Anna Halprin

Libby Worth, Helen Poynor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815364108
• eBook ISBN: 9781351056847
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Anna Halprin traces the life's work of this radical dance-maker, documenting her early career as a modern dancer in the 1940s through to the development of her groundbreaking approach to dance as an accessible and life-enhancing art form. Now revised and reissued, this book:

• 
  
  

• sketches the evolution of the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, exploring Halprin's connections with the avant-garde theatre, music, visual art and architecture of the 1950s and 60s

• 
  
  

• offers a detailed analysis of Halprin's work from this period

• 
  
  

• provides an important historical guide to a time when dance was first explored beyond the confines of the theatre and considered as a healing art for individuals and communities.

As a first step towards critical understanding, and an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

1
Life and Work

Family Background

In 1994, at the age of 73, Anna Halprin made an unexpected return to the public stage. Invited to perform at a Festival of Jewish Artists at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco, Halprin created a solo performance inspired by her Jewish heritage. This piece, which became known as The Grandfather Dance, was subsequently performed at the American Dance Festival in 1997 and at Halprin’s 80th Year Retrospective in 2000. Although Halprin had never stopped dancing and creating dances, for more than 20 years her attention had been turned away from theatrical performance and focused on the inter-relationships between artistic and personal process, dance and healing and the creation of contemporary community dance rituals. It is significant that The Grandfather Dance, which heralds the almost coincidental blossoming of a late and remarkable phase of Halprin’s artistic career, is autobiographical. The dance celebrates her relationship with her grandfather; it is dedicated to her grandchildren to help them appreciate their cultural roots. Halprin’s grandfather and his family had been forced to flee the Russian pogroms and, along with many other Jewish immigrants, had settled in Chicago establishing a tailoring business. Lacking a common language, the loving relationship Halprin had with her grandfather who spoke Yiddish was expressed primarily through body language and touch. The Grandfather Dance, performed in her father’s elegant pyjamas with a white silk shawl reminiscent of her grandfather’s prayer shawl, tells of her weekly childhood visits to her grandfather’s synagogue. The young Halprin, whose own life was relatively assimilated in mainstream American culture, was captivated by her grandfather’s passionate and embodied prayer and his personal sense of relationship with God. Interpreting his prayer as a dance she concluded that ‘God was a dancer’ and subsequently claimed that she has spent her life attempting to create dances which were as meaningful as her grandfather’s (Halprin with Kaplan 1995: 2). Certainly a potent combination of expressive physicality, emotion and spirituality has characterized much of Halprin’s work.

Ann Schuman was born in 1920 and grew up in Winnetka, Illinois. Although named after her maternal grandmother Hannah, a fact that she only discovered many years later, Halprin was known at home (and professionally until 1972) as Ann. Ann was the youngest child and only daughter of a close and supportive family. An unconventional child, Ann danced from the age of three, her natural expressiveness finding an outlet in classes based on the approach of Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) after a less than promising start with a teacher of Russian Ballet (McMann Paludan 1995: 24). Halprin’s love of dance was nurtured by her mother who encouraged her to experience many different approaches to dance. Her physicality was also evident in sport at which she excelled and tree-climbing exploits with her two older brothers. Halprin’s upbringing appears to have given her the security and self-confidence to develop a clear sense of herself from an early age. Her Jewish background made her aware of her ‘difference’ and a concomitant need to prove herself in the mainstream American culture which was her social milieu. At the same time Halprin claims this sense of difference proved liberating later in her career when her pioneering work flew in the face of the establishment. Halprin’s family was involved in social issues and she attributes her social conscience to a Jewish sense of responsibility. Several of her early dances reflect her concern with world issues on the brink of the Second World War. In 1939 she created a dance on the theme of war and refugees, and in 1940 another on liberty and freedom. An earlier dance in 1938 inspired by the beauty of nature highlighted the significance of her early relationship to the natural environment (Halprin c. 1938–40).

Early Years

Halprin’s childhood passion for dance developed throughout her teens as she continued classes and created her own dances to be performed at school and in Chicago, including her first solo Saga of Youth. With her mother’s continued support Halprin’s dance education touched on a range of modern dance techniques based on the styles of eminent choreographers of the period, such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis (1879–1968). In 1936, whilst still studying at Winnetka’s New Trier High School, she choreographed Pastorale, performed at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, in which she danced using music ‘with contrasting themes of improvised circular and angular movement’ (McMann Paludan 1995: 25). These early performances which drew on an eclectic mix of dance influences allowed Halprin to experiment with her own style and content. So that, at the summer workshop in 1937 at Bennington College, she already had a basis from which to evaluate the experience of working with major modern dance techniques prominent in America at that time.

In 1934, ‘Bennington College, a new women’s school in Vermont, created the nation’s first center for modern dance. The summer program consisted of a school and a series of concerts given by the faculty’ (Mazo 2000: 136), which rapidly gained a reputation for providing expert teaching in a range of modern dance forms attracting the best known dancers to its staff. These included Martha Graham (1894–1991), Doris Humphrey (1895–1958), Charles Weidman (1901–75), Hanya Holm (1893–1992) (who had worked closely with German modern expressionist dancer Mary Wigman (1886–1973)) and Louis Horst (1884–1964) (musician, composer and dance composition teacher). While open to discovery of other dancers’ techniques and styles, even at such a young age Halprin did not feel driven by what she had experienced to settle into one form of training. At Bennington, Doris Humphrey spotted Halprin’s dance talent and asked her to join the Humphrey–Weidman Company in New York City. However, difficult as it was to reject such a prestigious offer, Halprin recollects of the period ‘I had promised my family I would graduate from college before I became a professional dancer, so I decided to postpone this opportunity until I had finished school’ (Ross 2000: xv). Of the two colleges in America that offered a dance major Halprin chose Bennington and was initially disappointed to be turned down and to have to take up a place instead at the University of Wisconsin. However, this turned out to be ‘the luckiest mishap of my life. It was at the University of Wisconsin that I met the two people who would most influence my dance career: my future husband, Lawrence Halprin [1916–2009], and my mentor, Margaret H’Doubler [1889–1982]’ (Ross 2000: xv).

Margaret H'Doubler and Dance at Wisconsin

Halprin enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1938 and studied there for four and a half years, clearly exhilarated and inspired primarily by Margaret H’Doubler’s teaching. Although not a dancer herself, H’Doubler had become an enthusiastic advocate for the value of dance in education. Many of the principles she adhered to became foundational in Halprin’s development, an indebtedness that Halprin continues to acknowledge.

Recognized as a pioneer in the field of dance education, having set up the first undergraduate dance degree in the world in 1926 at Wisconsin, H’Doubler was initially a scientist with a degree in biology. She taught physical education at the University of Wisconsin and had an enthusiasm for basketball. The particular combination of values and skills she brought together in the creation of the dance degree was to influence directly and indirectly generations of dance teachers and to a lesser extent dance performers and choreographers. The formulation of the degree had its origins in a period of research at Columbia University and in New York City in 1916. Here H’Doubler came into contact with two teachers who used a scientific approach to dance and elements of improvisation, while a music teacher she met had students lie on the floor and begin to move from that position (Ross 2000: 118–19). ‘H’Doubler suddenly realized that lying on the floor, removed from the pull of gravity, it was at last possible to get the body to move with true freedom . . .’ (Ross 2000: 119–20).

In addition she became absorbed in the work of John Dewey (1859–1952), an educationalist and philosopher in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Columbia. His advocacy of the importance of experience in the learning process had obvious applications to the teaching of dance. This was combined with a theory of knowledge based on problem solving long used in the sciences, but according to Dewey, just as relevant in the teaching of the arts. In his view any inquiry or reflection would ‘have the same pattern of steps’. ‘It would begin with a problem and proceed through testing of possible solutions, to a resolution’ (Ross 2000: 125).

Although Halprin studied with H’Doubler well after her initial establishment of the dance degree, the type of class she experienced was still based on the philosophical principles H’Doubler had encountered in her studies with John Dewey. H’Doubler was determined to take a holistic approach to the teaching of dance, like Dewey avoiding a mind/body split and recognizing the significance of the physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual components of dance. In her book Dance – A Creative Art Experience completed while Halprin was at Wisconsin, H’Doubler makes a strong case for the role of dance in education, stressing its value for developing the personality: ‘It serves all the ends of individual growth; it helps to develop the body; it stimulates the imagination and challenges the intellect; it helps cultivate an appreciation for beauty; it deepens and refines the emotional nature’ (H’Doubler 1940: 64).

As Halprin would do later, she argued for the need for accessible dance and abhorred the thrust she had observed in New York for forms that were becoming tightly codified and refined, resulting in an reductive process that generated increasingly less involvement in dance. She wanted ‘to revive, through some kind of movement education, the impulse to move expressively, to dance, to develop adequate techniques for artistic expression’ (H’Doubler 1940: 44).

Ross notes in her book on H’Doubler that the ‘shift to valuing the process over the product was one of Dewey’s ideas that underlay H’Doubler’s whole philosophy of dance education’ (Ross 2000: 129). Dance students at Wisconsin undertook a pre-medical course to increase their knowledge of anatomy and scientific principles. H’Doubler built on this and encouraged her students to learn experientially about the structural make-up of the body and its capacity for movement. Their control developed through increased kinaesthetic awareness aiding creative expression. Alongside explorations into the spatial, rhythmic and dynamic elements of dance, H’Doubler insisted on the value of the emotional and imaginative experience of movement. She encouraged her students to have a sense of connection with the natural world through dancing outside. In order for dancers to follow the innate ‘craving for expression and the sharing of the enhanced emotional state’ (H’Doubler 1940: 53) they must both ‘train the mind to use the body and to reflect its conditions . . . and train the body to be responsive to the expressive mind’ (H’Doubler 1940: 70). As Halprin recalls, this style of teaching allowed students to explore ‘all the possibilities a movement could yield. This self-discovery evoked qualities, feelings, and images. Out of these personal responses we would then create our own dance experience’ (Ross 2000: xvi).

Both H’Doubler and Halprin drew on the pioneering work of Mabel E. Todd (1856–1932) who, in 1937, published her seminal work The Thinking Body, a book that continues to inform and inspire dancers and teachers of dance. It is based on the principle that: ‘The individual is a totality and cannot be segregated as to intellect, motor and social factors. They are all interrelated’ (Todd 1968: 3). Todd proceeded to analyse the relationship between these factors in great detail. Drawing on the work from a variety of fields such as science, engineering, medicine, anthropology and psychology, she explored the impact that thinking and feeling have on the basic structure of the body and way that we move. Of particular value in her work for Halprin was the emphasis on visualization, imagination and tasks to explore her ‘psychophysical’ theories. For instance she examined the specific difficulties a person has to overcome in walking, by virtue of the fact that they stand upright on two legs in a field of gravity. She considered anatomical facts in relation to mechanical forces while simultaneously extolling the importance of visual images and psychological attitude in encouraging ease and efficiency in movement.

While at Wisconsin, Halprin recalls in interview that her ‘reconnection with Judaism and Rabbi Kadushin was a reaction to the Hitler era’ (McMann Paludan 1995: 35). She became politically active in the Jewish student organization, the Hillel Foundation led by Rabbi Kadushin, and found support here and through H’Doubler for performance work and her senior dance project on the history of Jewish dance.

Lawrence Halprin and the Bauhaus Connection

In 1939 Ann Schuman met Lawrence Halprin, a graduate from Cornell University who had come to Wisconsin to study botany but realized while there that he wanted to focus on landscape architecture. They married in 1940 and while Anna Halprin completed her dance studies, Lawrence having finished his Ph.D. went to study at the Harvard School of Architecture in Cambridge. On joining her husband, Anna Halprin’s interest was sparked by the work of Walter Gropius (1883–1968) who was then teaching at Harvard. Gropius had led the German Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and established a teaching institution for the arts at Weimer (director 1919–28) consisting of a collection of workshops and a self-contained community of teachers and students who ‘embraced the whole range of visual arts: architecture, planning, painting, sculpture, industrial design and stage work’ (Gropius 1961: 1). Given Anna Halprin’s recent experience of study with H’Doubler and Mabel Todd it is hardly surprising that she felt drawn to sit in on lectures given by Gropius who stated:

One of the fundamental maxims of the Bauhaus was the demand that the teacher’s own approach was never to be imposed on the student; that, on the contrary, any attempt at imitation by the student was to be ruthlessly suppressed. The stimulation received from the teacher was only to help him find his bearings.

(Gropius 1961: 1)

Alongside the dance teaching Halprin had organized at the Windsor prep school and volunteer work in two settlement homes, she sat in on design courses, ‘transposed the design problems into choreographic studies and found interested architecture students to study dance with her’ (McMann Paludan 1995: 37). The Bauhaus principles of cross-art collaboration, collective creativity and the integration of art in society and in everyday life were to remain fundamental aspects in the development of both Anna’s and Lawrence’s artistic careers.

The Bauhaus ideal that encouraged workshop experimentation and democratic group work rather than artist as hero, reinforced Halprin’s experiences with H’Doubler at Wisconsin. However, during this period, while Lawrence Halprin left to serve in the navy during the Second World War, Anna Halprin still identified herself as a modern dancer. By chance, an opportunity arose for her to audition for Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, who had reunited to choreograph a musical Sing Out, Sweet Land. Halprin could now take up the offer she had turned down before Wisconsin and become a part of a dance company run by Humphrey and Weidman. She was promoted to female lead and performed in Boston (1944) and subsequently in New York. For several years she worked on this and other similar musical productions gaining a reputation as a successful dance comedienne.

Figure 1.1 The Prophetess, 1955. Photograph by Ernest Braun

During the 1940s Halprin continued to experiment with her own style of dance including choreographing The Prophetess and Lonely Ones (1946). She performed these at the YMCA Annual Young Choreographers’ Concert, where John Cage (1912–92), the avant-garde American composer, was impressed with her work and introduced her to dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009). The friendship that was established in New York was maintained once the Halprins moved to San Francisco, with Cage and Cunningham visiting to teach classes and give informal performances on the dance deck at her studio in Kentfield (McMann Paludan 1995: 42).

The Move to San Francisco

As Lawrence Halprin acknowledges, his wish to settle in San Francisco after the War in 1945 was not so welcome to Anna. ‘She felt that the centre for dance was in New York City and from her point of view at that time I think she m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 LIFE AND WORK
• 2 THEORY AND PRACTICE
• 3 THE MOUNTAIN PERFORMANCES, CIRCLE THE EARTH AND THE PLANETARY DANCE
• 4 PRACTICAL EXPLORATIONS
• Bibliography
• Contacts
• Index