In this episode hosted by Jennifer Edwards, we celebrate the life, work, and impact of Anna Halprin (1920-2021). A visionary force in both dance and healing, Halprin played a crucial role in the evolution of post-modern dance and developing ethical social practice through art. We learn about Halprin's work from scholars Ninotchka Bennahum and Wendy Perron, from Halprin biographer Janice Ross, and from Anna Halprin herself.
In this episode hosted by Jennifer Edwards, we celebrate the life, work, and impact of Anna Halprin (1920-2021). A visionary force in both dance and healing, Halprin played a crucial role in the evolution of post-modern dance and developing ethical social practice through art. We learn about Halprin's work from scholars Ninotchka Bennahum and Wendy Perron, from Halprin biographer Janice Ross, and from Anna Halprin herself.
Special thanks to New England Public Media for their support of this episode of PillowVoices.
*Audio note: in this episode, Ellis Rovin was our composer and editor; our engineer was Adam BW
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Pillow Scholar Jennifer Edwards, who is also the Director/ Producer of PillowVoices. She will be your host for this remembrance of the visionary dance pioneer Anna Halprin and her profound influence on American culture.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: She’s really the true mother of what has become known now as post-modern dance.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: That was Suzanne Carbonneau summing up the influence of Anna Halprin in just a few words. But how does one pay homage to a woman, a being, whose life spanned more than a century and whose work not only touched, but transformed lives around the world? In this episode, we draw from three conversations, housed in the Pillow archives, two about Anna Halprin, her training, influence and often unacknowledged place in dance history. The third is a PillowTalk with Halprin herself, and we will dedicate a good deal of our time to listening to this force of nature in her own voice and words.
We begin with a few snapshots of two of the major human influences on Halprin’s earlier life and work, her teacher, Margaret H’Doubler and her husband, Lawrence Halprin, both of whom she met at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. These passages are rich with context in terms of the people, ideas, ideologies and movements that would influence Halprin and be brought into practice in her interwoven life and work.
First, we hear Janice Ross in conversation with Suzanne Carbonneau, in a talk titled “I Brought My Dance From San Francisco” hosted by the Pillow in 2008.
JANICE ROSS: Margaret H’Doubler was, is known as the, the first great dance educator in America and she was Halprin’s teacher. She founded the first dance program at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 1917 and I stumbled into her wanting to read about who had taught Anna Halrpin. I’m always interested in teachers of teachers. And I, I was floored when I began researching this woman to find that she was not a dancer. There were no photos of her dancing, she really never took a dance class, and yet she was the mother of dance education in America. And it, for me, was a fascinating portrait of first-wave feminism. A kind of rethinking of the womans’ body in education. And the fact that you had to not be a partisan to effect that revolution. She was a P.E. teacher, really. And she loved the, the idea of what dance could do for young womens’ bodies. So she was able to create a curriculum and be an inspirational teacher in her street shoes and sensible dress.
One of the things that H’Doubler was improvisation. She felt that each woman had to tap into her own physical identity, her own movement form. She was positioning herself against ballet, which she saw as this regimented, codified way of moving. So she never demonstrated, first of all, she couldn’t demonstrate, but she also didn’t want to. Instead she would ask the women to improvise structured improvisations and that was exactly what Halprin used when she set up her first classes in San Francisco.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: Now, we will listen to Ninotchka Bennahum and Wendy Perron in a talk moderated by Maura Keefe, in July 2017.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: So Lawrence Halprin comes, hails from Zionist socialist jews in Brooklyn. And he started painting as a kid and, and he was very interested in horticulture and you see him with all these ideas in the ‘30s. And he goes to the University of Wisconsin Madison in ‘38 and meets this Anna Schumacher who becomes Anna Halprin and they fall in love. And she begins to study with H’Doubler who creates the first dance program in the nation in 1926 at the University of Wisconsin Madison. And she is a basketball coach who has never taken a dance class in her life and yet creates a whole methodology and, and, and written, you know, and publication record vis a vis how to construct movement through bio, anatomical and kinesthetic awareness.
WENDY PERRON: But more how to explore movement not a, and not, not a how to, but more just experimenting.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: Yes, and they, she and her husband who was also an architect had a home in door country next to Frank Lloyd Wright. And so Anna, who was on a date with Larry, went to see her teacher and said, ‘let’s go meet Frank Lloyd Wright.’ And so they knocked on his door, never having known him before and Frank said hello and that, and then so from there, Larry applies to Harvard School of Design where Breuer and Leslie menage and this whole refugee.
WENDY PERRON: And Walter Gropious.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: And Gropious, who’s the head of it. It, you know, this refugee Bauhaus group has taken, has gotten, thankfully, visas out of Europe at the very end of the time at which people could get visas out of Europe. And he goes to study with them. And then Larry becomes one of the foremost landscape architects in the country, after self-conscripting and serving as an officer on a, on a warship in the South Pacific.
WENDY PERRON: So I just.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: But really what’s so striking is his, his ability to mix inside and outside. That feels particularly about California.
WENDY PERRON: Which, and their, their whole landscape things was that too. But I just want to say cause we mentioned the Bauhaus, around the same time, other Bauhaus refugees came to Black Mountain in North Carolina and that’s where John Cage and Merce Cunningham went. So we have, although it seems like very separate, Anna Halprin on the west coast and Yvonne Rainer doing what she did at Judson Dance Theater, they both stemmed from these Bauhaus ideas.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: And the idea, what’s wonderful about Bauhaus, and Schlemmer and that world, that very new way of thinking about the body as an object, is this idea that open energetic fields surrounding the body, right? Balancing we think very much anatomically…
WENDY PERRON: Theater.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: You know, about how do we organize our joints, how do we organize ourselves within ourselves? The idea that, that, that space projects outside of oneself, that it’s not about the self, it’s about the space surrounding oneself. And Larry picked that up, idea up, and, and with his Zionism, with his deep interest in talmudic ethics at, at, along with Anna, and they decide that art has to be, has to have a social function. It has to build an ethical culture. And their, part of the ethical culture through the arts.
WENDY PERRON: And there was something very democratic about the way they interpreted Bauhaus. Because one of the ideas of Bauhaus was that you used objects that are close to you. You know, you make something out of, out of stuff you have. The example I use often is Anni Albers, who was Josef Albers' wife, made jewelry out of paperclips. So that, that went along with what, like, what Anna was doing. You do task improvisation, you make dances out of walking, and climbing uphill, and things like that.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: In the next clip, we will hear from Halprin herself, about what she considers her greatest successes.
ANNA HALPRIN: Before I start, I want to add something to my introduction. And that is that I’ve been married to the same man for 65 years, and I think that’s my greatest claim to fame. And, and not only because, because just sustaining a marriage that long, but because my husband has been such an enormous influence in my life, personally and professionally. And is the father of my two beautiful daughters, both of them are in the field of dance, but in the field of expressive arts education. So that, that's a good part of who I am, perhaps the best part of who I am.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: Before we dive into Halprin’s creative and healing work, I’d like to stay with Margaret H’Doubler, who incidentally was a Pillow faculty member in the 1940s. This time we will hear about how H’Doubler taught her students from Halprin, in a PillowTalk moderated by Maura Keefe in June, 2004, titled, “A Visit With Anna Halprin.”
ANNA HALPRIN: What was so inspiring about H’Doubler was that she, she really taught dance. She did not try to develop an idiosyncratic approach to movement and, and, and then you were to imitate her. Quite the contrary. She had a skeleton in the studio, and I have one in mine, and whenever we did movement, she would refer to it very objectively, very scientifically. As a matter of fact, I did human dissection for a year. God. I thought I would, I didn’t think I would get through that one, but I did. I mean I really learned to just love the, the way in which the body is put together. I mean, I got so, by my senior year, I’d be seeing where you are right now and I’d be looking at the person in front of me and say, gee, if I could just get inside that neck. I mean, that was, it was, I remember I was so enthusiastic. I, I brought Larry in, my husband, I said, you’ve got to see this cadaver I’m working on. It's so wonderful, you know. He came into the room, took one look at it, and turned green. And, you know, just fled the room in absolute shock.
MAURA KEEFE: So for H’Doubler who was teaching that way, which is a much more scientific approach…
ANNA HALPRIN: Much more scientific.
MAURA KEEFE: Versus Graham who was talking about the inner landscape, and the emotion, expressing emotion.
ANNA HALPRIN: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
MAURA KEEFE: It must have been a big change for you coming in.
ANNA HALPRIN: Well, it was not only that she taught dance from the scientific point of view, she also taught it from the philosophical point of view, and a very large philosophical point of view. And, and, and, and then she, she combined science, philosophy with the, the human nature. And she was very much part of the John Dewey era and the wife at, and it was a much broader truly educational foundation, and I studied with her for 5 years.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: Halprin mentions the influences of both John Dewey and Alfred Whitehead on H’Doubler’s teaching and it is clear how their philosophies paired with the influence of the Bauhaus artists, mentioned earlier by Bennahumplayed out in Halprin’s work. John Dewey was perhaps best known for his work in education reform. He believed in democracy above all else and is considered to be one of the fathers of functional psychology. Whitehead, was focused on what he called ‘process philosophy’ and argued that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us."
It’s important to note that both Anna and Larry Halprin were Jewish as were the Bauhaus artists that they surrounded themselves with at Harvard, and thus embedded in their faith was a sense of social obligation. It is also easy to follow the threads of philosophy, metaphysics, and social psychology, attributed to Dewey and Whitehead, through Halprin’s dedication to ethical culture and practice through the arts. We can trace that influence on post-modern dance and the intersecting artists and art forms that met on her dance deck during summer workshops and then stretched across the country each fall.
But first let's explore the bridge between Halprin’s modern dance training, the influences she experienced at the University of Wisconsin and at Harvard to what she would go on to make her life’s work in California. How did all of this translate to the work that Halprin did in the context of the body and the natural world. Here again are Bennahum and Perron.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: Anna was fully, was trained in modern dance, you know, she studied with the big, you know…
WENDY PERRON: She went to the Bennington School for the Dance.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: She studied with Graham, she studied with the big four. She gets a job on Broadway, she’s dancing for Humphrey Limon. Her husband is, as I said, in the South Pacific, she doesn’t know if she’s going to see him again. And she begins to, to reject modern dance, but this is not what she wants, this disciplining, this technical coding of the body didn’t mean anything to her. But she’s in the show because she
WENDY PERRON: But she could do it when you see the pictures of her.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: She could do it.
WENDY PERRON: She was a gorgeous dancer.
NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM: But she’s in the show and who comes backstage to congratulate her, but John Cage. This is 1944, and that’s when she meets cage and she and Larry go on to have a very significant and important friendship and working relationship with John and Merce, Larry and Anna. and they go back and forth together constantly, discussing this idea of the body as nature, the body as a landscape, the body as a tree that can grow. It’s not that you’re out in nature having a good time necessarily. The body decays, it erodes, it shifts, it has the seismic shifts of geological, of natural time, of natural flow in the service of community. And what, you know, Larry’s spaces were the, what, what does it mean to enter a space with falling water, why should falling water be in a public space in Seattle, for example. So she then began, what helped her to leave modern dance is she had to replace technique with something and from H’Doubler, she understood this idea of bio-anatomical awareness. So what, what happens if you walk up a steep hill up, up, opening and swinging your arm back and forth, carrying a very heavy umbrella in the other arm. What if you’re 6ft, what if you’re 4ft, well, you know, think. And then after hours of these kinds of exercises students would be brought together to share what they themselves, the empowerment of, of physical and ethnographic research that then become the building blocks of composition. That anybody can be a dancer, everybody has a body, so any body can dance.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: And from there, we can trace, as Janice Ross and Suzanne Carbonneau describe in this next clip, Halprin’s influence on the New York scene and on those to whom most attribute the postmodern movement. However their approach – what would take root at Judson Church – was really learned from Anna Halprin. Note Ross begins by saying the New Yorkers went east and found Halprin, but of course she meant west – New York to California.
JANICE ROSS: For the New Yorkers who headed East in the summers of the early ‘60s, this was walking into this center of hedonism really. I mean, they were, they were transfixed when I spoke with Meredith Monk, Yivonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Robert Morris, the art, the artist. There was this sort of Earth mother figure, teaching dance in the middle of the woods, clothing optional, it, it, it really set up ripples that reached all the way back to New York.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: The, and she’s really the true mother of what has become what has become known now as post-modern dance. We usually situate the movement as beginning in New York in the 1960s with the Judson Dance Theater, but as all those names you had mentioned, had studied with Halprin before they had started their work at Judson. I mean as we said, she had actually walked away from modern dance. And tell, tell us about how we get from what’s going on at Anna’s to what happens in New York then with, with Judson Dance Theater.
JANICE ROSS: Well they, they come out in the summer of ‘60, ‘61, ‘62 to work with Anna Halprin and discover improvisation, discover what we call task performance, where you can do a functional activity stripped of its functionalism and just look at the action as art. And they walk back into Merce Cunningham’s studio, where Robert Dunn is beginning, in the Fall of ‘62, the first Judson, what becomes Judson Dance Theater, the workshops. And they carry forward this improvisation from, from Halprin’s summer into the exercises he asks them to do. So he gives them choreographic assignments and they come back with improvisatory models using in part the Halprin work. And it, it fed into visual artists, musicians, Terry Riley, La Monte, Young were her accompanists that summer for people who know music. Minimalism, it was also the seat bed for that. She let them, not just the dancers, but the musicians do whatever they wanted. And I remember talking to La Monte and Terry, they used to drag metal cans, coffee cans along the glass windows of, of the side of the indoor studio which was built later in the ‘60s as accompaniment for the improvisation. And they said nobody else in the world would listen to it, let alone sanction that as accompaniment for the improv. And Anna was fine with it. And that, that really began this experimentation with found sound for music minimal, minimalism as well.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: I’d like to provide a quick overview, delivered here by Janice Ross, of two of Halprin’s choreographic and installation works, before turning the rest of this episode to Halprin, herself.
JANICE ROSS: ‘Parades and Changes,’ she, she didn’t really accumulate repertoire in the way that you certainly see most of the artists at Jacob’s Pillow do. She made work to solve problems and then she moved on. And ‘Parades and Changes’ is probably her best known work. It’s a work she took to Europe when she made her European tours in the mid-60s. She made three tours to Europe. And it’s a piece made closely with the composer Morton Subotnick, who’s a minimalist composer. And it’s a series of six different sort of, sort of structural containers for action. And the most celebrated of which is a very beautiful section of undressing and dressing in which the dancers very methodically, very neutrally in a, in a de-eroticized way undress, fold their clothes up, pause, put their clothes back on, and they repeat it three times. And it becomes a, a study really in the dance of the functional act of taking off your clothes and putting them on. One of her longest running dances is, was called ‘Circle the Earth,’ and it was, initially the performers were all people who were HIV positive or had full-blown AIDS. And it was a dance about disclosure of their health status, often to family members who found out for the first time as they sat in the audience to see the performance.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: And, and when would this have been?
JANICE ROSS: This was in the ‘70s. It, it started in the ‘70s and persisted for more than 20 years. Actually, very, sorry it was more like ‘80s. ‘Circle the Earth’ was early ‘80s. She was the first artist to work actually with, with individuals with AIDS in San Francisco and it was in the early ‘80s.
JENNIFER EDWARDS: I invite you to settle in and listen to this rather long, but poignant clip of Halprin sharing her approach to movement, healing and life.
ANNA HALPRIN: You begin to connect movement with feeling, or, you know, going from feeling is just a quality, but then you can also go deeper and say, ‘oh, I feel, I’m, I’m feeling sad. I feel sad because.’ You ask the word because and then you get into associations and you get into imagery and you get into the full spectrum of the awareness of movement on a physical level, an emotional level, on an imaginative level. So then you find some content. So then your dance begins to relate to who you are. Not who I am, what do you care about who I am? You, you, you need to care about who you are and when you find the you in you and it’s deep enough then you find your humanity. Then you find your spiritual connection. That’s the art, that’s the art process in dance. And I found that until I got rid of all that stylistic armor, I couldn’t get at that. So that became very important. And now I’m getting on to the next point, which I said I was going on two tracks. This was so new in dance that it was labeled either therapy, and I was, I fell off the tree of modern dance very early in life, and this was why. Because I got, god forbid, I got into real feelings and real emotions and real people, really using dance to transform their lives. Well this was considered therapy. So, and the therapists got very angry with me because I don’t have any credentials as a therapist, so I didn’t belong anywhere except the theater people. People like Richard Schechner at the Wooster Group, and people like Joseph Chaikin. And people like Jerry Krakowski were all working in the same, in the same avant garde movement. Then people like John Cage and Merce sort of ignored that part of my work, but there was another part of my work that, that I made, kind of, connections with John and Merce. Who didn;’t really understand why I was doing all this other approach, but they did understand one thing that we had in common. And that is that in my working outdoors in the natural environment, I was beginning to say to myself, ‘well, ok I’ve broken down movement, I’ve found a connection to real life, but there’s another element in the art process and that is how do you put things together?’ Which we called composition, and I, I didn’t find anything in composition that attracted me. But I remember a dramatic moment, I was, I was reflecting and it was very quiet and just by myself on the deck, enough to be aware of what was going on around me. And what I noticed was that, as I looked up, I saw a bird flying overhead and at the same time I was aware of a foghorn in the distance from the bay, I heard my children laughing up above in the play, in the play area, and a red berry from a madrone tree dropped at my side. And this all happened simultaneously, and I said, that’s interesting how that’s put together, let me try that for a while. So for a long while experimenting with, with my friends, my colleagues, I, I separated all elements, I separated all the elements and said, now we can do, we can, we can, and I called this method - scrambling the elements. And the elements were all independent. Well, you know, you see, this had a lot to do with what John was doing with chance, but I didn’t, he, he, I don’t know where he got his, what influenced him, I imagine it had to do with Eastern philosophy. I imagine that, but I, I don’t know, you’d have to ask Merce and John. But for me, it came from observing nature. And so this freed me. It, it wasn’t the solution ultimately, but for a long time it freed me enough to be able to work in depth with the, the nature of each material I was working with and it enabled me to work with other artists.
In 1972 I was stricken with cancer and the way it was diagnosed was, was in many ways more important than the cancer itself. Although cancer isn’t anything to laugh at. But the way in which it was diagnosed was astonishing to me. One of the things I, I was beginning to get at in dance was the importance of imagery in relationship to the way we function and, and, and I was interested in dream work because of the imagery and how dreams seem to have symbols and take you into layers of your consciousness that are non-literal. So I was interested in dreams, but I didn’t know how to work with the material, and I, and I was working with children a lot and I decided that they couldn’t, they also had trouble talking about or expressing verbally what they were experiencing. So I used to say to them, well let’s draw it. And so I started bringing out paper and crayons, and we started incorporating in every class drawing. And then I would say, well just use single words, not sentences, just single words and see if you can create some connection between the image that you have drawn and some words. And so they started making single words, and then out of those words, that was, those were like scrambled, all of them together, I’d say put them together again and create a poem or a story. And they would do that and find the meaning of what they had done as, as ways that it connected to their life. Well I began to get very bored with my adult classes. When they started discussing their work. You know, it was like, right into their heads, right out of their bodies. It didn’t have anything to do with what I was observing and it was just like, oh my god that was a total waste, all that movement. So I did the same thing. I start passing out paper, 18 by 22 inch paper. Sometimes we’d do group drawings. I did exactly the same process and it was amazing the connections that were made between what they were dancing and what was going on unresolved in their lives. Well, I drew, I, I would join from time to time with a, one of my groups and that were my colleagues and I drew a, a, sort of a grey, a mass in my pelvic area. And being the teacher I didn’t really have time to go into it, and I remember saying, it coming, it was my turn to share and I said, ‘oh this was symbolic of a new beginning, an embryonic beginning.’ But that night, I said to myself, that was ridiculous, you were totally in your head. And usually they, they would dance after they would draw and then they would make their statements, then they would dance them again, or have somebody else dance them until they got deeper and deeper into the context. I didn’t dance this at all, but I got very, I woke up in the middle of the night saying, what was that really? I better, I better do something about that. I just had this queasy feeling about it. And for some reason or other, I don’t know why, I just had this intuition that I wanted to go to a doctor. And have, and have an examination. And when he examined me, it turned out that I had drawn a malignant tumor. Yeah, so, that was quite a shock.
SUZANNE CARBONNEAU: So you’ve called your healing process there a psycho-kinetic visualization process.
ANNA HALPRIN: Yeah what I began to do was, I called it a psycho-kinetic visualization process because it was based on the kinesthetic sense. And so after I had a operation immediately, which altered my body forever, so once again, this was another turning point in my life where I said, oh well, that’s the end of dance for me. It took me a year to be able to walk. And took me longer than that to get over the emotional assault I felt and in those days, which, 1972, everybody that I knew that had cancer died. So I was also traumatized. And the doctor said to me, ‘well, you’re just fine now, if you don’t have a recurrence in 5 years, you’re scot free.’ Well you know that’s very funny that you say that because I don’t feel just fine. I’m scared, I’m weak, I can’t move, I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me in the future, I have two kids that are dependent on me. So, you know, I felt like saying forget, don’t tell me it’s just fine cause it isn’t just fine. But I didn’t know what to do about it, so I began to take slides of every single drawing that any of my students, or my children, did. And I must have a collection of thousands of slides, and I thought that maybe what I could do is decode these images. That maybe certain shapes meant something. Maybe certain colors meant something. Maybe certain symbols meant something. And I finally found the answer for myself at least was that you didn’t really know what that, what the content or the message was of your drawing unless you danced it again. And then drew it again. And then danced it again and went back and forth and back and forth. So I had a recurrence three years later and I decided, well I’ve done three years of research on this and I’m gonna try to do another self-portrait and I’m going to dance it. Which I did. And without, I mean, I could do a whole talk just on this one process, but to make it, cut it short, through the dance of the self-portrait I was able to go into remission. So this was such a positive experience for me, and gave me new hope that I decided that I would continue to dance and that I would share this process with as an alternative to not as a substitute for medical intervention, but as another dimension where the individual could take some active role in their own healing. So I began to apply it in my classes and not just for sick people, but for people who wanted to understand more about their life process. And I developed a, a training called The Life Art Process. People from all over the world began to come and worked for a solid year, 8 hours a day, working on The Life Art Process. How this could become a method that could be applied to many different situations in peoples’ lives. As you could, how you could apply it as an artist and as a performer, but how you could apply it as a teacher, as a social worker, as a doctor. And so we had a wonderful, diverse group of people. And just end it by saying it led me personally into working with people with cancer and AIDS. And one of the culminating works of that period was something called ‘Circle the Earth.’
JENNIFER EDWARDS: Anna Halprin continued her work, touching thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, if not more. She left this plane of existence on May 24th, 2021, but her wisdom and impact lives on in those who continue her work through their own bodies and teaching.
[Music begins, composed, and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob's Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or onsite.