this direct confrontation, shattering yet fascinating with death.
Anna Halprin and Merce Cunningham, friends and contemporaries, initiators of two fundamentally different attitudes to dance that are still being developed today, have scrutinized everything that they felt to be arbitrary in « Modern dance ». They rejected emotional excess, expressionist hypertrophy, too easily foreseeable themes and variations and the too direct relationship between « Cause and Effect » that Modern Dance is not quite exempt from. Very much in harmony with the thinking of John Cage, they have incorporated into their work the juxtaposition, dear to the composer, of the disparate activities that make up our lives. But where Merce Cunningham chose to work with collage, chance and technology while making use of the usual ballet aesthetics, Anna Halprin for her part, sought to « penetrate » the human body - just as La Monte Young sought to « penetrate » sound - so as to be able to work with all of its anatomical characteristics. She hasn’t made use of technology, as Merce Cunningham has, she hasn’t even questioned it. On the contrary she has chosen to favor the notions of the relationship to nature, nudity, sexual impulses, subconscious desire, ritual, ethic communities, social conflict, sickness, death...
In the manner of Nadia Boulanger who, - quiet at the same time - at the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau taught such widely different composers as Aaron Copland, Elliot Carter or Philip Glass, Ann always vigorously encourages those who work with her to search for their own individuality. « Tell what to do, not how to do it » is her motto.
She imparts her methods in such a way as to help each one find their own rules. This is at the very heart of her teaching: the belief that the other is really other, not a mirror image, nor, even worse, the mirror image of a mirror image...
Anna’s quest as an artist is based on her knowledge of human anatomy, together with the utterly original way has incorporated the ideas of the Bauhaus, especially those relating to the notion of group work, the challenge to the glorification of the artists’ ego, and the importance of the mode of procedure. All these ideas are associated with her refusal to found a company and to set up a repertory, which might have found her to repeat herself again and again... For her, art must be useful to the society we live in and that is why it must be free from any sort of preconceived idea. That is also why the notion of inclusion is so important to her. The work must include the less noble gestures of every day life, the audience, the sick, different ethnic groups and also the environnement... For a large part it is this philosophy of inclusion that underwrites the whole of her approach.
Furthermore, she feels that the mere fact of the presence in space of that high-precision « machine », the body, is in itself a statement to which nothing more need to be added, it need not be inflated with artificial gestures. To explore the reality of the body is the work of a lifetime. Anna Halprin has chosen to question, to re-examine, to rethink everything, so as to redefine once again everything the body can express through the medium of dance. This questioning can be so radical as to provoke a fracture that can be described as paradigmatic...
Many of the dancers who worked with Anna Halprin towards the end of the fifties formed the hard core of the « Judson Dance Group » in 1962 and, later on, from 1970 to 1976 that of the « Grand Union ». These groups developed and experimented, each in their own manner, the fundamental questioning initiated by her. Thanks to these artists her ideas became known, so that though she remained on the West Coast, her work has had a great impact on the orientation of New York choreographers and, by ricochet, on European one. Her students incorporated into their productions, the radical innovations that she had been working with in her own world, far away from the power structures of the dance establishment. They all recognize that work and teaching of Anna Halprin as a source of inspiration for the « Post Modern Dance - performances ». At « Judson Church », Yvonne Rainer formulated once again one of the axioms already present in the fundamental thought of the Californian choreographer: « No to entertainment, no to virtuosity, no to magic and trompe l’oeil, no to transcendence, no to the star system, no to grandiloquence, no to manner on, no to the seducing of the spectator by means of stylistic devices »
As already stated, we find the influence of Anna Halprin in the experimental work of a number of young choreographers, especially in France and Belgium. Most of them have never even heard of her and their references is to the founders of the « Judson Dance Theater » and the « Grand Union ». It is true that she never meant to create a following, but in spite of this, many generations of dancers, performers and other creative artists, have worked with her ideas and her fundamental questioning of nature and the meaning of movement, of the dew to earth functions of the human body and of the utter strangeness of ordinary daily life. Anna Halprin, a pioneer and essential figure of « Post Modern Dance », is, in fact, not well known to the general public, and, mist of the time, only briefly mentioned in dance anthologies and specialists works. Why? Because, as already stated, she chose to live in California, but also and above all, because after, as early as 1957, having originated a new approach to dance, after having participated in numerous international festivals, she chose to pursuer her experimental work far away from any kind of institution that could bring her acclaim. She never wanted to have anything to do with their latter land, furthermore she didn’t want to take her work on tour, she felt that too many engagements take up too much time. For her, several years were not too long to develop a view concept in. It was more important to delve deeper in order to constantly renew her work, than to make herself known by performing too much in public. To the question of fame, she could answer: « I wasn’t a candidate ».
And, finally, the serious illness with which she became afflicted led her to propose decisive answers, trough dance, to group of patients. To her, placing art at the service of life is not a vain formula. Though this approach was devoid of any kind of conventional displays of emotion and, devoid also of dubious sentimentality, it was, nevertheless incompatible with the demands of the international stage. Yet it was these decades of unrelenting work witch engendered and nourished Anna’s recent breathtaking creations which exemplify the powerful link that exists between her work with everyday, objective tasks, on the one hand, and that other part of her work which, in a profoundly striking way embraces philosophy, even metaphysics and the vertigo the latter can induce.
« I was a rebel, says Anna Halprin and, I think, an explorer. I wanted to break away from all the conventional roles. Who says I have to dance in a theater, who says I have to dance on points wearing a tutu? I never felt I had to explain what I was doing or why I was doing it. After my cancer I asked myself the question: What am I doing with my life? It was then that I decided to work with cancer and aids sufferers... I’am neither a therapist nor a social worker, I am an artist and I feel I must find an imaginative way out of these situations. Because that is what art is about: to integrate propositions which are imposed or suggested into the core of the creative process. »
If, in the middle of the 20th century Anna Halprin has installed a fertile center of revolutionary experimentation, right at the heart of contemporary dance, it is because for her, it is all important, to be ever on the lookout for new beginnings. Her aim was not to develop a style, as one would unroll a ball of string, it was on the contrary to break any link, however flimsy, that could hinder her research for something else.
Anna Halprin is in that tradition of artist who, like Marcel Duchamp or John Cage aim to show how extraordinary the ordinary can be, and thanks to them, the ordinary becomes a work of art. For John Cage and the space of his « 4’33 » of silence, the sole function of music is to make us aware of the miracle that is life. For Anna Halprin who shares the same feeling of wonder, it is obvious that such a miracle cannot be better celebrated than by dance, that art which is able to embrace, in the full richness of plenitude, the agility of man’s body, the mobility of his mind and the mystery of the universe that surrounds him.
Jacqueline Caux
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Press :
> La performance d’une vie - par Jean-Marc Adolphe - Mouvement - April/June 2006 - n°39
> Modernité d’Halprin - par Dominique Frétard - Le Monde - Friday, December 8, 2006 - n° 19244
> Anna Halprin, A l’origine de la performance - by Laurent Goumarre - art press - March 2006 - n°321
> La vieille dame qui a tout inventé - by Muriel Steinmetz - L’humanité - April 18, 2006
> Halprin, performeuse à corps perdu - by Marie-Christine Vernay - Libération - March 20, 2006
> Anna Halprin, à l’origine de la performance - by Philippe Noisette - Les Inrockuptibles - April 11 to 17, 2006 - n°541
> Anna Halprin, au cœur du corps - by Jean-Emmanuel Denave - Le Progrès de Lyon - March 27, 2006
> Rétrospective Anna Halprin : A l’origine de la performance - Lyon Web - 2006
> Anna Halprin : A l’origine de la performance - Moca Lyon - 2006
> Lyon Festival de sons et d’images - Magazine Air France - March 2006
> Soirée autour d’Anna Halprin - Corse Matin - February 2, 2005
> Danse / Anna Halprin, Exploratrice de danse, et entretien inédit - Mouvement - September-October 2004 - n°30
> Discovering a Dance Legend in your Home Town - Anna Halprin’s art filled life on view at YBCA - by Emily Hite - 2008
> Museums get an upgrade, Exhibits reflect move to electronic media - Anna Halprin : At the Origin of Performance - by Sara Wykes - 2008
> Anna Halprin : A life enhanced by dance - by Christa Palmer Bigue - Marin Independent Journal - March 6 - March 12, 2008
> Anna Halprin : At the origin of the Performance - Life amplified - January/February 2008 - v°03_n°6
> Director’s Note - by Wayne Hazzard, Executive Director - 2008
> L’espace de la performance : Anna Halprin - by Michel Collet / Entretien avec Jacqueline Caux - by Valentine Verhaeghe - Inter, art actuel - Winter 2007 - n°95
> Biennale musiques en scène, Musée d’Art contemporain de Lyon, 2006
> Découvrir Anna Halprin, 86 ans, figure de la danse postmoderne américaine – by Rosita Boisseau - Le Monde - April 2-3, 2006 - n°19031
> Belle performance pour le générateur - Itinéraires - Fall 2006 - n°53
> Anna Halprin - E-ilico.com - April 29, 2006
> Anna Halprin - Arthink - 2006
> Présentation MOCA Lyon - 2006
> Dossier Anna Halprin - by Philippe Verrièle - Danser - November 2004 - n°237
> Anna Halprin - Parades and Changes - Centre Georges Pompidou - 2004
> La performance d’une vie - par Jean-Marc Adolphe - Mouvement - April/June 2006 - n°39
> Modernité d’Halprin - par Dominique Frétard - Le Monde - Friday, December 8, 2006 - n° 19244
> Anna Halprin, A l’origine de la performance - by Laurent Goumarre - art press - March 2006 - n°321
> La vieille dame qui a tout inventé - by Muriel Steinmetz - L’humanité - April 18, 2006
> Halprin, performeuse à corps perdu - by Marie-Christine Vernay - Libération - March 20, 2006
> Anna Halprin, à l’origine de la performance - by Philippe Noisette - Les Inrockuptibles - April 11 to 17, 2006 - n°541
> Anna Halprin, au cœur du corps - by Jean-Emmanuel Denave - Le Progrès de Lyon - March 27, 2006
> Rétrospective Anna Halprin : A l’origine de la performance - Lyon Web - 2006
> Anna Halprin : A l’origine de la performance - Moca Lyon - 2006
> Lyon Festival de sons et d’images - Magazine Air France - March 2006
> Soirée autour d’Anna Halprin - Corse Matin - February 2, 2005
> Danse / Anna Halprin, Exploratrice de danse, et entretien inédit - Mouvement - September-October 2004 - n°30
> Discovering a Dance Legend in your Home Town - Anna Halprin’s art filled life on view at YBCA - by Emily Hite - 2008
> Museums get an upgrade, Exhibits reflect move to electronic media - Anna Halprin : At the Origin of Performance - by Sara Wykes - 2008
> Anna Halprin : A life enhanced by dance - by Christa Palmer Bigue - Marin Independent Journal - March 6 - March 12, 2008
> Anna Halprin : At the origin of the Performance - Life amplified - January/February 2008 - v°03_n°6
> Director’s Note - by Wayne Hazzard, Executive Director - 2008
> L’espace de la performance : Anna Halprin - by Michel Collet / Entretien avec Jacqueline Caux - by Valentine Verhaeghe - Inter, art actuel - Winter 2007 - n°95
> Biennale musiques en scène, Musée d’Art contemporain de Lyon, 2006
> Découvrir Anna Halprin, 86 ans, figure de la danse postmoderne américaine – by Rosita Boisseau - Le Monde - April 2-3, 2006 - n°19031
> Belle performance pour le générateur - Itinéraires - Fall 2006 - n°53
> Anna Halprin - E-ilico.com - April 29, 2006
> Anna Halprin - Arthink - 2006
> Présentation MOCA Lyon - 2006
> Dossier Anna Halprin - by Philippe Verrièle - Danser - November 2004 - n°237
> Anna Halprin - Parades and Changes - Centre Georges Pompidou - 2004
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