The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution

to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the

University of California Press Foundation.
ANNA HALPRIN
ANNA HALPRIN EXPERIENCE AS DANCE

Janice Ross
Foreword by Richard Schechner

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ross, Janice.
Anna Halprin : experience as dance / Janice Ross ;
foreword by Richard Schechner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-520-24757-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-520-24757-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Halprin, Anna. 2. Dancers—United States—
Biography. 3. Modern dance. I. Title.
gv1785.h255r67 2007
792.8092—dc22
[B] 2006034878

Manufactured in the United States

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
 TO SALLY,

who pioneered the 1960s for dance scholarship

 CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY RICHARD SCHECHNER ix

PREFACE xiii

ONE / Why She Danced ( 1 9 2 0 – 1 9 3 8 ) 1

TWO / The Secret Garden of American Dance ( 1 9 3 8 – 1 9 4 2 ) 23

THREE / The Bauhaus and the Settlement House ( 1 9 4 2 – 1 9 4 5 ) 49

FOUR / Western Spaces ( 1 9 4 5 – 1 9 5 5 ) 70

FIVE / Instantaneous Experience, Lucy, and Beat Culture ( 1 9 5 5 – 1 9 6 0 )

1 16

SIX / Urban Rituals ( 1 9 6 1 – 1 9 6 7 ) 154

SEVEN / From Spectator to Participant ( 1 9 6 7 – 1 9 6 8 ) 199

EIGHT / Ceremony of Memory ( 1 9 6 8 – 1 9 7 1 ) 244

 NINE / Illness as Performance ( 1 9 7 2 – 1 9 9 1 ) 300

TEN / Choreographing Disappearance:

Dances of Aging ( 1 9 9 2 – 2 0 0 6 ) 331

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 359

NOTES 363

CHRONOLOGY OF PEFORMANCES, VIDEOS, AND FILMS 405

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 421

INDEX 431

PHOTOGRAPHS following pages 1 4 2 and 2 3 8

 FOREWORD

Richard Schechner

in the 2003 film Returning Home, Anna Halprin, naked, settles into
the earth, her whole body drenched in mud. This mud is not filtered or
“clean.” It is full of clumps of earth and pebbles, dark brown, “primal.” As
is eighty-year-old-Halprin. She is one with the mud, the landscape . . .
and—dare I say it?—with herself. Still vibrantly alive, she enacts her phys-
ical return to her—and our—ultimate home in dirt and death. As we see
her body immersed, we hear Halprin’s voice: “We’ve been alienated from
the natural world. We need to find a way to reenter.”
To “reenter” has been Halprin’s perduring action through the eight and
a half decades of her life. A cancer survivor, dancer, choreographer, per-
formance theorist, community leader, healer, wife, mother—through the
stages of life from youth into old age, Halprin has left one stage only to en-
ter another. In the 1960s Halprin pioneered what was to be known as “post-
modern dance.” Her work was a key that unlocked the door leading to all
kinds of experimentation in theater, music, Happenings, and performance
art. Over her long and fecund career, Halprin’s glory has been to pay scant
attention to boundaries. Art, ritual, play, healing, exorcism, personal state-
ment, archetype have all been concatenated in Halprin’s participatory work.
Nor has she, even as an old woman, sat down satisfied to watch others. Hal-
prin leads by doing. Being one of the pioneers of participation in perfor-

ix
 mance, she passionately follows her own inclination. Where Anna Halprin
is, there is movement.
Janice Ross’s book treats Halprin as the iconoclast she is: breaking old
habits, setting out far from known paths, pioneering, inventing, combin-
ing. If Walt Whitman sang the “body electric” (in all its multifarious im-
plications), Halprin moves this vibrant body in very specifically American
ways. That is, Halprin—long a California resident—is both stubborn and
playful simultaneously, celebrating “the body” as a thing, a temple, an in-
strument, an erotic force, a part of nature, a construct, a living organism,
and a social being. Just as Whitman never tired of listing all that America
and Americans might be or become, so Halprin in her concrete physical
enactments—her workshops, her dances, her interviews—moves the Amer-
ican body. This body is not always or even primarily a “dancer’s body”—
slim, young, lithe, athletic. Sometimes it is a diseased body, crippled; or a
hurting body, in need of healing; or an old body, with barely breath left,
merging into the mud. What Ross shows in her depiction of Halprin’s jour-
ney is this radical acceptance. But, make no mistake about it, this does not
mean that Halprin is softheaded, gentle, or forgiving-for-no-reason. If she
embodies Whitmanesque/American idealism, Halprin also lives the life of
a hard-nosed pioneer leader, ready to trek into new territory, undertake
hard sweaty tasks, make unpleasant decisions, and cut loose when that is
called for.
Ross’s book is an intellectual biography. Ross traces the outline of Hal-
prin’s life. This is especially valuable in relation to Halprin’s formative years
as a girl and young woman. Ross provides readers with good information
concerning Halprin’s family, her deeply abiding Jewishness, her turn from
reading knowledge to motor knowledge, her resistant and rebellious core
(always a plus for an experimental thinker-doer), her nascent feminism
(“Ann didn’t like taking direction from any men,” writes Ross), her expo-
sure to the choreography of Doris Humphrey, and her big awakening at
the University of Wisconsin to what dance could be— ordinary and ex-
traordinary at the same time, pedestrian and artful, expressive and healing,
aesthetic and ritualized. And her meeting Lawrence Halprin—the start of
a lifelong collaboration between two extremely creative people.
Lawrence Halprin, at first a horticulturalist, then an architect profoundly
dedicated to organicity, drew Ann (not yet Anna) into the world of the
Bauhaus, under the tutelage of Walter Gropius, displaced from Germany
by Nazism to Harvard. The 1940s for the Halprins was a period of explo-
sive growth. The Bauhaus perspective opened to the whole world, proposed

x FOREWORD
a reconstruction of human living conditions and consciousness. This was
precisely the kind of vision Ann Halprin—at one time a “hick from the
mid-West”—thirsted for. Her lifelong task became how to link the ideal
universal with the bodily particular of dancing. In Boston, working with
schoolchildren, Ann began making dances that were socially aware, even
political, even as they were personal and expressive.
In 1943 Lawrence Halprin enlisted in the navy. He was discharged in San
Francisco shortly before VJ Day in 1945. Ann joined him there—and the
rest, as the saying goes, is history. A carefully told history by Ross. The move
to the West Coast—and its bursting sense of new energies, the “new age,”
the California spirit—suited the Halprins. Ann was to become Anna, rel-
ish working outdoors on her famous “dance deck,” form the San Francisco
Dancers’ Workshop, help create postmodern dance, and continue to this
day to aªect dance, theater, and performance art. Ross’s book adds much
rich detail to these aspects of Anna Halprin’s story. In reflecting on Hal-
prin’s life and work, I detect in her a counternarrative to the path taken by
members of the Group Theatre. The Group—a half-generation earlier than
Halprin—worked through the Great Depression, was to a large degree
formed by the Federal Theatre Project, and was then savaged by the anti-
Communist red scares of the late 1930s and the 1950s McCarthy period.
The Group opened the New York–Hollywood axis, where to this day the
Group style dominates American mainstream theater and film. Halprin—
and the dancing she embodies—got to California soon enough to partic-
ipate deeply in counterculture, a connection to the landscape (where Anna
and Lawrence converge), and to various alternative religions and ritual prac-
tices. These two tendencies—the Group and the Alternative—are the poles
of American performance culture. Generally, scholars have paid more at-
tention to the Group story. Ross’s book takes a big step in telling the Alter-
native story in terms of one of its major pioneers and practitioners.
A long journey, that from being Ann Schuman, the granddaughter of an
immigrant tailor from Odessa, to becoming Anna Halprin, the iconoclas-
tic icon of the American avant-garde. How much of Ann, the Jewess with
Eastern European roots, remains active in Anna, the quintessential Marin
County, California, counterculturist? We can change our names, but to what
extent can we transform and transcend our personal history? I believe in
Buddhistic presence, Heraclitan flux, and American revisionism. And
yet . . . we each carry within us our own cultural DNA, a marker. No, not
something as sharply defined as a marker. More like a cultural perfume en-
fragranting our values and behavior. And what might Anna Halprin’s scent

FOREWORD xi
 be? Earthy, from Russia; sweaty from her immigrant hard-working grand-
parents; expensively perfumed from her father’s success as a Chicago busi-
nessman; the odor of talism, the prayer shawls worn in shul, where Ann ad-
mired the men swaying back-and-forth in their ritual prayer dance. But for
all this, Ann Schuman was a child of privilege. A girl among more than a
dozen boys; the daughter of a well-to-do clothing manufacturer who had
risen far above his own father’s immigrant status. An American success story.
This success story is the core narrative of Ross’s book.

xii FOREWORD
 PREFACE

one summer evening in June 1961 Anna Halprin (or Ann, as she was
then called)1 related the following story during a lecture-demonstration at
Stanford University:

There was a little boy whose teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique.
The boy happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed and agitated.
Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind
his back. When his teacher appeared the boy asked, “Why do people have
to die?”
“This is natural,” explained the teacher, “everything has to die and has
just so long to live.”
Then the boy produced the shattered cup and said, “It was time for
your cup to die.” 2

Anna is describing herself as a cup breaker in the world of modern dance.

Her choice of the metaphor of a shattered cup delineates, in bluntly func-
tional and unromanticized terms, the literal task of an iconoclast, a breaker
of icons. The teacups she has shattered are procedural, involving how a dance
can be made, the role of personal history in shaping dance content, the role
of spectators, and the degree to which the choreographer takes risks, exper-
iments, and gives up control. This is what a teacher does—a radical teacher.

xiii
 Although she comes decades later, Anna Halprin can be linked to the tra-
dition of Isadora Duncan, Maude Allen, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis,
women about whom the dance scholar Susan Foster once remarked, “They
constructed of the stage a space where the self might unfold rather than a
place where the self was depicted . . . they argued for an alignment of all
of dance practice with the natural.”3 In deciphering Anna’s work, one finds
not a rarefied performer’s body so much as a rarefied performer’s mind,
the performing of a social and confessional awareness as a way of aligning
with the natural. The self that unfolds on her stage is plural—the routinized
selves of everyday actions, encounters, exchanges. Anna’s works resist the
evolution of theatrical dance practice toward social diversion. She reverses
this trend, reintroducing dance as a medium for social investigation and
activism.
Anna Halprin’s work opens a window on the interlocking histories of au-
thenticity and the body shaping the cultural and aesthetic radicalisms of
America in the second half of the twentieth century. In telling her story, I
have been motivated by a desire to understand how experience becomes
performance and how dances might change the people who witness and
perform them. My perspective is intentionally two-sided—looking at both
Anna’s work in the context of twentieth-century American culture and at
aspects of American culture through her dance.
Anna Halprin’s story oªers a vivid case study of modern dance in the
process of redefinition in postwar America. Implicitly, I argue for dance as
a rich medium of portraiture during moments of social unrest. The chal-
lenges in this undertaking are considerable—they require keeping the per-
forming body at the center of analysis even when its actions are deliber-
ately unscripted and the social body collapses into the performing body.
Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance explores what has given Anna’s work
the capacity to be emblematic of Beat culture in the 1950s, youth culture
in the 1960s, multiracial culture in the 1970s, the culture of illness in the
1980s, and, subsequently, the culture of the aged from the 1990s to the pres-
ent. This project traces the ways in which the pedagogical, artistic, psycho-
logical, and religious leaders Anna encountered shaped her regard for the
role of performance in American culture. In the process she arrived at her
own post-Freudian formulation of what it is that bodies need to express.4
I saw my first Anna Halprin dance in 1970, when she and her San Fran-
cisco Dancers’ Workshop performed the undressing and paper-tearing
sections of Parades and Changes to inaugurate the opening of the University
Art Museum in Berkeley, California. I remember pressing to the edge of

xiv PREFACE
the spiraling ramps of the museum along with a mass of my fellow students
to gaze down upon the ritualistic neutrality of the dancers’ matter-of-fact
nudity. The visual and emotional images were both startling and deeply
memorable in their directness and simplicity. This seemed to me the per-
fect dance statement for this moment of body-against-the-machine anti-
war demonstrations and quest for open disclosure and meaningful indi-
vidual engagement.
In 1978 I encountered Anna’s work again, this time as a young dance critic
writing about performance for ArtWeek. I reviewed Male and Female Ritu-
als, a dance presented in the grand fourth-floor rotunda of the San Fran-
cisco Museum of Modern Art. As soon as I took out my little critic’s note-
book, however, Anna approached me and informed me this was an audience
participation dance and note taking was forbidden. Little about her dance,
in either its form or its structure, seemed to invite a considered critical re-
sponse. I wrote a dismissive review, noting what I perceived as her hostility
to critics and my hostility to the loose and undisciplined nature of the join-
along dancing. Apparently she didn’t appreciate my review: several months
later, when I interviewed her for an advance story about Citydance for the
San Francisco Chronicle, she insisted on taping me and on having her assis-
tant present for the full interview to be sure she was quoted accurately.
In 1986, now as the dance critic for the Oakland Tribune, I wrote about
Anna Halprin again, this time by becoming a participant for the evening
in one of the first Steps dance workshops she was leading for people living
with HIV. I was interested in her leap from postmodern dance to perfor-
mance rituals about healing and curious whether it represented a rupture
or continuation of her work as a dance artist. It took me more than a decade
to explore that question, and in the process I wrote another book, about
Anna’s teacher Margaret H’Doubler. That was far from a coincidental
detour—for Anna’s aesthetic is deeply pedagogical in conception, ambition,
and scale. She is foremost a dance educator—primarily focused on others’
responses to prompts that generate movement and, often, dances. In ret-
rospect, my completion of Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, more than
twelve years after I started it, was aided by Anna’s return to choreography
and performing. In the last years of the twentieth century she began ac-
tively making and performing dances on public stages after a hiatus of nearly
twenty years.
This book traces how the pedagogical methods Anna encountered, first
as a student in elementary school, later through her work with H’Doubler
in college, then as a spouse in the circle of Walter Gropius’s classes at Har-

PREFACE xv
 vard, and subsequently as a woman in postwar America helped shape her
as an artist. Through each period of her life Anna steadily collected infor-
mation about the relationships between the public display of bodily activ-
ity and the social categories of identity. Her work reveals some of the com-
plex ways contemporary cultural information is shaped and relayed through
that moving body.
In exploring how Anna Halprin has restructured spectatorship, redefined
the dynamics of performer and audience, and activated the untrained body
as a medium of discovery and expression, this book examines her dances
as existing in a network of representations and identifications, and contin-
gent on practices in modern dance history, performance theory, activist pol-
itics, popular culture, feminism, and education. Her work grapples with
the prevalent mechanical, reductive view of bodies in Western culture, over-
writing this with an understanding of the expressivity entropy and disin-
tegration might allow.
“As your life experience deepened, your art experience would expand,”
Anna once promised.5 This statement summarizes a major lesson of her
more than six decades of making dances. Here is dance where the work is
not primarily about what happens in the imaginary frame of the stage, but
instead about what happens to the performers and spectators. Anna Hal-
prin’s work shows how dance, wed with moments of intense social and per-
sonal change, oªers a starting point, a new beginning and permission, in
the name of art, to explore. Experience. Perform.

xvi PREFACE
 ONE

Why She Danced

1920 – 1938

Biography is a novel that dare not speak its name.

roland barthes

one saturday morning in 1926, in a quiet Chicago suburb, a small girl

peered through the wooden lattice that screened the women in the upstairs
gallery of an old synagogue from the men below. At first she could see only
a mass of black frocks and broad-brimmed black felt hats swaying subtly
to the rumbling incantations. Then, as a group, the men beneath these hats,
their long black side curls reaching the lapels of their coats, turned. They
faced the two small narrow doors of the Ark, the cabinet that held the or-
nately wrapped scrolls of the Torah. Precisely on cue from their prayer books,
they bent their knees and bowed their heads as one.
The girl held her breath in anticipation of the next moving prayer. “Shem’a
Israel, Adonai, Aloniheniu, Adoni Ehad . . . ,” the rabbi intoned, and the
full congregation joined in, the women softly from upstairs and the men
more forcefully from below. This day, Simchat Torah, was the most jubi-
lant Jewish holiday of the year, marking the changeover in the Torah read-
ing cycle when the Book of Deuteronomy is concluded and the Book of
Genesis is begun anew. The rabbi and the cantor carried the Torah scrolls
around the synagogue as the boys and men sang and danced behind them
in serpentine lines. Their arms flung upward and their feet stamped the
ground as the rhythm of devotion, the physical passion of faith, rose up,
sending their bodies into intoxicated action, echoing their joyful hosannas
of communion with God.

1
 Six-year-old Ann Schuman caught sight of her grandfather, Nathan Schu-
man, his head thrown back, his arms upraised, and his long white beard
and long silky white hair swaying as he joined in ecstatic prayer. Years later
she recalled, “I just thought this was the most beautiful dance I had ever
seen. Not only that, but I thought he was God. He looked like God to me,
and he acted like what I thought a God would act like. So I thought that
God was a dancer.”1

Nathan Schuman had been a prosperous tailor in Kreminlecz, a small town

outside the old Russian port city of Odessa, which at that time had not yet
been emptied of its Jewish population by emigration and a series of dev-
astating pogroms. He had been born into as comfortable an existence as
any Jewish resident in that area could hope to attain in the 1860s. At an
early age Nathan learned from his father, a skilled and enterprising tailor,
how to make finely fashioned clothing. As the eldest son of a prominent
Orthodox Jewish family, Nathan was the only one of his parents’ seven
children permitted to attend the local school. There he learned Russian, a
sign of begrudging social acceptance by the local government. When he
was in his twenties, Nathan, who maintained his family’s strict orthodoxy,
married his stepsister Bertha, an equally devout young woman.
As Nathan’s reputation for making fine-quality clothing grew, so did his
clientele. By the mid-1880s, when his second-youngest son, Isadore (Ann’s
father), was born, Nathan had become the o‹cial tailor of the town’s
sizable Cossack regiment. Employing a number of assistants, Nathan made
all the uniforms—long outer coats decorated with fur and braiding, close-
fitting breeches, and side-buttoning shirts—for the Cossack soldiers. Since
the 1840s, in villages around Odessa, the Cossacks had been burning and
looting Jewish households, often killing their occupants. Sometimes the
Cossacks abducted eight- or nine-year-old Jewish boys to serve twenty-five-
year-long subscriptions in the Russian army in Siberia, where few survived
the first year. Driven by the pogroms as well as the scarcity of economic
opportunities, brutal despotism, and killings—all of which were frequently
encouraged by a government confounded by the unwillingness of the Jews
to assimilate and convert—the Jews of shtetl cities throughout Russia and
Eastern Europe had begun a mass exodus. To stay was to face a government
policy of “relentless butchery against the Jews.”2
However, Nathan, along with his family and his growing business, was
always spared during the Cossack purges. He may have been a Jew, but he

2 WHY SHE DANCED

was indispensable. In a macabre echo of the Passover tale, in which the Jews
of ancient Egypt escaped the ordered killing of their firstborn sons by mark-
ing their doorposts so the angel of death would pass over them, Nathan
and his family were saved by an identifying mark the Cossacks themselves
put on their door indicating that the Jews who lived there were to be spared.
Further, family legend has it that Bertha never learned to cook, because in
Russia she never had to —the Cossacks kept Nathan’s family supplied with
servants as partial payment for their uniforms.
Yet Nathan knew that eventually his usefulness to the Cossacks would
end and then he, his wife, and six children would all become victims. Plac-
ing his two oldest sons, Herman and Sam, in charge of the factory, Nathan,
who spoke only Russian and Yiddish, left alone for an unknown future in
America. He made his way to Chicago with its sizable community of Ger-
man and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The historian Irving Cut-
ler has noted, “Between 1880 and 1925, over two million Jews left Eastern
Europe, going mainly to American cities. In time eighty percent of the Jew-
ish population of Chicago consisted of such emigrants and their descen-
dants.”3 Nathan worked in the garment industry, the largest employer of
Jewish men, women, and children. This industry was concentrated in the
southern part of downtown Chicago, where many worked in crowded shops
above storefronts. Workers usually labored twelve- and thirteen-hour days,
six days a week, mostly doing piecework.4 Nathan, who never really learned
English, used to get to work by recognizing certain signs along the tram
route. When the tram route changed one day, he was lost and frantic he
would lose his job. He was eventually led back to where he was staying, and
the next day a friend guided him to work, continuing to do so until Nathan
recognized the new tram route.
Even within the Jewish communities of Chicago there were tensions, par-
ticularly between the more a›uent and educated German Jews and the newly
arrived and frequently illiterate Eastern European and Russian Jews like
Nathan. The character of Chicago’s Jewish community was changing, and
by 1900 Eastern European Jews would outnumber German Jews by 50,000
to 20,000. According to Cutler, “The poverty of the Eastern European
Jews”—like Nathan—“was much more desperate than the German Jewish
poverty had ever been and their piety was generally much more intense.”5
It took Nathan a number of years, laboring as a tailor’s assistant, to earn
enough to send for his wife and two daughters. The four boys were to be
sent for later, once Nathan saved the money for their boat passage. Her-
man, as the eldest son, had been permitted to attend Russian schools, so

WHY SHE DANCED 3

 he, like his father, had the advantage of being literate—a big help in the
task that lay before him.
In the early part of 1898, Nathan arranged for Herman and Isadore’s pas-
sage from London to Ellis Island. It was their responsibility, however, to
get from Odessa to London, alone and on foot. With pieces of gold sewn
inside their boots, the boys walked the hundreds of miles from Odessa to
the Polish border. They wore coats with identification tags and, sewn in-
side, the itinerary of a network of sympathetic families who would aid them.
At the Polish border they bribed the Russian guard on duty to permit them
to enter, but as they ran across the border the guard suddenly changed his
mind and fired in the air while pursuing them.
Herman and Isadore did make it to the Polish side, only to discover that
the first link in their underground network had failed to show up. Terrified,
they spent the night in the barn of a nearby farm, slipping in under cover
of darkness, hastily eating the pieces of sausage and bread they had carried
with them, and leaving again before daylight. Easily recognizable as Jews
because of their short clipped hair with long side curls, white shirts, and
black breeches with the tassels of their fringed prayer shawls hanging out,
Herman and Isadore were soon spotted by a Polish Jew. Knowing how dan-
gerous it was for two young Jewish boys to wander through Poland, which
at the time shared Russia’s o‹cial dislike of Jews, he helped the boys make
it safely to their next contact. They then spent nearly one year, moving from
one sympathetic family to the next, until they finally made it to Le Havre
in France, from there across the English Channel to London, and finally,
on steerage passage, to New York’s Ellis Island. Years later, Isadore, weep-
ing, would recount to his grown children how terrified he had been on that
transcontinental crossing.
Isadore worked hard to become assimilated quickly. Soon after he arrived
in Chicago, his father opened a clothing manufacturing business, and
Isadore became a salesman there. His ability to read and write English re-
mained minimal, however, and his guttural Yiddish accent stuck with him
his entire life. As an a›uent, self-made man, Isadore used to joke that he
could get by without reading or writing; all he needed to do was purchase
a rubber stamp with his name to deposit the checks that kept rolling in.6
By the time his daughter, Ann, witnessed her grandfather praying, the
importance of religion in Isadore’s life had greatly diminished. As was true
for many Jewish families rushing to assimilate at the time, Isadore and his
family expressed their Judaism privately, in their home, as part of their cul-
tural heritage—usually just on major Jewish holidays. Instead of celebrat-

4 WHY SHE DANCED

ing their coming of age at thirteen with a bar mitzvah, Ann’s brothers were
“confirmed” in a Reformed Jewish ceremony when they turned fifteen, and
so was Ann. “We were so Reformed we were actually close to being Uni-
tarian,” Ann’s brother Albert once quipped, noting that their synagogue’s
services were held on Sundays rather than Friday nights and Saturday morn-
ings.7 As Ann recalled years later:

Being Jewish was more social to me than religious. It was a feeling of

being part of a tribe. It was belonging. It was being able to tell jokes
and know that they would understand. It was having certain intonations
in your voice. It was having certain expressions that you would say and
you would know that everybody would understand. It was the feeling of
belonging more than it was any kind of religious connection.8

To fit in and be accepted rather than doggedly standing out as diªerent

was what Isadore and most other young Jewish immigrants in Chicago
wanted. They had experienced the high price of being diªerent in the old
country. One link to his life in Russia that Isadore never forgot was his sym-
pathy for the “little guy.” “He was a staunch Democrat,” his daughter re-
membered. “He had to be taken to the hospital when Nixon was elected.
He got sick from the news he was so upset.”9
Compared with her father, Isadore, her father’s father, Nathan, seemed
exotic and mysterious to the young Ann. This Orthodox Jew, who went to
synagogue daily, davened, and spoke mostly Yiddish with a smattering of
Russian, was a blood relation with the allure of a foreigner. In her rapt plea-
sure at Grandfather Nathan’s “dancing,” Ann discovered herself, respond-
ing to a love of movement wedded to ritualism. That Saturday morning in
the synagogue Ann witnessed what Howard Eilberg-Schwartz has called the
“savage” in Judaism.10 This central ritual of worship for the Jewish male,
with all its primal spiritualism, fascinated her. It oªered a vivid contrast to
the contained existence of her mother, aunts, and indeed all the adult women
of her extended family, where there seemed to be no avenue for escape. Now
Ann had seen an outlet for expression come from her staid grandfather—a
man she could never talk to because of their language diªerences, but some-
one she already connected with almost intuitively, through touch, commu-
nicating more closely with him than any of his other grandchildren.11

We would go and visit my grandfather and grandmother every week, and

since he only spoke Yiddish he communicated with me by touching me.

WHY SHE DANCED 5

 So he touched me a lot. My father never touched me. So [with the grand-
parents] there was a lot of touching, and Grandfather would pat me and
he would stroke me and he would talk Yiddish to me, but he knew that I
didn’t really understand.12

Ann had seen her grandfather in the most sacred of places, the synagogue,
expressing his fervor through dance. Here was a language she understood.
For the young Ann, her grandfather’s Hassidic dance helped initiate a
process of learning about herself, and it lent support to her own nascent
nonconformity. As she has stated:

I think that my connection to Judaism, the idea that you don’t bow down
before a golden idol, implied for me a sense of intellectual freedom, artistic
freedom. It gave me the sense of being myself and acknowledging other
people to be who they were. Not having expectations that there were
dogmas to follow influenced me very much.13

Already at six, Ann loved dance—and now she had seen motion linked to
the divine, to ritual, to some raw part of humanity’s communication with
the spiritual. Dance could be intoxicating by its honest ritualism and also
important enough to be the ultimate avenue of ecstatic expression to God.
It would be years before Ann would also discover that from that initial vivid
childhood incident came another lasting lesson—through dance one can
find an interior self. In her lifetime, all of Ann’s art would, in some sense,
be part of a larger search to find that hidden soul of herself.

Ann’s mother, Ida Schiª Schuman, may not have understood all that dance
would come to mean for her daughter, but she did sense its appeal. A warm,
patient, benevolent woman, whom her children and family friends repeat-
edly described as “angelic,” Ida gave her only daughter dancing lessons be-
ginning at age four, simply because she herself had always wanted to dance.14
She assumed that Ann would, too.
Ida had been born in Chicago in 1893 to Samuel and Hannah Schiª, who
had met in Chicago but had both emigrated, separately, from small towns
in Lithuania a decade earlier. Ida enjoyed a comfortable, close-knit family
climate at home. The push toward assimilation was there, as it had been
with Isadore Schuman’s family, but never at the expense of a harmonious
family environment. Whereas excitability and the drive to get ahead were

6 WHY SHE DANCED

strong traits in the Schuman clan, in the Schiª household good deeds
counted for everything. Samuel, who had learned his trade from his father,
owned a small haberdashery in Chicago’s South Side. He and Hannah
quickly began their family. Always more comfortable in their mother
tongue, Yiddish, than English, the couple accepted their American-born
children’s eagerness to embrace new American values—but only to a point.
When two of their sons, Jack and Charlie, married non-Jewish girls,
Samuel and Hannah disowned them and never spoke to them again. Han-
nah went into mourning and “sat shiva,” the Jewish ritual when one mourns
for someone who has died.
Ida, the last of seven children, was indulged by her two sisters and four
brothers as the baby of the family. When her mother died in her fifties from
what was likely diabetes, Ida, just fifteen at the time, was raised by her fa-
ther and siblings. Four years later, on a family holiday to French Lick, a
popular Jewish resort area in Indiana, Ida met Isadore Schuman, about seven
years her senior, and they married shortly after her nineteenth birthday.
Isadore, who had already worked his way up to a prominent position in the
Chicago-based Schuman cloak and suit business, impressed her with his
ambition and teasing sense of humor.
Ida and Isadore’s firstborn, a much-desired daughter, Ruth, died a few
days after birth, the victim of a too-violent forceps delivery. Then there
were two boys, Stanton, born in 1914, and Albert, born in 1917. Three years
later, on July 13, 1920, Hannah Dorothy Schuman, the long-awaited daugh-
ter, was born in the family’s home at 623 Laurel Avenue, Wilmette, a
lakeshore suburb forty-five miles north of Chicago. Named for Ida’s mother,
Hannah instantly assumed a special place in the family—an only girl with
twelve male cousins and two older brothers. Ann, as she soon came to be
called, was small and wiry like her father, with his intense blue-green eyes,
but with the flaming, red frizzy hair of her mother. Ann stood out from
the start.
Ida, like most middle-class women at the time, did not work outside the
home, and Isadore saw to it that she always had plenty of household help.
A full-time nanny helped with the children, a maid did the housework, and
by the time Ann was seven, a full-time German chauªeur and gardener,
Hugo, had been hired as well. Ida spent her days overseeing this household,
cooking for the frequent social gatherings the Schumans hosted, and play-
ing mah-jongg and bridge with other Jewish housewives. More than ever
Ann became her focus, perhaps as a result of her own private restlessness
in not having found an avenue of personal expression.

WHY SHE DANCED 7

 Always shrewd in business, Isadore began buying and selling property, even-
tually shifting from the clothing business into real estate. While Ann was
growing up, he moved his family into various homes around Winnetka,
the almost exclusively non-Jewish suburb of Chicago. Named after a Na-
tive American phrase meaning “beautiful land,” Winnetka has been con-
sidered one of the most prestigious residential locations on Chicago’s
North Shore since the beginning of the twentieth century. By the time she
was in high school, Ann’s family had moved seven times, always within a
few-mile radius. Ida dreaded the moves but said nothing. She just obedi-
ently gathered up the household and did as Isadore wanted. “Dearie,” he
would say, “we’re moving.” “It was a man’s world and my mother had lit-
tle to say,” Ann recalled years later. “So she never said a word. She just went
along with it. I hated it. I had friends in the neighborhood, and it was always
very disorienting to have to leave.”15 To Ann, moving seemed “repulsive”;
indeed, since she and her husband built their home in Kentfield, Califor-
nia, in the early 1950s they have never moved, living in the same house for
more than fifty years.
One of the Winnetka homes that the family moved into was an authentic
Swedish farmhouse with thatched roof, secret compartments, beamed ceil-
ings, and stenciled patterns along the windows. Miriam Raymer (now Ben-
nett), a childhood friend of Ann’s who lived four houses down the street,
remembered the Swedish house as one of the most unusually beautiful in
the neighborhood. To Isadore, however, it was primarily a good business
investment. A few years later, as Isadore’s wealth grew, he had a mansion
custom-built three blocks from the Swedish home, on Tower Road, the most
fashionable street in town. Situated on a spacious knoll, the two-story, Tu-
dor-styled brick house had rooms of palatial proportions, including a huge
bedroom for each child, and there was a pond that would freeze over, be-
coming a kind of private skating rink. When the stock market crash and
depression hit in 1929, Isadore sold the Tower Road mansion and the fam-
ily moved into a rental house. It was only a temporary setback, while he re-
organized his finances. Not all the Schuman brothers were as resilient. In
1927, as the personal pressures among Isadore’s brothers began to mount,
Isadore’s older brother, Herman, turned on the engine of the new car he
had recently purchased—his first—and sat in the garage until he died of
asphyxiation.
Perhaps because his reading comprehension was so limited, Isadore never
trusted investments he could not wear, touch, walk on, or live in. When,

8 WHY SHE DANCED

after Herman’s death, he turned the family wholesale clothing business over
to his other brothers, Sam and Abe, he concentrated almost all his wealth
in real estate rather than in stocks. As a result, he was hurt far less than
many by the stock market crash. He got back on his feet quickly by using
the property he did own as leverage. Isadore was learning how one’s mas-
tery of a new culture could be emblazoned through ownership of the ur-
ban landscape.
As an outward sign of success, Isadore loved clothes. Short, slender, with
olive skin, blue-green eyes, and jet-black hair well into his eighties, Isadore
was an impeccable dandy. His closet contained scores of hats, from straw
ones for the summer to fine felt ones for the winter. All of his shirts were
silk and prominently monogrammed. He had dozens of suits; jackets of
every color, including custom-made gray and white silk ones, and a favorite
gold tie. “My father wasn’t parsimonious at all,” Ann recalled. “If he needed
one cashmere sweater he wouldn’t get one of anything, he’d get six. He had
a Cadillac because that was the best car.”16
Isadore seemed to work all the time. “He was primarily a provider,” Ann
remembered. “He was never a pal or someone who would come to school
or PTA meetings. He didn’t enter into family life much.”17 Ann was twelve
before the Schumans attempted their first (and only) family vacation. They
drove to Northern California to visit Ida’s brother, Jack, who lived in San
Rafael. While Ann stayed with her parents at Uncle Jack’s home, her two
brothers hitchhiked to Los Angeles for a week to see the 1932 Olympic
Games. What Ann remembers most about the whole vacation was the car
ride. The car got several flat tires, and each time Isadore exploded in rage.
The chatter of the restless kids in the backseat also infuriated him, and he
would wheel his head around and bark in his heaviest Yiddish-inflected En-
glish, “Shut up or I’ll trow my teeth at you!”18
Isadore did, however, have a playful side. “When he was alone with my
mother he wasn’t funny at all, he was very demanding,” Ann later said. “But
give him an audience and he was a funny man. He never told jokes: he was
just funny. He had a comeback for everything anybody said. He had really
Jewish, sarcastic humor. And when he talked he would gesture typical Jew-
ish gestures. His face would be so expressive. Had he had a diªerent up-
bringing I think he would have been a famous comedian, like the Marx
Brothers.”19
Early on Ann shared her father’s gift for comedy, at first unwittingly.
Ida recalled that when Ann was four she was laughed out of her first bal-
let class because she was so tiny, so cute, and so restless. Later, on Broad-

WHY SHE DANCED 9

 way in the Burl Ives musical Sing Out, Sweet Land! Ann did an uninten-
tional comedic solo when the bloomers on her costume fell down and she
kept trying to dance, prompting one critic to proclaim her “the Fanny Brice
of dance.”20
Isadore’s irascibility, however, was sometimes more than the young Ann
could take. At mealtimes, if Ida oªered an unwanted suggestion, he might
shout, “You crazy fool! You just stick with your pies and I’ll take care of the
business!” Ann began to get severe stomachaches whenever she sat down
to a family dinner, and by age twelve she had a case of colitis so severe that
she was put on a bland diet of broth, boiled chicken, and rice for a year.21
Her brothers retreated too, Stanton by establishing close relations with Ida
and Albert by becoming very quiet and introverted.22
Despite the emotional tension in the family, Ann recalled only one in-
stance when tensions escalated into physical punishment. Stanton had done
something that triggered Isadore, who grabbed the boy and a hairbrush and
took him in the bathroom and spanked him. Ann was so upset that she
stood outside the bathroom door sobbing.
For Ann, Ida and her side of the family always represented calm, sta-
bility, and infinite patience in the face of Isadore’s and his siblings’ edgy
irritability.

My mother’s side of the family was very close-knit. They loved each other.
They enjoyed being together. There was a loving kindness throughout
that whole family. They were just delightful. Whereas, my father’s side
of the family—somebody was always fighting with someone. They were
more high-strung. They were very dramatic and theatrical. There was
always turmoil.23

The benevolent and the neurotic—Ann herself would vacillate between

these two extremes of temperament as she attempted to balance what she
wanted to be—an artist—and what she was raised to be—a wife and
mother. For much of her life it would be an uneasy union.

When Ann’s family left behind the religious and cultural familiarity of the
Jewish community of Wilmette and moved to the predominantly non-
Jewish suburb of Winnetka, they were drawn not only by the real estate
opportunities, but also by the promise of the comprehensive reforms under
way in the Winnetka public schools. The “Winnetka Plan,” or “Individu-

10 WHY SHE DANCED

alized Learning,” was an innovative Progressive curriculum designed by
educator Carlton Washburne and implemented from 1919 into the late
1930s.24 Although some critics labeled Washburne’s program subversive, it
grew out of a belief in individual learning. It belonged to a period when
education was seen as the primary means for achieving societal repair and
personal change, a perspective initiated by such intellectuals and educators
as George Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and Edward L. Thorndike. These vi-
sionary thinkers implicitly linked pedagogy and social reform, a pairing that
Ann would eventually echo in her dance work.
Ann spent her early life as a student exclusively in Washburne schools,
beginning in 1926, when she entered first grade at the Hubbard Woods
Elementary School, through 1934, when she graduated from Skokie Junior
High School. The experience-based curriculum was ideally shaped to help
Ann acquire the tools for becoming an artist and dance educator. Indeed,
the reconceptualization of the individual in education paralleled a rethinking
of the whole person in several arts disciplines at this time. The internal di-
mensions of humankind, our spiritual and psychological sides, became the
subject matter of the visual and performing arts. In her dances of the late
1920s and early 1930s, for example, the choreographer Martha Graham re-
vealed a new fascination with what she called “the interior landscape.” Gra-
ham delved into the desires and motivations that shaped an individual’s be-
havior, outlook, and capacity to make sense of the world.
Washburne’s educational program promoted aesthetic understanding by
heightening students’ sensitivity to the world. He believed that processes
can only be understood if they are based on experience and that a child’s
body and emotions, not just the mind, must be stimulated as facets of the
whole individual. Washburne directly stated that he was cultivating “each
child’s special aptitudes” rather than genius in the arts or a particular sub-
ject.25 As a Progressive, Washburne was unusual in his emphasis on the arts
in education. His design allowed students to spend a substantial portion of
each day engaged in painting, sculpture, drama, folk dance, music, or a com-
bination of these disciplines. But even more unusual was how Washburne
used the arts educationally. Instead of seeing classes in the arts as training
for art making, he encouraged work in the arts as training for life, as a tool
for learning about the world.
For Ann, the classroom experience provided support and encouragement,
without the strain of competition with students fighting for the top grades.
“There was never any homework,” she recalled, and whenever the weather
was decent, everybody carried the tables and chairs outside, so the class could

WHY SHE DANCED 11

 be conducted outdoors for the whole day. Indeed, Washburne felt strongly
that the spontaneous kinds of learning that take place outside the class-
room are just as valid as those that happen within. He believed that stu-
dents needed “time out of doors for gaining experience, for hobbies and
explorations.” Cultivating one’s ability to attend to the world around may
sound like a generic skill, but it is a key quality for an artist. Learning first
to experience, then to understand, and finally to represent the particulars of
experience as something vivid are prerequisites for an artist.
Although the curriculum broke boundaries, there were certainly religious
and ethnic, if not class, separations among the students. Ann and her class-
mate friend Miriam Raymer (Bennett) recalled the extreme social isolation
they felt as the only Jewish children in their class. As Ann put it:

Knowing that I was diªerent was sometimes very painful to me because I

was discriminated against because of that diªerence. I wouldn’t be invited
to certain social events at school, and it took me a while to realize that
was because I was Jewish. But all I knew as a kid was that I was diªerent.
My hair was bright red and very kinky. Everyone else in my school had
blond hair and blue eyes, and the girls could swish their hair around. I
would try and swish my head, and my hair would stand up and never
come back down. So I knew that I looked diªerent as well.26

They were always excluded from birthday parties, and the school seemed
either ignorant or indiªerent to this.
Stanton also remembered with painful vividness the outright hostility
of the Winnetka community to Jews. “They built spite fences,” he said in
an interview in Winnetka in the 1990s as he pointed to eight-foot-high
wooden fences that had been erected in the late 1920s by neighbors irate at
having the Jewish Schuman family living next door, just a few blocks from
Washburne’s model school.27 These early encounters with anti-Semitism
would color Ann’s approach to dance:

Growing up and going to school in an anti-Semitic environment meant

that having a Jewish extended family was very important to me. It gave
me lots of security and a lot of loyalty. It did shape a lot of my attitude
about dance because I felt a great injustice around this. I felt a great sense
of loss and my dignity and self-esteem were very challenged. I really experi-
enced being a minority person and had a lot of sadness around that. And
a lot of resentment. I think that it did shape a lot of the directions that I
ultimately went into.28

12 WHY SHE DANCED

 Although anti-Semitism made it di‹cult for Jewish students to make
friends, Winnetka schools did foster a close relationship between all stu-
dents and their teachers. Ann, like other students, at times brought her
teacher home for lunch. On other occasions, teachers ate supper at students’
homes in order to chat with the fathers just as they had with the mothers
at lunch. Through this practice, one imagines, the teachers got a much richer
sense of their students’ interests and lives outside the classroom, perhaps
helping them look more favorably on children like Ann, who did not ex-
cel in the traditional academic subjects, but developed a passion for the cre-
ative side of the curriculum. In her later work in dance Ann would often
cap rehearsals and performances with communal meals as part of the so-
cial occasion where learning continued and teacher/student boundaries were
bridged.
Ironically one of the most immediate identifying signs that marks Ann
as a Winnetka alumna is that she cannot write cursive and is a poor speller.
Part of Washburne’s pragmatic approach to the curriculum was not to teach
cursive writing. “Children learn manuscript [printed] writing more quickly
than cursive,” he said. “And the words look more like the words in books.”29
This decision typifies Washburne’s boldness in reassessing canonized as-
pects of the curriculum. More important, though, is the way Washburne’s
innovations challenged the authoritarian use of space and the disciplining
of student bodies so central to educational institutions for centuries. As
Michel Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
the organization of classroom space “made possible the supervision of each
individual and the simultaneous work of all. . . . It made the educational
space function like a learning machine, but also as a machine for supervis-
ing, hierarchizing, rewarding.” Foucault also discusses the control imposed
by examinations and cursive writing: “Good handwriting, for example, pre-
supposes a gymnastics—a whole routine whose code invests the body in
its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the index finger. . . . A
disciplined body is the prerequisite of an e‹cient gesture.”30
Foucault’s argument suggests that Washburne’s abandonment of cursive
writing, tests, and the traditional classroom hierarchies liberated Ann in
ways more profound than anyone knew at the time. Not until high school
did Ann encounter the usual compulsory obedience to rules and sub-
servience to the teacher signified through the student’s “docile” body. For
Washburne, it was much more important to give students time for cre-
ativity and self-expression than to burden them with rote “lessons.” In his
words:

WHY SHE DANCED 13

 Progressive schools, . . . are alive with the singing of folk songs and good
music, with “rhythm bands” for little children (beating time on sticks
and cymbals and triangles), and orchestras and bands for older children.
They are colorful with the original painting of the youngsters. . . . There
is dancing—folk dances, square dances, rhythms. There are “creative
dramatics”—plays made up by the children themselves, the parts spoken
spontaneously, not memorized. And there is “creative writing”— original
stories and poems, often “published” in a fully illustrated room or school
magazine or newspaper.31

Rather than cultivating exceptional talent in a few students, Washburne’s

program encouraged an artistic sensibility in every student. The connec-
tion between the Winnetka Plan’s reliance on dramatics and the genre of
personally confessional dance/theater that Ann would develop is striking.
Washburne seemed to see the arts as important social tools for understanding
oneself and the world. For Ann, it was not just that Washburne’s ideas fos-
tered artistry, but also that his focus on the social utility of art helped shape
the kind of artist she would become. It prepared her to rethink the insti-
tutional structure of a dance company as well as the kind of dialogue with
society she would have as an artist.
A dramatic example of Washburne’s intended curriculum can be seen in
the special projects at each grade level. Ann particularly remembered the
time her class built an entire, full-scale Indian village on the school grounds.
Her most vivid memory is of the several Native Americans who were in-
vited to the village, where they wove baskets, cooked, and danced daily for
a two-week period while the students observed them, asking questions and
trying their hands at any of the various tasks they wished. Ann also recalled
weekly field trips, such as the evening when her entire class assembled late
at night to view stars through a telescope. Another time Ann’s class visited
an orphanage, and afterward they sent sandwiches each week to the children
there. Occasionally, though, the emphasis on having a “real experience”
could prove too much for some students. When Ann’s elementary class vis-
ited the stockyards in Chicago, she became physically ill at the sight and
smell of the slaughtered cattle.
For Ann, whose life work would involve how to represent publicly her
inner experiences, being a student in Washburne’s schools proved seminal.
“The emphasis on the arts, on creating and the freedom of choice, the way
we built together, acted as a group”—all these influenced her greatly. “The
most important thing that I remember about school in Winnetka was that

14 WHY SHE DANCED

I loved it,” she said.32 She and her friends didn’t want to skip school at all,
even when they were sick.

Ann always struggled academically. She called herself a “motor learner” to

explain her lack of facility in math or academics. “I was in the slow learn-
ing class because I couldn’t grasp concepts,” she later commented. “I couldn’t
do math. Abstract thinking was very di‹cult for me. I excelled in motor
learning.”33
It was physical activity—a pick-up game of street baseball rather than
playing paper dolls with Miriam Raymer and her friends—that interested
Ann.

I remember riding my bicycle and going down this big hill to go to school,
and I remember going down that hill and feeling like a bird just flying,
I wasn’t riding the bike anymore, I was just relating to that moment of
flying. It was a very powerful movement experience which gave me a
feeling of freedom and liberation and ecstasy and a sense that I could
immediately switch into the movement for its own sake rather than for
a goal. I was no longer considering that I was going to school, I was really
just in that moment.34

Always fiercely competitive, Ann was “an ultimate tomboy,” as Robert

Raymer, Miriam’s brother, remembers it. “She wanted to excel at whatever
her brothers were doing, whether it was swinging in a tree or participating
in a neighborhood baseball game.”35 Ann’s brothers, Albert and Stanton,
excelled in both academics and athletics: Stanton became an honors stu-
dent and star football lineman at the University of Michigan and went on
to become a prominent real estate attorney in Chicago; Albert, an excel-
lent swimmer, track man, and football player, eventually received a degree
in engineering from Stanford University and became a businessman in Santa
Barbara. Her brother Albert once remarked that part of the work ethic he,
Stanton, and Ann were raised on emphasized two things: becoming a pro-
fessional and becoming a person who did something that contributed to
the world. “I only know two dirty seven-letter words,” Albert quipped when
he was in his late seventies, “Bastard and Retired.”
Even as a young child, Ann used dance as her source of achievement.
When Ann was laughed at in ballet class because she was “so funny-look-
ing and so ridiculous,” she recollected, “my mother was so insulted that she

WHY SHE DANCED 15

 took me out of the ballet class and then decided that I needed something
a little freer, so she enrolled me in an Isadora Duncan-type of class.” This
interpretive dance class was more tolerant of little Ann’s energy. For the
next two years, Ann studied creative movement at a local dance school in
Winnetka, waving scarves up and down and tossing balloons in the air with
the other young girls. She enjoyed skipping, galloping, and sensing in her
body the pulsing piano rhythms the teacher played: “I just loved it. It was
very free and I felt very comfortable in that kind of atmosphere.”36 For Ann,
the experience may not have been of dance as art at this point, but it was
one of raw physical motion and expression.
Ann’s father did not always understand her desire to dance; instead, Isadore
encouraged Ann, as well as her mother, Ida, to study the harp. The image
of two women, mother and daughter no less, playing this celestial instru-
ment fit right in with the neo-romantic trends of the time. This was after
all the heyday of Maxfield Parrish’s nostalgic portraits of an idealized Amer-
ican girlhood. Ida and Ann had no interest in learning to play the harp. But
Ann did study piano for eight years, from the time she was ten until she left
for college. She played the family’s grand piano. “I had a hard time sticking
with the piano because I didn’t like the discipline of sight-reading and play-
ing,” she said. “I’d get on the piano and improvise. I liked that so much bet-
ter. It was hard for me, but I was a good pianist for a long time. I’d play in
concerts up until the time I went to college. After that I just lost touch.”37
By the time Ann was in her early teens, Ida had discovered Alicia Pratt,
a local dance school owner who brought in modern dancers from the Den-
ishawn school founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn to teach master
classes and workshops. These classes consisted mostly of music visualiza-
tions, drapery manipulations, and decorative poses. “I loved it because it
appealed to my fantasy,” Ann recalled. “I could be an Indian, I could be a
Nautch girl, I could be anything I wanted to be. They were very exotic.”38
St. Denis’s dance notes of the time detail the kind of exercises that would
lead up to these movement “fantasies.” A typical set of instructions, according
to St. Denis historian Suzanne Shelton, would read: “Walk forward—back
through veil. Bend forward in pity. Hands in teaching attitude. Hands in
prayer. Take veil in right hand, wrap around right wrist. Pose right hand
then left.”39 A music visualization might have the students dancing to the
first movement of one of Beethoven’s compositions. One girl might take
the part of leader, and the rest became members of a small army involved
in a vague battle that ended in victory, but with casualties.
Ann digested everything she learned in these weekly dance classes by put-

16 WHY SHE DANCED

ting on impromptu recitals for her parents, brothers, and whoever else hap-
pened to be at home. Sometimes she would use her friends in the shows as
well. The important thing was not so much what one did as that she had
an audience. Albert remembered Ann dancing around the living room and
the fact that his gentle teasing did not faze her in the least. From the start,
Ann knew how to be comfortable in the limelight. By 1934 she had appeared
in her first major public performance, at the Chicago World’s Fair.
Ann’s privileged place in her immediate family was amplified at big fam-
ily get-togethers. Here she was the youngest girl, the fair-haired special one
in a culture that traditionally gave women little voice, but at the same time
stipulated that they were the ones with the power of passing on the Jewish
heritage.40 It was because she was still young that Ann’s passion for dance
was indulged, but no one in Ann’s family really expected her to have a ca-
reer. The family’s goal for her was to get a good education so she could then
make a good marriage to a nice Jewish boy.
Ann had other ideas, but at the same time she enjoyed her special status
as a girl. “Girls were protected,” Albert remembered. “She was spoiled by
everybody. But then we were all brought up to make up our own minds
about things and Ann certainly did. She’s always been a natural, natural.
She got started in that direction at age five and she just kept going.”

By the time Ann arrived at Winnetka’s New Trier High School, she was
already living and breathing dance, and she rebelled angrily against this non-
Washburne school’s rules. In particular, she objected to taking the girls’ soccer
class in physical education—a requirement for graduation. She was one of
the best female athletes in the school, so it was not playing soccer she ob-
jected to. What upset her was the idea that dance was not considered an equiv-
alent physical activity. This enraged her. At lunchtime she often did not bother
to eat, preferring to make up tap dance and soft-shoe routines with one of
her black high school coaches. “I had absolutely no discrimination—as long
as it was dance I really just loved it all,” she said.41 She finally made such a
fuss that the school administration agreed to exempt her from soccer and
let her substitute her outside modern dance classes for the PE requirement.
She was the only student in the school permitted to do this. Like Isadore,
Ann expected to get her own way. “She always objected to structure,” ac-
cording to her brother Albert.
The one place where Ann did employ structure was in the neighborhood
classes she began teaching for her friends and their mothers when she was

WHY SHE DANCED 17

 twelve years old. These classes consisted primarily of stretches and warm-
up exercises as a prelude to improvisational situations. Ann wanted to give
her students the same freedom she found so appealing in dance.
Ida agreeably took Ann to as many dance classes as she wanted, but it
was modern dance that captured Ann’s attention. “When I was introduced
to modern dance, that’s when the real dedication came,” she later explained.
“I was absolutely enamored with modern dance. It was physically chal-
lenging and it gave me a chance to begin to understand that it was OK for
me to express my own creative life. That was a great turning point for me.”42

Although I’d been exploring all kinds of dance just for the love of it,
it wasn’t until I was an adolescent that I was exposed for the first time
to the primary innovators of modern dance—Doris Humphrey, Charles
Weidman, Martha Graham, and Hanya Holm. When I saw them a light
went on. Here were dancers responding to political and social themes,
using a freedom of movement I had never dreamed possible. It was
Humphrey I was able to identify with most closely. I couldn’t identify
with Martha Graham at all, possibly because our body types were so
diªerent. Also she was so intensely dynamic it was overwhelming.43

By the time she was in high school, Ann was making weekly trips to
Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago to study with Frances Allis, a mod-
ern dance teacher who had studied with the ballet dancer Adolph Bolm
and the German expressionist dancer Harald Kreutzberg. The trip was a
two-hour train ride from Winnetka, and at least one other student in the
class, Pearl Lang, took note of this level of dedication. Lang, who went on
to a distinguished career with Martha Graham’s dance company and then
formed her own dance theater in 1954, remembered the unusual intensity
Ann displayed in those classes and how it matched her own: “I do know
we danced well. We were so enthusiastic. We worked day and night and we
had a lot of energy at that time. The two of us were going to be dancers.
There was no doubt.” They both also decided early on which modern dancer
they wanted to work with: “Ann said Doris Humphrey and I said Martha
Graham,” Lang recollected. “Ann had a very sparkling energy. She was in-
terested in finding out and experimenting with movement.”44
One day, inspired by a recent master class Doris Humphrey had taught
at Northwestern University, near Chicago, fifteen-year-old Ann stripped
her fancy bedroom bare in a gesture that also echoed the liberated spaces
of the Washburne schools’ classrooms. Ann’s room, painted pale blue, had

18 WHY SHE DANCED

had ru›ed curtains, a canopy bed, and a big dresser with an oval mirror
and frilly lampshades. Ann tossed all this out in the hallway, rolled up the
rug, and set her mattress on the bare wood floor. She had decided she wanted
to live in a dance studio.
Ann’s tolerant and devoted mother took it all in stride. A short while later,
she surprised Ann by inviting Tatiana Petroviana, who taught interpretive
dance at the Alicia Pratt School in Winnetka, to live in the Schuman house.
Ida gave Tatiana free room and board for the next year so that Ann could
interact with someone equally interested in dance. Ann’s two brothers were
both away at college, so there was plenty of room in the house.
Tatiana was followed by Josephine Schwartz, a former dancer with
Charles Weidman, who had also worked with Doris Humphrey. Josephine
had been directing a dance school in Dayton, Ohio, with her sister, Her-
mine, but they were struggling financially, so Josephine, or “Jo” as Ann called
her, came to teach at the Pratt School and lived with the Schumans for a
year, playing four-hand piano with Ann in the evenings. Jo related to Ann
as a big sister, taking her to see dance classes and all the major dance at-
tractions in Chicago. It was with Jo that Ann first saw Doris Humphrey’s
dancers perform Shakers and the New Dance trilogy. “I remember being
very impressed with New Dance,” Ann recalled. “It challenged me. I kept
wondering how did she do it? It was such a noble, philosophical statement,
it stuck with me.”45 Many years later, in the year before Ida died, Ann asked
her mother why she had taken those dance teachers into the house. “I did
it just because you were so interested in dance,” Ida replied simply.46 Yet
this was an incredibly radical thing to do in the mid-1930s. As Selma Jeanne
Cohen, writing about Doris Humphrey and modern dance in 1935, noted:

At the beginning of 1935, the modern dance was anything but a house-
hold word to middle America. Few had heard of it; even fewer had
actually seen it. Ballet was somewhat familiar, for Pavlova had toured in
the 1920s and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo began its American travels
in 1933. But Isadora Duncan had performed rarely in her own country,
while the Denishawn tours had taken repertories of exotica, amply adorned
with colorful sets, costumes, and picturesque paraphernalia. When audi-
ences did see modern dance, even in its Broadway form, they didn’t seem
to recognize it.47

Petroviana and Schwartz shared more than their interest in dance with
Ann; they provided her first up-close model of what it might be like to be

WHY SHE DANCED 19

 a woman out in the world with a career in dance. Ann’s study of dance
flourished in this environment, and she began increasing her classes in
Humphrey technique at the Pratt School to three times a week. In 1934 she
had appeared in her first major public performance, dancing with a small
student group at the Chicago World’s Fair, where they performed Den-
ishawn-style dance under Pratt’s direction. What Ida and Isadore had not
counted on was just how influential having dancers living in the house
would be for Ann.
Ann, however, was not really aware of how financially tenuous the life
of a modern dancer was in this period. The January 1935 concerts of the
Humphrey-Weidman company that excited Ann were performed in the vast
Chicago auditorium, which was only half-filled.48 Dancers on a two-week
tour of the Midwest with Humphrey in February 1936 reportedly received
thirty-five dollars a week in wages, a significant improvement after months
of unpaid rehearsals and teaching for a salary of two to five dollars a class.
One collective dinner—a twenty-cent soup bone, water, and vegetables—
was made to last for three days.49 (It was a good thing Isadore did not know
this. Robert Raymer remembers Isadore, in his old age, proudly boasting
about his successful daughter by saying that Ann was in the studio “mak-
ing lots of money.” Of course she wasn’t, but that was Isadore’s only real
way of understanding accomplishment.)
Rebellious and emboldened by having these older dancers in the house,
the teenaged Ann began testing limits, but in a way that still allowed her
parents to control her. For example, she started dating some of the older
boys in the high school. Not only were these boys not Jewish (there were
only two or three other Jewish families in the Winnetka schools then), but
their families were snobbish and anti-Semitic as well. Moreover, Ann didn’t
like taking direction from any men at this time. Robert Raymer, a neigh-
bor who was a year ahead of Ann, remembered catching a ride to high school
with her every morning and shivering the whole way because Ann insisted
on keeping her window wide open in the midst of January. She wanted “to
maximize the fresh air.”
At the beginning of her senior year, Ann did her first piece of choreog-
raphy, a solo about nature entitled Pastoral. She performed the dance at
the Evanston Women’s Club and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago un-
der the auspices of the Chicago Dance Council. In a note she wrote to
herself about the dance a couple of years later, she remarked how the dance
seemed to fall right into the form of the music by Poulenc. “I paralleled

20 WHY SHE DANCED

the music exactly. The dance, like the music, was lyrical, gay and light. . . .
I did this because the music made me do it. I danced in no particular floor
pattern, although I was conscious of where I was traveling. I danced to
the audience.”50
Toward the middle of her senior year, seventeen-year-old Ann entered
the annual high school talent show. This was going to be the first time she
would show her peers her own modern dance choreography. Remember-
ing that modern dancers always had composers write music for their dances,
Ann asked a young musician to write some original music to accompany
her solo, earnestly titled Saga of Youth. She wore a rust-colored silk-crepe
dress with a cream-colored sharkskin slip. She noted the following about
the dance in 1941, when she began to compile a list of her choreography:

The idea in this dance was one of struggle and growth. After the dance
was finished I realized it was the story of Adolescence. I treated the ma-
terial in a dramatic form. It was my form and not the form of the music
for I had the music written after the dance was completed. The whole
quality of the dance was serious, subjective, wild, terrifically spectacular
(although I did not mean it to be) but most sincere. . . . [It] finally ended
after a spectacular acrobatic tumbling to the floor, with me prostrated.51

The school assembled, and no sooner had she begun than the students
started snickering and then laughing loudly. “I was going through this dance
and hearing these people giggling, and what I was experiencing at that mo-
ment from the audience was so in contrast to what my experience was that
I was absolutely devastated. I was so embarrassed that I wouldn’t go back
to school. I simply couldn’t deal with facing my classmates because they ap-
parently thought this dance I had done, was so weird. It was two weeks be-
fore I would go back to school, and during those weeks I kept thinking
about what had happened. I decided I would have to make better art, bet-
ter dance.”52 Ida let her stay home. She recovered su‹ciently to perform
the dance a few months later for the Chicago Council audition, where she
was commended for her “splendid technique.”
Ida may have let Ann stay home from school for a couple of weeks, but
the real test of who was in charge came when Ann announced that she had
received an oªer from Doris Humphrey to join her company. Humphrey,
impressed by Ann’s musicality and high energy, invited Ann to come East
and dance with her in New York starting the week after her graduation from

WHY SHE DANCED 21

 high school. “To have Doris invite me to join the company was absolutely
heaven,” Ann recalled. “This is exactly what I wanted to do. But I had
enough family obedience to not dare leave school. We all knew how much
it meant to our parents for the three of us to get an education.”53 Ann rightly
sensed that for Isadore and Ida this would have been one of her few re-
quests they refused. So Ann prepared to apply to college. She began by
searching for the school with the best dance program.

22 WHY SHE DANCED

 TWO

The Secret Garden of American Dance

1938 – 1942

The long infancy and childhood specific to the human species is an extended
training and rehearsal period for the successful performance of adult life.
richard schechner
Performance Studies: An Introduction

new trier high school , which Ann attended, was known as one of
the best public high schools in the nation. Its top graduates could expect
to be admitted to any of the leading Ivy League universities. So it was with
considerable disappointment and shock that Ann opened a letter in the
spring of 1938, her senior year, from the one college to which she had ap-
plied, Bennington College in Vermont, and learned that she had not been
accepted. Ann had been confident that her grades easily equaled those of
the other applicants. What was diªerent, she felt, was that she wrote “Jew-
ish” on her application form when asked for her religion.
Jewish quotas at elite academic institutions in America had existed at least
since the 1920s, as had exclusion from certain neighborhoods. In the mid-
1930s, in line with the rise of Nazism in Germany, some Americans expressed
concern about the United States becoming a haven for Jews, so the college
quotas received reinforcement. With sad irony, just as the forced identifi-
cation of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia had reconnected them to Ju-
daism, so too the label of “Jewish,” which Ann felt Bennington’s rejection
a‹xed to her, had the eªect of strengthening what up until now had been
her fairly ambivalent cultural identity as a Jew.1
Jews were particularly resented in American higher education in part be-
cause they were viewed as highly competitive, eager to excel academically
and winning a disproportionate number of academic prizes. Harvard’s pres-

23
 ident, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, “was convinced that Harvard could only
survive if the majority of its students came from old American stock.”2 In
1922 he proposed limiting the number of Jews at Harvard to no more than
15 percent, rationalizing that limits would prevent further anti-Semitism.
“The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in
proportion to the increase in the number of Jews.” Although the faculties
at Princeton and Yale resisted, the administrations at these schools also im-
posed Jewish quotas. Indeed, most of the Ivy League schools kept the num-
ber of Jewish students at around 20 percent during the 1930s and 1940s,
whether through explicit quotas or by other tactics, such as declaring a com-
mitment to a nationally representative student body and thus limiting the
number of students from such metropolitan centers as New York and
Chicago, where the largest Jewish populations were. Another approach was
to require photographs or personal interviews or to include application ques-
tions about changes in the family name and religion.3
Ann’s parents were upset about her rejected application, but neither Ida,
with only a high school education, nor Isadore, who had never attended
school, knew how to advise Ann. They turned to their lawyer’s wife, a fam-
ily friend who was a graduate of the University of Chicago. She had re-
cently heard of the dance program at the University of Wisconsin and sug-
gested Ann apply there. Ann had no trouble being accepted by Wisconsin,
but housing for a Jewish student in Madison would prove to be a challenge.
Ann’s most immediate focus, however, was on an intensive summer pro-
gram, immersing her in modern dance.

Although Ann’s application to Bennington College was rejected, she was

accepted into the summer dance program held on its campus in rural Ver-
mont. Founded in 1932, Bennington was the first college to oªer a bache-
lor of arts degree with a concentration in dance, graduating its first three
dance majors in 1936.4 Both John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick of
Teachers College at Columbia University had been among the Progressive
educators involved in the planning of this college, which aimed to present
the arts as equal to the other academic subjects.5
Bennington’s emphasis on dance as a performing art was cemented with
the inauguration, in 1934, of the Bennington School of the Dance, an in-
novative summer program, distinct from the regular academic curriculum.
For the next nine years, until it was interrupted during the war years, the
Bennington School of the Dance became the most intensive program of

24 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

dance production and study in the nation. Its fifth summer, in 1938, was
the largest and most ambitious yet, oªering not only the usual four weeks
of classes, lectures, and student demonstrations, but also a week of dance
performances, August 4 to 10, in the Vermont State Armory. Some 3,800
people came from all over the country to attend the festival, and several
hundred more had to be turned away for lack of space. For the first time,
all four major modern choreographers—Martha Graham, Doris Hum-
phrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm—were in residence at the same
time with their companies, and they oªered eleven premieres, including
two works that would become emblematic of American modern dance:
Humphrey’s Passacaglia in C Minor and Graham’s American Document, her
first dance to employ a male, Erick Hawkins.6
Artistic edginess and competition among the “Big Four” choreographers
were pronounced. Eleanor King, a Humphrey dancer and Bennington “fel-
low” (as the younger choreographers were called), recalled that Martha Gra-
ham’s dancers “were forbidden to speak to other groups. . . . Clique-ishness
and factionalism prevailed.”7 For some, the tensions were heightened by
the new romance between Graham, age forty-six, and Hawkins, age
thirty—the start of a relationship that would last until the early 1950s. Louis
Horst, Graham’s musical director, mentor, and former lover, continued to
fulfill his usual duties including teaching his legendary dance composition
class, which Ann took, but those close to him said that “inwardly he was
seething with resentment and irritation.”8 Bennington faculty members gos-
siped about Graham and Hawkins, and the students probably knew some-
thing was going on as well. As Martha Hill, the director of the summer
school, who stayed in the same faculty housing as Graham, reported, “Erick
was around a lot. I’d hear noises in the kitchen at 3:00 a.m., go down to
check, and find Erick and Martha having a cup of tea. This was a period
of ‘free love,’ of course. You didn’t get married.”9
Although, for Ann, the focus was not on this budding romance but on
the chance to learn from contemporary masters, still, implicitly, she would
witness the juggling required to maintain one’s personal and professional
life in a relationship between two artists. Even though she was one of the
youngest of the 180 participants in the Bennington School of the Dance
that summer, Ann was very comfortable.10 “I felt very self-confident and
at home. I felt like this was my community,” she said later.11 Ann decided
to audition for Eleanor King’s dance, and King chose the perky Ann for
the “Hoe-down” and “Hornpipe” sections of her three-part American Folk
Suite. Ann also took Horst’s challenging dance composition class. Although

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 25

 she found Horst “very bizarre with a dry and sarcastic sense of humor,” Ann
was relieved that he liked her and frequently picked her to demonstrate her
solutions to his composition exercises.
To Jeanne Hayes (Beaman), who roomed across the hall from Ann in the
Bennington dormitory that summer, Ann seemed lively and passionate,
making up for what she may have lacked in rigorous technical training with
an irrepressible appetite for dance. “She may not have had great turnout,
but she was always musical in a way. She was wiry and with an articulate
and just very alive body,” Jeanne, who had a background in classical bal-
let, later said.12 Jeanne went with Ann to the initial auditions to be in the
dances by the young choreographers associated with Graham, Holm, and
Humphrey. “Ann was watching my audition for Marian van Tuyl’s piece,”
Jeanne recalled, “and we had to do a [Graham] back fall. When I finished,
Ann said to me, ‘Oh Jeanne, why did you hold your hands up in fifth po-
sition before you fell?’” Ann understood that “letting one’s ballet show” in
this era of a strict separation between ballet and modern dance was risky.13
However, Jeanne did get the part, and at the end of the summer, Graham
even invited her to New York, but she declined, preferring to join the San
Francisco Ballet.
What Jeanne remembered most about Ann from that summer was her
crazy sense of humor. “We were both in Louis’s class and we both got along
with him well,” she recalled. “I remember one day Ann did a wonderful
stylized little minuet. It was a very formal and severe thing [done for Horst’s
pre-classic dance composition assignment], but she managed to do it with
some humor and an edge of parody to the refined movement. Ann was
always a free spirit.” Ann and Jeanne also engaged in a couple of minor es-
capades at Bennington. The first involved a ruse for getting more than the
permitted single scoop of ice cream per day. Since they both loved ice cream,
they quickly figured out that if they waited until the gallon ice cream tubs
were nearing empty, they could pack their cones from the bottom to the
top with all the remaining soft ice cream. This worked until one day the
cook sternly suggested they stop stu‹ng their cones. Another incident was
more audacious. Obliged to create a final student composition at the end
of the summer, the two collaborated on a dance they titled “Reaction to
Bennington.” In this two- to three-minute duet, performed in silence, Ann
and Jeanne crawled around aimlessly on the floor on all fours. “It was a
comment on modern dance and what we had seen that summer at Ben-
nington,” Jeanne later explained. “We reacted to the idea that you had to
follow these strictures in composition. So many of the choreographers were

26 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

making works that were going to transform the world and uplift people.
We were showing that we were not uplifted!” Their work was greeted with
silence: “No one laughed. No one said anything.”
One person who might have appreciated the girls’ satirical movement
commentary was Margaret H’Doubler, a guest lecturer at Bennington that
summer. The founder and director of the dance program at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison, and the nation’s pioneering college dance edu-
cator, H’Doubler, a former phys ed teacher, was an anomalous choice for
Bennington. Her philosophy diªered markedly from the fast track to the
professional dance world that Bennington championed. The dance program
model Hill was creating at Bennington was on its way to becoming the ma-
jor alternative to H’Doubler’s approach to dance education. Hill, who had
studied with H’Doubler in Madison in the summer of 1927, proudly dis-
tinguished her new program at Bennington:

Taking dance out of the PE Department, from a sport to an art form,

that was the big accomplishment of 1932. I was brought up to think
that theater was something that nice people didn’t do. There would be
revivalist meetings where you could march up the isle and say you’d give
up dance and drink. . . . So this was absolutely amazing that a New
England college [like Bennington] would tolerate dance and the arts. . . .
It was further unthinkable that dance, of all the arts, would be backed
so thoroughly.14

In the brief six-week summer program at Bennington, Ann was already

on her way to discovering a small voice in herself that countered the emerg-
ing modern dance mainstream. “Reaction to Bennington” might have been
a prank, but it suggested a critique of some of early modern dance’s often
inflated, self-important qualities. In H’Doubler, who was about to become
her mentor, Ann would discover a kindred spirit. More important, from
H’Doubler she would gain a radically diªerent conception of learning in
the arts.

In late August Ann and Ida, accompanied by the young rabbi from their
synagogue, set oª for Wisconsin to find Ann a place to live in Madison. At
the time Ann didn’t question the rabbi’s joining them for the trip; she thought
this was just his usual level of concern for congregation members who were
leaving for college. Soon, however, she realized he was in love with her and

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 27

 that his interest in listening to her talk about her dances was more an inter-
est in her than in dance. Later, when he suggested coming to Madison to
visit her, she began making excuses why she couldn’t meet with him.
During those initial few days, however, the rabbi’s presence provided a
counterpoint to the religious intolerance that greeted Ida and Ann’s attempts
to find a room in one of the private homes renting to university students.
At the first several homes they visited, Ann was asked her religion. When
she said she was Jewish, she was bluntly told, “We don’t mix.” Finally, she
found a room in a house close to Lathrop Hall, home of the university’s
dance program. Ida and the rabbi left. At last Ann was on her own.
The program that Ann enrolled in at the University of Wisconsin in the
fall of 1938 was the oldest professional dance degree program in the nation.
After starting in 1917 as a single summer class in interpretive dancing taught
by H’Doubler, the Wisconsin program grew rapidly, oªering the country’s
first BS degree with a major in dance by 1926. Two remarkable women were
behind this achievement: H’Doubler and her boss, Blanche Trilling, the vi-
sionary chair of the women’s physical education department.
By 1938 the forty-nine-year-old H’Doubler was on the cusp of national
recognition as a pioneering dance educator. The story of her refashioning
dance into an academic discipline for women is one of the stranger tales of
early-twentieth-century cultural development in America. Never a dancer
herself, H’Doubler avoided the established systems of classical, social, and
concert dance training. Instead, she based her invention on short-term ob-
servations of dance teacher Alys Bentley’s classes for children. H’Doubler
had stumbled upon Bentley’s private music and dance classes in New York
while studying education and philosophy for a year at Teachers College,
Columbia University, where she was greatly influenced by the pragmatic
philosophy of one of the professors, John Dewey. Back in Madison, she
adapted her impression of Bentley’s classes into a college course suitable
for propriety-conscious young women. Trilling helped give H’Doubler a
direction for this achievement, framing her reduction of dance to its move-
ment essentials as the way to make dance “something worth a university
woman’s time.”15
From the start, H’Doubler emphasized training “the thinking dancer”
rather than shaping students for careers in the professional dance world. Un-
like the Bennington model, her thrust was on creating conditions for stu-
dents to discover dance possibilities within their own bodies, not on con-
veying detailed and specific dance content. For H’Doubler, teaching, not
performing, was the ultimate profession in dance. She once cheerily told Mary

28 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

Hinkson, a talented dance student who was confused about her professional
performing career options, “You can always teach!”16 H’Doubler valued dance
for its capacity to foster the creative impulse independent of the stage. Her
methods spurred students to question technical training in the arts and to
conceive of education as broadly liberal, a preparation for life.
H’Doubler’s approach echoed some of the same Deweyean principles be-
hind Carlton Washburne’s Winnetka schools, and the similarity was un-
derstandable. When in 1916–17, at Teachers College, H’Doubler took a sem-
inar with John Dewey, the father of Progressive and experiential learning in
higher education, she was profoundly aªected by his new concepts of art
as experience. Dewey’s theories provided a rationale for H’Doubler’s trans-
formation of dance from a questionable social practice, particularly for
women, into a valued educational one. Perhaps most critical for H’Doubler
was Dewey’s belief that the mind and body worked together, that bodily
and mental activity were not separate.
Dewey posited that thinking is inquiry and that any act of inquiry be-
gins with a problem and proceeds, through testing of possible solutions, to
a resolution. What Dewey described was, in eªect, the scientific method,
which appealed to the scientist in H’Doubler, who had majored in biol-
ogy. In her dance classroom she continually prodded her students to test
the range of motion of each of the body’s major joints and to improvise
within the spatial, rhythmic, and stylistic parameters she set. Each student
thus arrived, through personal experimentation, at movement solutions to
the “problems” H’Doubler posed. If, for example, a student followed the
impulse to curve her spine downward, she might find herself curling down
lower and lower until she reached the floor. There she might find herself
rolling over onto her back, eventually straightening her spine out once again,
but this time stretched flat on the ground.
In Dewey’s model, outlined in his landmark treatise Art as Experience,
learning by experience was “art in germ,” because the path of the student,
through trial and error to understanding, paralleled that of the artist
grasping for a resolution to a design problem.17 What particularly attracted
H’Doubler to these ideas of Dewey’s, which he had ruminated on for years,
was that this was an educational rather than a strictly aesthetic model, al-
though decades later, in Ann’s hands, it would become both. Interestingly,
it was at the midpoint of Ann’s tenure at Wisconsin, in 1940, that H’Doubler
published her definitive book on the subject of dance education, Dance: A
Creative Art Experience, articulating a vision of dance as a means for fo-
cusing on the development of self rather than performance.

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 29

 H’Doubler saw dance as a rich democratic medium through which stu-
dents’, particularly women students’, sense of their e‹cacy in the world
could be transformed. Ann was captivated from the first class:

When I arrived at the Lathrop Hall studio for my first class at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin, I waited nervously in line with forty other bright-eyed
students. I assumed our teacher would begin the class with exercises, the
way a dance class usually began. Instead, H’Doubler arrived all breathless
and enthusiastic. She greeted us warmly and, instead of taking her place
in front of regimented lines of students, she invited us to gather infor-
mally around her in front of a skeleton. I was shocked. By the end of the
day, I was so intellectually stimulated and creatively engaged that I could
not wait for the next class.18

Ann understood immediately, on an intuitive level, that she was not ex-
pected to imitate H’Doubler (indeed, this would have been extremely
di‹cult because H’Doubler never demonstrated). Rather, she was to learn
how the human body was built for physical action. H’Doubler frequently
started her movement classes by asking students to lie on the floor. Then
she gently led them verbally through simple actions, such as the gradual
shift of weight along the torso and legs as one slowly rolled from back to
stomach.
Sometimes H’Doubler gave her students kneepads and instructed them
to crawl at various tempi around the studio while paying attention to how
their bodies adjusted. At other times she distributed blindfolds to encour-
age them to focus on their interior, felt sense of movement rather than think-
ing about dance from an external, observational standpoint. H’Doubler usu-
ally closed the curtains on the dance studio’s mirrors so students could not
watch themselves during these kinetic and sensory explorations. (Ann’s
dance studio, in which she has worked for more than fifty years, has also
never had a mirror.) In some sense H’Doubler’s students must have felt as
if they were learning to walk again, so systematically did H’Doubler stress
the rediscovery of natural movement patterns. Ann remembered this crawling
exercise with awe and aªection. “What other dancer at that time in history
ever had anyone get down and crawl?” she wondered of H’Doubler. “Yet
that action is such a vital movement because it deals with coordination.
It’s the whole thing.”19
The young freshman from Winnetka was most startled by the real hu-
man skeleton H’Doubler kept suspended in a portable frame oª to one side.

30 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

As already noted, H’Doubler was an empirical scientist at heart, who had
not only majored in biology, but minored in chemistry and philosophy while
a student at Wisconsin. She had chosen this path in part because there was
no physical education major at the time, but also because, in spirit, her or-
ganizational approach to the world was one of systematic, sequential dis-
covery. Her dance major curriculum came to require physiology, kinesiol-
ogy, and a class in anatomy in which each student was part of a group of
four who dissected a cadaver, exploring the layers of muscle fibers, tendons,
and bones.
In every dance studio she created after leaving Wisconsin, Ann similarly
set up a skeleton in the corner with charts of the body’s muscles on the
wall. These were the real diplomas of her college dance education. While
teaching, Ann frequently referred to these props—showing her students,
for example, just as H’Doubler had shown her, how the trapezius muscle
connects the neck, spine, and shoulder blades through the activation of mus-
cle fibers that stretch diagonally into the vertebrae. The idea, according to
Ann, was to give you “a clear image of how the scapula supports your head
and when you [got this] you would be working your body in the right way
so it was very comfortable, natural and right.”20 Following her mentor, Ann
built her dance vocabulary from the most fundamental kinetic logic of the
body. Instead of teaching a movement technique, both H’Doubler and Ann
encouraged a physical unpeeling of the body’s habituated responses until
one reached a core truth.
H’Doubler’s attempt to draw out the distinctiveness inside each student
resonated strongly with Ann’s democratic impulses, especially in the wake
of her recent experiences with anti-Semitism. As she later explained: “New
York studio training was about imitating movement. It’s like brainwash-
ing you to respond automatically. H’Doubler always thought that one
dancer imposing her movement on another was autocratic to the psyche.
She fiercely defended the right of each person to have her own individual
expression—that was the core of her philosophy.”21 While Ann’s recol-
lections always cast this quality of H’Doubler’s teaching as an aesthetic
value, her comments can just as easily be read as social.

Although Ann may have initially felt isolated as a Jew in Madison, the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin had been a major destination for Jewish students since
the mid-1920s. The campus was home to the nation’s second-oldest Hillel
Foundation, the Jewish organization for college students that began in 1923

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 31

 at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The University of Wis-
consin’s Hillel, founded in 1924, focused on providing opportunities for Jew-
ish students to gather and engage in a variety of activities, from religious
to cultural, social, and political. It oªered, for example, weekly Shabbat din-
ners, celebrations of the Jewish holidays, and lectures on Zionism and the
political situation in Palestine.
Initially, Ann went to Hillel for a pragmatic reason: she wanted to meet
men. After a few weeks with only other women in Lathrop Hall, she real-
ized the limitations of spending her days in the women’s physical education
building. “I wanted to socialize and meet Jewish guys,” she explained. “The
young people at Hillel were all very active—they had labor movement in-
terests. It was a very exciting time.”22 Among the “guys” she met at Hillel
were two who would become the most influential men in her professional,
and personal, life.
At a time when Ann was becoming increasingly aware of anti-Semitism
and its eªect of contracting one’s social space for self-expression, she was
also discovering new ways of expressing her sense of who she was. Through
H’Doubler she was learning that dance could be, should be, an arena for
self-discovery. Self-expression would follow. Her high school paean to ado-
lescence dance had flopped because, as often happens with young chore-
ographers, it may have been more felt by her than communicated to the
audience. In Hillel and its leader at the University of Wisconsin, Rabbi Max
Kadushin, Ann found an arena of encouragement for expressing her sense
of herself as Jewish. H’Doubler’s classes promoted dance as an expression
of the body’s individuality, and now Ann was discovering that that indi-
viduality could have a name.
Kadushin, a prominent Conservative rabbi and scholar, had come to the
University of Wisconsin Hillel in 1931, after serving a congregation in
Chicago for five years and helping to found the Midwest Council of the
Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Forty years old in 1938, he was
a lively intellectual and cultural activist. He eagerly turned his Hillel into
a place where being Jewish and doing “Jewish” activities were loosely
defined— one could debate political policy or play basketball just as read-
ily as participate in the annual Passover meal. He drew the line, however,
at student radicalism, refusing to allow the young Communist league to
meet at Hillel. The dean used to call Kadushin in whenever a Jewish stu-
dent was in trouble because of his reasoned diplomatic outlook.
The year Ann started at Wisconsin, Kadushin had just published his
second and most influential book, Organic Thinking: A Study in Rabbinic

32 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

Thought, in which he endeavored to demonstrate that rabbinic thinking
presented a systematically structured worldview and that religious experi-
ence should be thought of as part of the ordinary course of daily life. De-
scribing Judaism as an organic whole, Kadushin argued that rabbinic think-
ing may not seem logical in the philosophical sense of the word, but it is
directed by an internal order. To erase an idea from the Jewish tradition,
he contended, would be the equivalent of cutting a limb oª the body—it
would disrupt the inherent “organismic” pattern of rabbinic thought, which
was all related, even though it might stretch over thousands of years.23
Kadushin led seminars at Hillel in which he discussed these ideas as well
as his beliefs about the relation of the individual to society. Most impor-
tant for Ann, he implied that one might balance the stabilization of soci-
ety and the expression of the self with the making of art. As Kadushin later
explained this: “A work of art, like a valuational situation, is a complete en-
tity in itself and bears the imprint of the personality, which achieved it. To
yield aesthetic satisfaction, any work of art—a painting, a piece of sculp-
ture, a symphony, a lyric poem—must be a harmonious whole; and if it be
such it will be charged with the personality of the artist who created it.”24
Under Kadushin’s direction, Hillel became a center of Jewish culture on
campus, with a Jewish-themed theater group (the Hillel Players), a sports
league, and a dance group, in which Ann would play a major role (she also
belonged to Orchesis, a selective student-run dance group that oªered reg-
ular concerts through the dance department). “Rabbi Kadushin encour-
aged me to dance my roots,” Ann said of her shift to Jewish-themed dances.
“It was at the University of Wisconsin that I really began to explore my
roots on an artistic level and he helped me a great deal in getting me bib-
lical references and encouraging that I continue to do this.”25
Like the other students in Hillel, Ann was concerned about what was
happening to the Jews in Germany. In her freshman year she learned through
Hillel of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, when on November 9,
1938, nearly two hundred synagogues were set on fire and numerous Jew-
ish businesses and shops vandalized throughout Germany and Austria in a
Nazi-orchestrated evening of violence. In the fall of 1939, for two of the
early dances she created at Wisconsin, Ann reflected on the human cost of
war. Her solo Elegy, or Hymn to Dead Soldiers was performed to a sparse
percussion score in near-silence. “I was tremendously moved by the war sit-
uation and felt the deep tragedy of lives being taken by war death all over
the world,” Ann wrote about her inspiration for this dance. “I did not an-
alyze any further but just danced my hymn. . . . The style was archaic as I

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 33

 walked within the path and twice I would break from this path and kneel
over a dead body,” she added, suggesting how much she had already ab-
sorbed the structural lessons of Louis Horst’s summer class.26 In Song of
Youth or Refugees, a group piece, she used vocal accompaniment from the
dancers to evoke the plight of those made homeless by war. Her notes on
these dances include a few sentences about the audience reaction to each
and her musings as to whether her intended feeling seemed to have reached
the viewers. Even as a novice dance maker, Ann was sensitive to a possible
breach between her impression of her work and that of her audience. Her
notes suggest her realization that the content of these dances rallied sup-
port even if their form was shaky.
The Hillel Review published some glowing accounts of Ann’s dancing,
written by Ben Stephansky, a student Ann had met through Hillel and be-
gun dating. In one long essay, he traced the history of Hillel’s dance group,
describing how it began in 1935, when at an informal Sunday evening get-
together, while the group was singing a Yiddish parody, “Rose Blumkin, a
student in the university dance department, arose to dance . . . [and] spon-
taneously synthesized her (and our) Hillel experience and the experience
of her academic training in the art of dance.” In the final sentence of the
article Stephansky mentioned Ann and heralded her as “one of the most
brilliant dancers in the history of the Wisconsin dance school.”27 Follow-
ing Blumkin’s lead, Ann was creating a bridge between the university’s strong
dance program and the responsiveness of the Hillel students and staª to
contemporary dance done with a Jewish theme.

The summer of 1939, before her sophomore year, Ann had once again at-
tended the Bennington School of the Dance summer program, which was
held at Mills College in Oakland, California. Twenty-six Bennington fac-
ulty and staª members went West for the summer, including the “Big Four”
choreographers. Through this program, Rosalind Cassidy, director of the
Mills College summer session and chair of the physical education depart-
ment, hoped that Bennington’s School of the Dance would be “fundamen-
tally aªected by influences belonging inherently to the West” and that there
would be “a new enrichment and strong consolidation of the whole field
of the dance.”28 Ironically the short-term eªect on the Bennington staª
was the opposite: Doris Humphrey complained, “There is no view and there
are no long stretches of space for the eye and the spirit on the campus . . . it
all presses in too much.” Martha Graham’s teaching assistant, Ethel Butler,

34 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

found the landscape equally stifling: “I couldn’t breathe out there. . . . I
needed to get somewhere where I could see out and beyond.”
Ann didn’t register any specific response to the California setting that sum-
mer, but eventually she would experience the western influences Cassidy
outlined and, through her, they would radiate out, to the field as a whole.
For her summer studies Ann again chose Humphrey’s technique over Gra-
ham’s, noting that “Doris’s work came easy to me—she was friendlier.
Martha was always putting on a show.”29 She also took Louis Horst’s “Pre-
classic and Modern Forms” composition class and performed her dance Ex-
orcism as one of the student pieces he showcased from his “Primitive Stud-
ies” assignment. What did impress Ann that summer was a slender young
male student from the Cornish School in Seattle who had a remarkable
jump. He dazzled everyone. His name was Mercier (Merce) Cunningham.
Ann had driven to California with Ida, but Ida had gone back to Chicago
after a brief visit with her brother. For the return trip, Ann accepted an in-
vitation from a new friend in the Mills workshop to accompany her and
her family back to Chicago via the family’s summer ranch in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. Ann was particularly excited because the family had invited her to
attend a big Native American dance festival in Gallup, New Mexico. It is
possible that she had learned about this special showcase of Native Amer-
ican dance from Louis Horst, who attended the festival with his compan-
ion Nina Fontaroª and good friends Ruth and Norman Lloyd. Ann, how-
ever, never saw the dances. At the last moment, with no explanation, as she
recalls, her hosts announced there was no room for her and left her at their
ranch to take a horse ride while they went oª to see the Indian dances. Fu-
rious, Ann checked herself into La Fonda, a hotel in Santa Fe, where she
met a group of students who gave her a ride back to Chicago.30
Soon after her return to school, Ann began running the Hillel dance
group, touring with them at the B’nai B’rith chapter at Sheboygan and field-
ing invitations from as far away as Chicago. The Hillel Review remarked:
“Our Hillel Dancers, which originated this year under the guidance of Ann
Schuman, has since become one of the most successful activities ever to
originate at the [Hillel] Foundation.”31 In reviewing the Orchesis per-
formances, the Chicago Dancer, the city’s dance newsletter, described Ann
as “outstanding by her range and power” and her Three Pages from a Diary
as “one of the most coherent solo suites in contemporary dance.”32
Ann was also proving herself very articulate verbally about dance. In a
student-led lecture demonstration in the spring of 1940 Ann and four other
Orchesis members presented the fundamentals of modern dance. Ann’s in-

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 35

 troduction reads like an early manifesto of her goals for dance: “You see
dance is like Democracy. It is a point of view—a concept. We do not have
a code of movements that is standard step patterns. We do not have a dog-
matic system of rules and regulations that sets a dancer as a cog in a ma-
chine. . . . The ultimate aim is . . . a perfection of the knowledge of our ma-
terials of dance and the nature of man.”33
Ann’s course work was going well—with the exception of Blanche
Trilling’s class on dance pedagogy for children. Preparing dance teachers for
the public schools was an important part of the Wisconsin curriculum. The
year Ann entered, the program included classes in “The Teaching of
Rhythms to Children,” “Dance Curriculum in Secondary Schools,” and
“Student Teaching.” The thoroughness of Wisconsin’s dance-teacher train-
ing was renowned—during Ann’s first year at the university, forty-four dance
graduates were already teaching in colleges and universities in twenty-three
states, and each year the demand for dance teachers exceeded the supply.34
Ann, however, rebelled against Trilling’s method, which was to have the
college dancers teach dance classes for each other as if they were ten-year-
olds, and they were supposed to react as if they were children. “I thought
it was the silliest thing. It was just nonsense,” Ann later said. “We were sup-
posed to be elementary-age children, first grade to eighth grade. It was such
a phony setup, I didn’t give any credence whatsoever to that course. Trilling
insisted we had to make lesson plans for every class according to a specific
way of doing this, a grid system. So you wrote down every single activity
and as much information about how you were going to present it, and why
you were doing it.”35 Both the artificiality of the class and the overdeter-
mined structure for teaching dance irked Ann. Trilling, a PE educator, was
accustomed to teaching sports incrementally through repeating an action
that eventually would become real—such as throwing an imaginary bas-
ketball repeatedly until finally one got to hold a real one. This method sim-
ply didn’t work for dance, which in itself may have been instructive for Ann,
for neither artificiality nor empty or excessive structure would ever be part
of her teaching repertoire.
Ann found the required six months of teaching real children in Madi-
son’s public schools much more enjoyable. For her own classes in the Madi-
son schools, Ann rejected Trilling’s structure of having students imitate
movement: “I just remember thinking it was so boring, but I didn’t have
any models other than the fact that I myself had danced all my life as a
child. So I think my teaching of children came from what I would have
liked if I had been a child. I taught what would have appealed to me.”36

36 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

 Although Ann had a special rapport with H’Doubler, not every student
got along so well in the department. Attendance figures for H’Doubler’s
classes often settled into the single digits, and the attrition rate in freshman
and sophomore classes was high.37 At times, Ann sensed conflict between
H’Doubler and other dance faculty whose approaches diªered from her
own. One of the most awkward instances was during Ann’s junior year when
Beatrice Hellebrandt, a former student who had received graduate degrees
in music elsewhere, returned to teach in H’Doubler’s program. Hellebrandt’s
new methods of music analysis and instruction as well as her more abra-
sive personal style conflicted with H’Doubler’s approach. Once, when Ann
was showing a dance she was choreographing to H’Doubler, who frequently
would spend an hour or two watching and commenting on Ann’s work,
Hellebrandt joined in and disparaged work that H’Doubler had just
praised. “H’Doubler was always positive and Hellebrandt was being very
judgmental—I think because I wasn’t somehow or other reflecting the mod-
ern dance imprint that was beginning to creep into the department. There
was a lot of tension building up in the department,” Ann recalled.38 At the
end of the academic year, Hellebrandt oªered to resign and H’Doubler ac-
cepted immediately.
Overall, there seemed to be few shadows in Ann’s life at Wisconsin, and
as her self-assurance grew so did her personal aspirations. One evening while
at Hillel during her sophomore year she noticed an older student holding
a pipe and looking “very handsome and very sophisticated.” That man was
Lawrence (Larry) Halprin. As she remembers:

I had come to Hillel to do a dance with a little group that I had formed in
the dance department, and [Larry] was sitting there with his pipe, looking
at the dance very carefully. Then he made some intelligent remark after-
wards. He referred to people like Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey,
and I was very impressed. Because nobody at Wisconsin knew about things
like that. I was very impressed with his knowledge of the things that I was
interested in—and the pipe.39

On his side, Larry says, “I remember this pretty thing coming into the room
and she sat down in the back. She had this Grecian profile and I was rather
intrigued by that. [She] did get up and cavort around a little bit and dance
with a few other sylph-like ladies and I thought that was all very amusing
and so I went over to see if I could make contact with her.”40
That evening Larry succeeded in walking Ann home, being careful to

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 37

 avoid her boyfriend Ben Stephansky. Ann and Larry’s paths crossed only
at Hillel, so Ann began attending Hillel events more frequently. Soon Ann
became part of the same Zionist Hillel group that Larry belonged to, do-
ing folk dancing, attending lectures, and going on picnics in the surrounding
countryside. Larry’s attachment to Judaism was diªerent from Ann’s—he
attended Hillel because of his commitment to the founding of a Jewish
homeland. Everything about him was expansive, from the scale of his so-
cial activism to his range of experiences and concerns. From the start, Ann’s
and Larry’s passions coincided on a number of levels even while their tem-
peraments and sensibilities contrasted. As Ann explained, “Larry was my
first real love. We had a lot in common. We shared similar attitudes about
most everything. We enjoyed the arts. We enjoyed being in nature. So there
was just a tremendous bonding from the get go. . . . [But] we were very op-
posite personalities, which I think was important for me, because I was very
intuitive and spontaneous and he was always very intellectual.”41
Four years older than Ann, Larry was considerably more worldly. He had
arrived at the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1939 as a graduate stu-
dent researcher and teaching assistant in the department of horticulture.
He had just graduated in June with a BS degree in plant sciences from the
School of Agriculture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. While at
Cornell, Larry had worked his way through school by washing dishes in a
fraternity house, maintaining a newspaper route, and helping run a coop-
erative restaurant where he and his pals got their meals for free. He had also
been very active in fighting social problems, marching on picket lines and
traveling to Pennsylvania to help coal miners resist the mine owners’ eªorts
to break the unions. “At one point,” he recollected, “I was almost kicked
out of Cornell because of my activities in support of the labor unions. I re-
member being hauled up in front of the president of the university after
one particular escapade in which we went down to the Pennsylvania
minefields, where people were starving. So I was very obsessed with social
problems.”42
Social activism was a cherished value in the Halprin family. Larry’s fa-
ther, Samuel W. Halprin, initially owned a wholesale women’s clothing busi-
ness but later became president of Landseas, a scientific-instruments ex-
port firm that traded between the United States and what was then the
struggling Jewish population of Palestine. Rose Luria Halprin, Larry’s
mother, had begun working with the American women’s Zionist organiza-
tion Hadassah when Larry was thirteen years old. She served as its presi-
dent from 1932 to 1934 and again from 1947 to 1952. After her first term she

38 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

moved with Samuel and Larry to Jerusalem for five years to serve as a liai-
son during the construction of Hadassah’s hospital complex on Mount Sco-
pus, north of the city.
Larry’s great-grandparents and grandparents had come from the same
Eastern European roots as Ann’s. His mother’s family had come from a town
in Russia called Radoshkovitz (now in Poland). His maternal grandfather,
Philip Luria, was born in Kurenitz, a tiny town in Lithuania near the city
of Vilnius. Luria, who was permitted to work outside the Jewish ghetto,
bought and sold things. When he immigrated to America in 1881 at the age
of seventeen, he opened a business that made silver objects. Larry’s father’s
family, who came from the town of Halgrin in Germany, changed their
name to “Halprin” when they arrived at Ellis Island. The two sides of the
family were connected, and there was speculation that Larry’s mother and
father may have been second or third cousins.43
Larry’s mother and father were both born in Harlem, which was then a
Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan. Rose was born into an ardent Zion-
ist family. Her parents, Philip and Rebecca Luria, taught her Hebrew as a
child, and she became fluent in French, German, and Yiddish as well. She
attended the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Amer-
ica and studied for two years at Hunter College before she met Samuel and
dropped out to marry him at the age of eighteen. Larry proudly described
Rose’s parents as Jewish intellectuals: “They were literate and read the Yid-
dish newspapers and they attended the Yiddish theater. They were active
Zionists as well.”44
Although Samuel never attended college, he was a high school graduate,
which was a respectable level of education for the time. Samuel’s first busi-
ness, selling women’s clothing wholesale, was very successful, and at the age
of thirty-five he retired as a millionaire. He decided to take the family, in-
cluding twelve-year-old Larry and his five-year-old sister, Ruth, on a year-
long tour of Europe. The family intended to hire a governess to maintain
the children’s schooling while they traveled, but twenty-year-old Sydney,
one of Larry’s maternal uncles who was as close as a brother, oªered his
services instead. He still recalled that trip vividly, at the age of ninety-two:

In 1928 I learned that my brother-in-law, Larry’s father, was selling his

business. This was before the Great Depression. He and his wife (my
sister) were taking a great trip abroad, and they were going to do it in
style. There was no air travel in those days, so they were booking first-
class accommodations on a great steamer. I learned that they were plan-

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 39

 ning to take a governess with them . . . a kind of person who could keep
[the children] up-to-date in their studies. When I heard about this, I
couldn’t believe that I was not the right person for that job!45

Uncle Sydney got the job, after persuading his family and taking a leave
from the City College of New York, where he was in his senior year. In De-
cember 1928 he set sail with the Halprin family on The Europa. “Oh, it was
black tie every night,” Sydney remembered. “It was first-class all the way.
My sister had a steamer trunk [filled with clothes]. She never would be
caught dead in a dress that she had worn the day before.”
Once they arrived in Europe, they began sightseeing, spending time in
the major cities, including a month in Paris. Samuel and Rose insisted that
the children were Sydney’s responsibility during the day. Dispensing with
any traditional ideas about going through lesson plans in their hotel room,
Sydney took them out to explore the city. Indirectly he gave young Larry
an expansive sense of the environment as educator, of how the architecture
and landscape of a city could be one’s teacher, of how the stories of a cul-
ture could be written on the buildings and in the streets and walkways. One
day Sydney decided to take the children to Versailles, and they spent the
whole day wandering through the gardens and rooms of the palace. “I had
to carry Ruth on my shoulders through the Hall of Mirrors,” he recalled.
“But the place was empty, and Larry was fascinated by everything that he
saw. He wanted to move slowly through all of it to absorb it.”
As they toured Paris on foot, Sydney noted that Larry kept “staring and
looking at the city.” Larry was “very easy to travel with as a young boy, not
complaining . . . [but] looking, looking, looking.” After their ship visited
Naples, Sydney bought Larry some pads of drawing paper and gouache,
and Larry began drawing everything he was seeing. It was then that Syd-
ney became aware of Larry’s artistic gift. They journeyed through Italy to
Egypt and then to Palestine where, because of Rose’s activity in Hadassah
and Zionist aªairs, they planned to stay for four months. Larry amused
himself on the long train ride by looking out the window and drawing the
endless desert with great interest. Under Sydney’s tutelage, he was begin-
ning to discover that his identity and the geography he found himself in
could be linked.
The house the Halprins rented in Jerusalem was next door to several in-
teresting families including that of the future Israeli political leader and ar-
chaeologist Yigal Yadin, who was Larry’s age. The two became inseparable

40 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

friends, going to school together and preparing for their bar mitzvahs, which
they both had in Palestine that summer. It was an experience that would
live on in Larry’s imagination:

All of this was just a parade of fantasies, like from the Arabian Nights, in
front of me at times. I fell in love for the first time, I can remember, with
a beautiful Israeli girl. My family traveled all over the country. We went
to Tel Aviv, where we saw some remarkable floats in a festival of Purim.
Then we went up north and saw our first kibbutz. It all rubbed oª on me
in a profound way, and I’m sure that it has aªected me for the rest of my
life because it was so pure and so wonderful and without flaw. It was like
I was in the middle of a living museum, a living archaeological museum,
a museum without walls.46

Then suddenly the “parade of fantasies” ended. On October 29, 1929,

as the Halprin family was returning to the United States on the steamer
Acquatania, their holiday collapsed. With the crash of the New York Stock
Exchange, all of Samuel’s profits, which he had invested in the stock mar-
ket, were wiped out. “On the way there my father was a millionaire; when
we got oª [the ship] my father was a pauper,” Larry recollected. “The Crash
happened and my father lost everything.”47 The family returned to Brook-
lyn, where Larry attended a leading local prep school, the Polytechnic Coun-
try Day School for Boys. Scraping together the tuition was di‹cult, but
for the Halprins young Larry’s education was the top priority. He remem-
bers it as a great high school, and despite being one of only about twenty
Jewish boys at the school, he didn’t feel any religious bias. “I’ve never had
a problem with anti-Semitism,” he says. “My roommate once said some-
thing about Jews in general, and I swung on him, and he looked at me and
said, ‘Larry, for Christ’s sake!’ I was a Jewish WASP. I had what was either
the good or bad fortune of being a top-notch athlete, so I was asked to be-
long to fraternities where no other Jew had ever even walked in the door.”
The summer Larry graduated from prep school he left for Palestine, where
he lived from 1933 to 1936. (His parents and sister moved to Jerusalem in
1935.) As he describes it: “I was going back to a place that I loved. I was
looking for adventure. I worked in the building trade; I worked in gardens;
I worked in a factory extracting potash from the Dead Sea. I worked in
orange groves.” He also helped found what would become Kibbutz Ein
Hashofet, near Haifa, where he lived for several months, but most of the
time he was on the move, eluding the British authorities because his two-

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 41

 month visitor’s visa had long since expired. He remembers the cultural life
in Palestine in particular as “intense”: “There was folk dance every night.
We’d do the hora. I lived with the Arabs and I learned Arabic and Arabic
dances. I painted with an art group there.” Not surprisingly, Larry was also
very involved with Zionist activism: “I remember my mother and father
were a little nervous about me going oª, so they made me promise to come
[back to the United States] and attend college.”
Larry decided he would return to Palestine as soon as possible and live
on a kibbutz, because he loved the life and the ideals he had seen there.
First, however, he planned to gain useful skills by studying at Cornell’s re-
puted agricultural school. Uncle Sydney, who had recently graduated from
Harvard Law School and was practicing as an attorney in New York, served
as Larry’s guardian as he worked his way through college, receiving no finan-
cial support from his parents. While at Cornell, Larry pursued a full range
of interests—becoming the championship pitcher on the varsity baseball
team and doing research in biology, particularly about how plants adapted
to natural environments. He also continued painting and joined Hillel,
through which he was active in Zionist causes. “All Jewish kids in those
days had social consciences,” he recalled, noting that the apartment house
he lived in at Cornell had “Zionists on the top floor, Trotskeyites on the
second, and socialists and law [majors] on the first.”48
In 1939, just as Larry was completing his degree at Cornell, one of his
professors told him that a plant researcher at the University of Wisconsin
needed help from someone who knew the kinds of things Larry had just
been studying. So in the fall of 1939 he arrived in Madison prepared to pur-
sue a Ph.D. in plant physiology, researching the influence of light on plants
and their fruiting habits—and then return to Palestine. Decades later, Larry
still wondered why he never did return to live on a kibbutz: “I’ve never
worked that out in my head. It’s a conflict and an inconsistency that I ad-
mit to,” although he pointed out that the war intervened. Still, as he put
it, “I’m quite introverted actually. I’m shy on a certain level. . . . And I’m
not sure how I would have done. If I had gone back and worked in the kib-
butz and lived there, I’m not sure how I would have survived.”49

Within a few months of their meeting, Larry and Ann were sweethearts.
In December of 1939, she went home with him to New York to meet his
parents, who had returned to the United States when war loomed in Eu-
rope. Ann ostensibly traveled to New York to take a Christmas dance course,

42 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

but only Hanya Holm was teaching. Ann had never been drawn to Holm’s
movement at Bennington, and after just one day of the workshop she told
Holm she was not comfortable in the class. Holm was very understanding
and let her withdraw. For the next two weeks Ann sampled classes at other
dance studios in New York. She slept on the floor of the Halprins’ apart-
ment on East Seventy-fourth Street, between Second and Third Avenue.
When Ann and Larry returned to Wisconsin for the winter semester, they
moved in together, living in a room they rented in a professor’s house. Larry
took an avid interest in Ann’s dancing, and on one occasion he obligingly
played the corpse in a performance of Lynchtown, a famous anti-racism
dance that Charles Weidman, the former partner of Doris Humphrey, staged
on campus with student dancers. Soon after that, a real corpse prompted
a far less aesthetic response from him: accompanying Ann to one of her
anatomy classes where cadavers were being dissected, Larry promptly
passed out.
During the summer of 1940, Larry spent time in Door County, in the
northern Wisconsin lake country, where he tended experimental plots of
cherry trees and other plants for the university’s department of plant phys-
iology and botany. “I had been away all summer running these horticul-
ture experiments, and it was after I came back that I realized that three
months away from [Ann] was a disaster,” he later said.50 Soon after he re-
turned to Madison, Larry convinced Ann to take an evening hike with him
to see the view from a tall structure on a steep hill that was a ski slope in
the winter, overlooking Lake Monona. “I think we had been to the movies
or something and I induced her to walk up to the top of this tower, and
up on the top there was a small space, and so I had her trapped. I induced
her to allow me my blandishments,” Larry recalled. “I think it was at that
moment that we finally realized this was more than a flirtation. She agreed
to marry me.”51
Larry’s father and mother soon let it be known to the rest of the family
“that there was this girl in Wisconsin who was very artistic and very nice,
from a good family, a Jewish girl, that Larry was going to marry—and that
he was madly in love,” Sydney said. “I had not met her so I went out to
Winnetka, and we became very friendly right away.”
Ann and Larry were married on September 19, 1940, in the living room
of the Schumans’ Winnetka home. It was a small wedding, with just the im-
mediate families and without any dancing. Because it was a traditional Jew-
ish ceremony, the couple stood beneath a chuppah (wedding canopy) set up
in front of a huge bay window that looked out over an expansive lawn and

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 43

 an adjacent, privately owned golf course. Rabbi Kadushin, who had come
from Madison, read the marriage vows. At the end Larry smashed the tra-
ditional wineglass with his foot—its shards a symbol of the infinite years of
happiness the young couple would, it was hoped, enjoy together. “They were
so much alike,” Ann’s childhood friend Miriam Raymer (Bennett), who at-
tended the wedding, recalled. “They even looked alike then. They were tall
and slim with red curly hair. They were both arty, even in those days.”52
The Schuman and Halprin families got along well together, particularly
after Samuel Halprin and Isadore Schuman realized they knew each other.
“At the wedding, Sam and my father looked at each other and said, ‘Don’t
we know each other?’” Ann remembered. “It turned out that my father had
sold to Larry’s father when he used to go on the road as a salesman.”53 That
broke the ice.
There was no honeymoon; Ann and Larry returned immediately to Madi-
son. There is a photo of Ann and Larry taken in Madison a few weeks af-
ter the wedding. They stand gazing at each other in the midst of a meadow
of knee-high grasses, each with one arm locked behind the other’s waist.
Larry, who wears crisp white pants and a white short-sleeved shirt, stands
upright as Ann, in a full skirt, peasant blouse, and kerchief knotted over
her hair, playfully leans away from him, her left arm bent at the elbow as
if she were trying to coax him into an impromptu dance. In this image Larry,
serious, looking with furrowed brow at a whimsically moving Ann, seems
to anchor her as she prepares to take flight.

Larry and Ann resumed their routine life as students, taking weekend trips
around the Wisconsin countryside in an old car they had recently acquired.
Sometimes they went to Door County, where they visited H’Doubler and
her husband, Wayne Claxton, who had a weekend home there, just five miles
from the university’s agricultural plots. Larry got on well with H’Doubler
and particularly Claxton, who was an artist and an architect. H’Doubler
“was very emphatic about dance being part of biology and anatomy, and . . .
an important part of life,” Larry remembered. “She was very helpful to Ann,
I knew that. It was evident immediately that the relationship between
H’Doubler and Ann was very special. She had a very strong feeling, I think,
that Ann was going to be a great artist.”54
One afternoon Ann suggested the two of them go out to Spring Green,
about thirty miles west of Madison, to see Taliesin, the home and studios
of Frank Lloyd Wright. “Who the hell is that?” Larry asked.55 Larry had

44 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

never heard of Wright, the pre-eminent American architect, who by 1940
had created some of his most celebrated structures, including Fallingwater
in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, and the Johnson Building in Racine, Wiscon-
sin. Ann had heard about Wright from H’Doubler, whose architect hus-
band had likely visited Taliesen, and she may also have heard about him
from Rabbi Kadushin. Since the mid-1930s, Kadushin and his wife, Pro-
fessor Evelyn Kadushin, had preached to and befriended the apprentice ar-
chitects and designers at Taliesen, which was regarded as an outstanding
example of Wright’s “organic architecture,” a unified approach to the world
akin to Kadushin’s “organic thinking.”56 Later, angered by Wright’s sym-
pathy for Hitler and the Nazis, the Kadushins would break oª relations
with Wright and never speak with him again.
For the young horticulture student and dancer, the afternoon’s visit proved
a life-changing event. By 1940 Wright had purchased all of the six-hundred-
acre valley land originally owned by his grandparents and their descendants.
He named this property Taliesin, a Welsh word that translates as “shining”
or “radiant brow,” and he described the buildings he constructed there as
wrapping around the brow of the hill. Testing new ideas about architec-
ture at Taliesen, Wright explored compressing and expanding space to lend
a quality of tension and release to his designs, while always respecting the
natural beauty of the materials. In 1932, with his third wife, Olgivanna Lloyd
Wright, he had begun the Taliesin Fellowship program, an arrangement in
which young men and women lived with the Wrights at Taliesen and par-
ticipated in every aspect of the life there, working on the buildings, in the
fields and kitchens, on drawings and projects, and taking part in evening
social events. To Larry it must have looked like an American kibbutz, with
design rather than agriculture as its product.
“I’ll never forget walking in and there was a banner headline across the
lintel of Wright’s studio. It said, ‘What a man does, that he is,’” Larry re-
membered. “And then there was another one somewhere that said, ‘Archi-
tecture is the mother art.’ . . . I walked through the drafting room and by
the end of two or three hours of being there, I said, ‘Boy, this is what I re-
ally want to do.’ It was just as simple as that.”57
After spending the day at Taliesen, staying into the evening to attend a
concert in the Wright-designed theater there, Larry and Ann drove home.
That night, instead of studying, Larry raced to the main library on cam-
pus and looked up architecture. He found a short bookcase with what few
books there were on that topic at the time. Under the heading “Landscape
Architecture,” he came across three books, one of them a classic by Christo-

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 45

 pher Tunnard on landscape architecture and the design of the environment
that detailed how urban design should work at making cities wonderful
places. “I thought, ‘My God!’ The bells starting ringing and I said, ‘This is
really what I want to do.’”58
The next day Larry found a listing for a small program in landscape ar-
chitecture in the campus directory. He located a professor there and an-
nounced his desire to be in the department, explaining his sudden passion
but also its link to his expertise in plants and design. The following day
Larry was admitted to the department. Three weeks later, Larry was called
into the professor’s o‹ce. “You’re a duck in water,” he told the startled Larry.
“We’ve gotten you a scholarship to Harvard.”
Larry had only a few months left at Wisconsin, but Ann still had an-
other year of school to complete. They discussed what to do. Ann was de-
termined to be a dancer, but all of the models she knew—Graham,
Humphrey, Holm—had put their careers before marriage. “I’d had a very
traditional upbringing,” she explained, “and marriage meant the woman
stayed in the home and was domestic and the man went to work. That was
my only model.”59 But here she was married at twenty, with her own ca-
reer not yet started and with a new husband who was about to begin again
as a student, unable to support her.
Somehow, intuitively at first, the couple made a decision that put in place
the relationship between their lives as artists and their lives together that
would remain for all the years to come. Each recognized the other’s need
for a creative life outside of the marriage. Perhaps because he came from a
family with a model of a dynamic woman who worked outside the home,
and also because he was an artist, Larry accepted Ann’s commitment to her
career and her art, as well as him. “Dance was so much a part of me that
when he began to know me he knew me from the point of view as a dancer
and somebody who was very serious and dedicated about my work. He was
interested in it, so it didn’t feel like there was any conflict. I felt there would
be tremendous support and encouragement,” Ann said of her realization
that she could have both marriage and her life in dance.60
As things happened, however, the first critical test of support was Ann’s
for Larry. “The realistic expectation in those days was that I was supposed
to support the family,” Larry commented years later. “The idea that I would
continue school was quite revolutionary.” Even more unusual was that Larry
would change his field and start school again in a whole new discipline.
“That she encouraged me to change fields was, of course, the best thing
she ever did,” he said.61

46 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

 Larry graduated from the University of Wisconsin in May 1941 with an
MS degree in horticulture. He again spent the summer living in Door
County and tending the university’s horticulture experiments. This time,
however, Ann lived with him, and the two spent a great deal of time visit-
ing with H’Doubler and Claxton there. At the summer’s end Larry left to
begin Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
Ann, who now went by the name Ann Schuman Halprin, continued her
studies in the dance department at Wisconsin, but now, with the change
in Larry’s plans, her short-range dance career goals had suddenly shifted
from performing to teaching. She rented an apartment with another stu-
dent, and they lived downstairs from Lavinia Nielsen, a former member of
the Jooss Ballet in Germany who had begun teaching in the dance depart-
ment the previous year. Nielsen became close friends with Ann. Their friend-
ship continued the rest of their lives, and when Nielsen married fellow Jooss
dancer Lucas Hoving, he became part of that circle as well.
As her final project for the dance major, Ann submitted her senior the-
sis on May 11, 1942. This hundred-page, hand-printed treatise details the
development of Jewish dance from biblical times to the present. Titled “He-
brews: A Dancing People,” this passionate account, seemingly written in a
fluid outpouring with almost no corrections, begins with dances as early as
2000 b.c.e. and concludes with a listing of contemporary Jewish dance
figures, including Lincoln Kirstein, Andre Levinson, and Miriam Rambert.
Its rousing final chapter carries an unmistakably Zionist call for “the settle-
ment of a homeland for the establishment of a Jewish national center
whereby the Jewish peoples can become a positive force in the world.” Mod-
ern Jewish dance, she claims, “has great possibilities granted a land and
freedom. This dance of the Jews should make significant contributions to
the history of the dance of the world and to the history of human civiliza-
tion.”62 This impassioned document neatly brings together all of the crit-
ical influences on Ann at Wisconsin—dance, Judaism, and, through Larry,
Zionism.
Ann also presented a graduation concert of her own choreography in the
main University of Wisconsin theater. Ruth Hatfield, a young dancer from
Minneapolis who was in the audience, remembered, “Ann was very strong
at that point. Her concert was based on the diªerent stages in the life of a
woman. It was like a biography.”63 Hatfield had been directed to see Ann’s
work by Gertrude Lippincott, a leading Minneapolis dance teacher who
had seen Ann perform at one of the Bennington summer sessions.
Immediately after taking her last final, Ann left Madison, skipping her

THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE 47

 graduation because she was so eager to join Larry in Cambridge. The de-
tour that four years earlier had led Ann to the University of Wisconsin
had proved fortuitous. She now had the skills not only to dance but to
teach dance, and thus earn a livelihood. More critically, however, through
H’Doubler’s classes she had discovered that one arrived at creative movement
by attending to the biological logic of the body in motion. Embedded in this
logic was a route to extraordinary freedom. Later this would be called im-
provisation, but H’Doubler didn’t use that term, preferring instead that her
students think of it as movement discovery. “Modern dance is a concept—
a point of view and not a prescribed system,” H’Doubler observed in an ar-
ticle published not long after Ann graduated. H’Doubler explained that
“compositional form is no longer dependent on musical forms. Today dance
is free to choose for its accompaniment from a variety of possibilities—
speech, song, sound eªects as well as music.” She added, “The emphasis
today is to know and experience dance as a creative art experience, expressing
and communicating the dancer’s emotional reactions to his impressions, as
he evaluates them. The technical necessity is to train the body to become
a strong, flexible, sensitive and well-coordinated instrument capable of re-
sponding to the exigencies of the expressive mind.”64
H’Doubler’s teachings had remade Ann’s conception of where invention
in dance begins. Ann would bring her own emphasis to H’Doubler’s foun-
dation, extending a revolutionary model of dance education that would help
form the basis for the next generation’s invention of postmodern dance.
While the larger field of American dance built a divide between dance edu-
cation and dance for the stage, Ann set about bridging that binary and
demonstrating that radical pedagogy would be the springboard for the next
wave of invention in dance.
In her four years at the University of Wisconsin, Ann had found three
of the most critically influential people in her life—Margaret H’Doubler,
Max Kadushin, and Lawrence Halprin. The first had given her a model for
dance as an arena for self-discovery, the second had helped her find out
who that self was, and the third was about to share with her a mutual ex-
ploration of how aesthetic, visionary, and social practices could be com-
bined and made palpable, in space.

48 THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

 THREE

The Bauhaus and the

Settlement House
1942– 1945

Young people came . . . not to design correct lamps, but to participate

in a community that wanted to build a new man in a new environment
and to liberate the creative spontaneity in everybody.
walter gropius
commenting on the original Bauhaus Manifesto

larry’s enrollment at harvard , which had initially looked like such

a radical career leap, soon assumed the contours of an inevitable choice,
both for him and, just as important, for Ann. From this point forward,
their art, as well as their lives, became intertwined. Arriving in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in the fall of 1941, Larry walked into the charged center of
a displaced European culture in the process of being transplanted to the
United States. Although Ann remained in Madison until the following sum-
mer, finishing her degree, they were in frequent communication as Larry
shared the excitement of the German design avant-garde he was discover-
ing. “It was one of those wonderful periods in a school’s life when the essence
and the core of creativity is present,” he later said. “Not only were the pro-
fessors wonderful, but I was in a class with a remarkable group of people:
Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Paul Rudolph, some
of the great architects of our time, were all classmates. I was surrounded by
students who were as excited about architecture as I was and through whom
I spent a remarkable period as an apprentice.”1
As the situation in Europe worsened in the late 1930s, scores of writers and
visual artists fled to America, including Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Piet Mon-
drian, Hans Hofmann, George Grosz, Hans Richter, and many designers

49
 and architects from the Bauhaus, which had been closed by the Nazis in
1933. Among the prominent “Bauhauslers” were Josef and Anni Albers, László
Moholy-Nagy, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger,
Herbert Bayer, and the director and mastermind of the Bauhaus from its 1919
inception in Weimar Germany, the distinguished architect Walter Gropius.
Gropius had arrived at Harvard in the spring of 1937, when he accepted
the university’s invitation to chair the architecture department. By the time
Larry arrived with a scholarship in landscape architecture, Gropius’s influence
extended to all the departments in the School of Design. Every aspect of the
program at Harvard—the students, the classes, and particularly the discovery
of Gropius—delighted Larry. He had come wanting to study with the lead-
ing landscape architect of the time, Christopher Tunnard, whose book had
captivated Larry when he discovered it at the library in Madison. Now, how-
ever, he realized that Tunnard’s vision of interrelated nature and society fit
into a much larger portrait of culture and community pioneered by Gropius.
In his book Gardens in the Modern Landscape, Tunnard characterizes con-
temporary garden design as “the last stronghold of Romanticism,” claiming
it is time to “face the task of creating a new landscape for the 20th century.”
Hinting at connections between social responsibility and design, Tunnard’s
book, which was published in 1938, in time for him to have known about
the Bauhaus, reads more as a call for change than an actual blueprint. “I be-
lieve if we can gain a clearer picture of what a garden is, or should be, we
shall be better equipped to evolve a technique of planning which will play
a part in satisfying the complex needs of modern society,” Tunnard writes.

The fact that garden making is in part a science does not free it from the
duty of performing an aesthetic function. It can no more be turned over
to the horticulturist than architecture to an engineer. That it has a place
beside the other arts is more than clear from a study of the past and that
it still has a mission to fulfill. We need gardens for rest, recreation and
aesthetic pleasure. How then can we neglect the art that makes [people]
rational, economical, restful and comprehensible?2

Tunnard’s call is for revisiting nature as an important moral and emo-

tional force in citizens’ lives. He redefines the landscape designer as an artist,
one who works with colors and textures of living materials. For Larry, this
notion of horticulture as an important aesthetic and cultural practice sug-
gested how he might knit together the disparate parts of his intellectual life
and marry romanticism to practicality. With the war intensifying, how-

50 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

ever, Tunnard, a Canadian citizen, left Harvard within a year of Larry’s ar-
rival to join the Canadian army.
Except for Tunnard, the department of landscape architecture did not have
any distinguished landscape design specialists. So Larry approached Gropius
and asked him for personal criticism of his work. Often Gropius told Larry,
“Well, I can tell you what I think, but don’t think that I know much about
the landscape.”3 Larry also sought out comments from the architect Marcel
Breuer, who also taught at Harvard. “I spent as much time or more study-
ing architecture as I did landscape because there were so many more people
in that department,” Larry explained. “The big influence on me was really
the architecture department, not the landscape school.” Moholy-Nagy also
occasionally lectured in Larry’s classes: “On an American level, it was like
being at the Bauhaus,” Larry claimed.
Reportedly, Gropius’s and Breuer’s styles of oªering comments to stu-
dents diªered significantly, so students often liked to hear from both men
to get a sense of their progress. “Gropius was always in iron control of him-
self,” his biographer Isaacs reported. “Sometimes his own perplexity was
revealed by his finger-twisting, a curling of his right eyebrow, and an even
more careful search for appropriate words. A balance was provided by
Breuer’s eªervescence. He sometimes gave an artistic, light approach that,
teamed with Gropius’s fundamental and comprehensive one, oªered the
students an unforgettable experience.”4
Gropius saw the School of Design as reflecting a conceptual, not just
an administrative, unity. Even within classroom assignments, he would
“encourage collaborative eªorts, perhaps of two architects with a city plan-
ner and a landscape architect, selected freely by the students themselves.”5
An essential premise of Gropius’s work at the Bauhaus had been to unify
the practical arts—sculpture, painting, and crafts—under architecture and
to erase the distinction between fine and applied arts, between the role of
artist and craftsman. This was the basis for what Gropius called a “school
that was the servant of the workshop.”6 Larry and Ann would eventually
take this model of a fused production and educational environment into
their respective fields and make the idea of a workshop, both in title and
practice, central to their working processes. They were excited by the crit-
ical role of the human dimension in design, which was central to Gropius’s
concept. “The satisfaction of the human soul is just as important as the
material,” Gropius wrote when he began the Harvard program in 1937. “The
intellectual achievement of a new spatial vision means more than structural
economy and functional perfection.”7

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 51

 In the curriculum, this vision began with a general design course, mod-
eled after one taught by Paul Klee at the Bauhaus. Larry called it the most
significant class he ever took. As he explained, “The Bauhaus always started
with a general course in design, which was painting and sculpture, and it
wasn’t the history of it, it was doing it—making drawings, building sculp-
ture, and stuª like that. And it took me a great leap to the point where I
understood the relationship of all the arts together. It was like somebody
had opened a curtain and there was this great world of fantasy in front of
me, with dancers and painters and set designers and music. That’s what I
saw all of a sudden. Up until then, on some level, I had been starved.”8
Throughout his first year at Harvard, Larry wrote regularly to Ann, re-
porting on his growing pleasure at having the disparate parts of his artis-
tic, academic, and ethical life coalesce.

When Ann arrived in Cambridge, she walked into a small studio apart-
ment that Larry had rented on Harvard Square. He had begun outfitting
it with a few choice pieces of Bauhaus furniture, including a chair designed
by Mies van der Rohe and a stool and table designed by Alvar Aalto. The
rest of the furniture was makeshift student pieces, including a bed that dou-
bled as the only couch and a bookcase made of boards sitting on bricks.
The intellectual life that Ann walked into, by contrast, was extraordi-
narily elegant, stimulating, and rich. Larry had become friends with
Gropius, and soon after Ann’s arrival Gropius and his wife, Ise, invited the
couple to dinner. The Gropius house, now a landmark of early modernist
architecture, was startling in its spare, white, rectangular simplicity. Built
by Gropius immediately after his arrival in the United States and completed
in the fall of 1938, the house was located in the Boston suburb of Lincoln.
It was situated atop a rise and linked to its surroundings by a projecting en-
trance, terrace, screen porch, and vine-covered trellises. Reading a descrip-
tion of the Gropius’s house, one can easily see why its flat-roofed novelty
and austere design prompted the Federal Housing Authority to refuse to
provide mortgage insurance, claiming that its design was unsuitable in a
neighborhood of vintage colonial estates. It is equally easy to understand
how the design dazzled the young Halprins:

From within, large windows frame the landscape and expand the mod-
est interior spaces. The subdued color scheme—throughout the house,
a palette of whites, grays and earth tones sparked by occasional red

52 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

 highlights—defers to the out of doors and modulates with the fluctua-
tions of exterior light. The Gropiuses found that the house provided ideal
growing conditions for houseplants, which became central to the decorat-
ing scheme, along with stones, shells, and branches. The house that is sup-
posed to express reason in pure form has turned out to personify poetry
as well.9

Ann was astounded not only by the house and its impressive modern art
collection but also by the beauty of Ise Gropius. “I was very shy but very
excited because all of this was so diªerent from my background with
H’Doubler. I felt I was really now in a community of artists,” she later said.10
At first Ann hadn’t known who any of these Bauhaus artists were. She felt
like “a hick from the Midwest” with her University of Wisconsin back-
ground in the midst of the artistic Harvard elite. Occasionally, she sat in
on some of Larry’s classes, including the general design seminar. She found
the discussion of space in this class particularly stimulating to her own ideas
about choreographic space: “It was an approach to dance and art that was
totally new for me. My approach to dance at Wisconsin had been on a very
scientific level because H’Doubler was a biologist, she wasn’t a dancer. I
didn’t have any conception of the total scope of dance in relationship to
theater, to space, and to architecture and all the other arts. . . . It was like
looking at the whole universe and seeing dance in the perspective of a much
broader context.”11
As soon as she arrived in Cambridge, Ann contacted Winsor School, the
most elite private school in town, to inquire if they needed a dance teacher.
The former head of the PE program at Ann’s old alma mater, New Trier
High School, had recently been hired as the athletics director for Winsor.
She not only remembered Ann, she hired her. “I was the first Jewish per-
son ever to set foot in the school,” Ann recalled. “I was teaching the children
of the Boston Brahmins, the Cabots and the Lodges. The kids were ex-
ceptional. But I remember feeling very uncomfortable and out of place.”12
For the next two years, Ann taught three or four days a week at the Win-
sor school, riding her bike, the Halprins’ only form of transportation, from
their little apartment, across town, and up the hill to the school:

It was an all-girls’ school and they just did remarkably creative work, both
in terms of their movement skills and their writing skills. I used writing,
their poetry, and their stories, and the way they were able to make connec-
tions between what they were studying in their classrooms and bring that

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 53

 into their dances was just amazing—their sense of form and structure,
their ability to work together and create dances as a team. They were the
most superior group of kids I have ever worked with.

For Ann, the ease of teaching these girls translated into a heightened
emphasis on creativity: “I was able to do much more with the creative
process, and I was able to actually present more dance skills. The eighth
graders were doing the same kind of movement skills that I would give to
any adult class. I had them create their own dances and perform them for
each other.” In the program notes for a demonstration of student work on
March 24, 1943, Ann explained that each of the nine dances was developed
through rhythmic movement exercises that then suggested “a literal idea, a
specific emotion, or a particular feeling state.” This statement reveals much
about what Ann valued most in her dance classroom. From the time she was
a young child, her pleasure had always been creating new paths of personal
expression.
Ann took care to mark the studio as a special space of transformation be-
fore her students even entered the room. She kept the children waiting out-
side until it was time for class to start. Then, each week she asked a diªer-
ent child to lead the others into the dancing room. “I made a very definite
demarcation between outside and the dance space,” she explained. “So the
child who was the leader would set the movement and the floor pattern
and all the rest of the children would be followers. It was like a ritual, and
they would know the week before so they would be prepared.”
If Ann had any illusions that teaching dance would always be this easy,
she had only to look across town to the community of South End Boston,
where she taught weekly dance classes in the South End Settlement House.
Boston was home to five large settlement houses that had been opened in
the 1890s in low-income immigrant communities. Essentially neighborhood
welfare institutions, the settlement houses provided community services,
classes, lending libraries, playgrounds, and educational programs for the ur-
ban poor. Ann found the settlement house the most challenging teaching
situation she would ever encounter.

I remember coaching and helping them with basketball and stuª like
that. I was just doing what was needed, but the dance classes that I
taught—their attention span and their inability to focus—were very
challenging. They came from extremely disturbed homes—alcoholic,
violent. And I found this a very challenging and important experience

54 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

 because I realized for the first time what a protected environment I had
been teaching in. I saw that there were kids that were the result of social
disorder, and you saw it in their bodies and their minds. You saw it in
their inability to express themselves in any other way than this constant
chaos and frenzy and uproar. It was so disturbing to me.13

For a young dance teacher, it was an intense environment in which to dis-

cover the social uses of art, and for Ann it was eye-opening:

They would bring their babies and kid sisters because they would be
baby-sitting, because their parents were working. I remember one little
black girl who couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and she was
baby-sitting her little sister who couldn’t have been more than two and
a half. She was crawling all over the floor, and I remember she peed and
made a big puddle. Her sister came over and whacked her across the face
and then took her body and mopped up her pee with her body. I just
stood there watching this, just appalled that she would have hit her for
that and the humiliation of taking the kid and using her for a mop.

Ann was determined not only to teach dance but to deal with social is-
sues. She may have at times seen teaching at the settlement house as “a hor-
rendous experience,” but she stuck with it for the full two years she was in
Cambridge. “I had committed myself to something and I had to find a way
to meet these requirements,” she later said. “What I began to discover was
that these children were a product of their environment and I had to create
a diªerent kind of environment for them to work in. They were so needy.”
Remembering her own di‹culties with freedom and structure in class
when she was a child, Ann decided that the cure for the chaos of her class-
room with the settlement kids was a diªerent kind of freedom. She exper-
imented with very concrete methods in her assignments. For example, one
day she brought in a pile of cardboard cartons and set up a series of sim-
ple interactions between the kids and the boxes. First, she had the children
do things in relation to the cartons, such as jump over them. Then paint
them. Then move the painted boxes, depending on their colors, to diªer-
ent points in the room. “I started using very concrete techniques that would
give them very clear definition and still promote movement activity,” Ann
explained. Next, she had the students gesture as if they were putting all of
their angry feelings—the pushing, the shoving, and the banging into each
other—into the boxes.

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 55

 The demands of how to create structure and at the same time provide a
climate that fostered the pleasures of unfettered dancing led her to other
solutions that avoided labeling any behavior or action as “bad” or “wrong.”
She came to see the time the settlement house children had with her and
with dance as “an oasis for them in their lives.” “I remember being tough,
but I avoided scolding them. I would handle them by saying, ‘There are
times when we move and the movement just takes over and we have no
control of what we do. Now when I see that happening and when I think
that somebody might get hurt, there’s going to be a special place in this
room where you can go and do something else until your body is able to
help you.’”
“Uh-oh, your body needs some help,” Ann would say when somebody
got knocked down and started screaming. And she would direct the wild
child to a section of the room she had outfitted with crayons and paper.
The child had to stay there until Ann checked in and determined that his
or her body was now back in control. Intuitively, Ann was reading back
past the unruly child’s actions to the emotional source that spoke through
the uncontrolled movement. “They had so much hurt that it was coming
out in this bombastic movement. How can you scold a kid for having all
this anger because she comes from a really dysfunctional environment?”
Years later when she reflected on this early teaching experience, she un-
derlined what the children had taught her. “I just think that [these] children
sensitized me to the broader picture of life. I discovered you don’t look at
a child just when they come to dancing class. You really need to look at the
child as a whole person. You really need to know what makes them tick,
what creates the movements that they create. And this started for me, very
poignantly, at the settlement house.”
The desire to know more about the inner workings of her dancers may
have started for Ann at the settlement house, but it did not end there. She
began probing, first with the children, then with herself, and finally with other
adults, not just what the intended meanings of the specific gestures were,
but what the unanticipated patterns of their actions or poses might suggest
when looked at from the outside vantage point of the audience. In particular,
she was interested in how individual choices might suddenly look differ-
ent if grouped together—more like a movement paragraph than a sentence.
One of the most popular dances she evolved in this way with her children’s
classes came to be called “The Cathy Dance.” For years she repeated it when-
ever she taught children. The Cathy Dance emerged out of a basic, struc-
tured improvisation Ann did in class one day:

56 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

 I had them spin and then I’d say “Stop!” And then: “Now move out of
your frozen position.” One time this one little girl froze and everybody
else happened to be in a frozen position as if they were pointing towards
her. So when I said, “Now just move from where you are,” they all started
making fun of her and they made her into a victim. They taunted her.
This just came out accidentally, and then she suddenly shouted out, “Stop
it!” and she said, “I turn you all into toads.” So she became the bully and
they became the victims. And they all became toads. “Now I turn you
into this . . . Now I turn you into that . . . ” The only thing I ever said in
that whole dance was, “Well, Cathy, how would you like this dance to
end?” And she just put her nose in the air and said, “And don’t ever do
that to me again!” and she walked out of the room.

The Cathy Dance became so popular that Ann had to do it again and again
until everyone had a chance to be Cathy. What delighted her about the
Cathy Dance was how true it was to the internal socialization process that
all the children were experiencing at that time in their lives. They described
a troubling problem and then, through movement improvisation, they un-
covered a creative way to essentially rewind the scene and replay it with just
the right witty comeback.
Ann rarely spoke with Larry about her teaching experiences at either the
settlement house or Winsor. She had rented a small studio where on her
days oª she worked on her own choreography, creating a series of solos she
eventually performed in a concert attended by several design students and
faculty members from the Harvard program. The strongest link between
Ann’s daily experiences as a children’s dance teacher and the stories of his
Harvard classes Larry shared with her was a growing mutual awareness that
the way in which a subject is taught can be as critical an educational expe-
rience as the subject matter itself.
This period in Boston confirmed for Ann that a revolution in design or
art or dance is by necessity linked to a revolution in pedagogy. Through
Larry’s immersion in the School of Design program and her own atten-
dance at public lectures, social gatherings, classes, and other events, she ab-
sorbed the spirit and challenge of Gropius’s approach to teaching design.
Ann was working in dance education and had been primed by H’Doubler
to think of dance pedagogically, so it was logical that her absorption of the
Bauhaus ideals and aesthetic was most vivid as a new educational model.
Indeed, Gropius himself envisioned the Bauhaus fundamentally as an ed-
ucational system— one that linked aesthetic production and social change.

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 57

 Gropius’s establishment of the Bauhaus curriculum at Harvard coincided
with the U.S. government’s first big and direct investment in culture as de-
mocracy. As part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the country
embarked on a massive employment relief program for artists in 1935, the
Works Progress Administration. Created in the midst of the widespread
unemployment of the Great Depression, the WPA redefined art as an im-
portant democratic and social activity. Projects were created that empha-
sized culture’s interrelationship with every aspect of life. New academic the-
ories and experiments were tried in an eªort to address social and economic
problems through education. Politically focused, collaborative art experi-
ments were also regarded with new interest in the eªort to address broad
cultural goals through the arts. By the time it was o‹cially terminated on
June 30, 1943, the WPA had employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.41
million individual projects in writing, theater, dance, visual arts, history,
and music.14
In many ways Larry and Ann rode the crest of this wave of cultural
change, this redefinition of the role of art in American life. Moreover, at
Harvard, they found themselves at the center of another revolution. Not
only did the Bauhaus approach revolutionize design in America, but it also
aªected other art forms, suggesting new alliances between art and social
utility, including art actions that echoed and perhaps even changed people’s
lives. In her own experiences at the settlement house and Winsor School,
Ann was already discovering that there were appetites among the disen-
franchised that art might fill and aptitudes among the privileged that it
might stimulate. At other points in her life, Ann would again find herself
shuttling between these two social extremes and attempting to address both,
with compassion and curiosity, as vital arenas for making dance.

More immediately, however, Ann began shuttling between the art forms of
dance and architecture. Just as Larry was finding his many disparate inter-
ests suddenly fitting together under the Bauhaus rubric of no segmenta-
tion in the arts, Ann started contemplating how she might play with ar-
chitectural concepts like space through the medium of dance. Larry, too,
began regarding her work in dance with new eyes. As he explained, “The
Bauhaus itself in Dessau [the site of the school from 1925 to 1932] had in-
cluded dance, theater, and costume design. So I was enveloped with the
idea, which I still believe, that there are no pieces in the arts. That they are

58 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

all one thing, and that all the arts are a way of creatively modifying and
improving the world.”15
In her own dance classes Ann began exploring the architectural concepts
of space she had gleaned from Larry’s general design class. She was able to
implement this because a wealthy Chicago heiress and dance patron, Bar-
bara Mettler, was impressed with Ann’s teaching at the Winsor School in
the spring of 1943. Mettler, who had studied at the Mary Wigman School
in Germany, invited Ann to teach at her private residential summer pro-
gram for dance teachers on her New Hampshire estate. Ann was given the
freedom to teach whatever she wanted—and Ann chose the concept of
“space,” entitling her curriculum “Visual Design and Dance.”
She led oª the first week with an exercise that would become emblem-
atic of her incorporation of the natural environment as a guide for creation
in the arts. Specifically, she instructed the students to go out into the coun-
try and “bring back forms from nature they found exciting because of a de-
sign feeling. Bark, stone, twigs, foliage, fungi.” Initially Ann had the stu-
dents sketch these—probably a literal adaptation of a Bauhaus task. In a
handwritten note on that first week’s lesson plan, however, Ann indicated
that the results were so unsatisfying that she felt discouraged. She then found
an “improvement”: “Instead of drawing objects asked them to dance or
move as impressed by objects.” She elaborated, “One by one each person
began to show thru movement diªerent ways of feeling space. We discov-
ered that it was live substance. That we could act upon it and that it in turn
could act upon our movements.”16 Here was a bedrock discovery of the
nexus of space, form, and motion that would be the foundation of her dance
teaching and performance for the rest of her life. Oskar Schlemmer’s ar-
chitechtonic space now had a link in American dance.
For the next two summers, Ann continued to teach and study dance in
the big barn on Mettler’s estate, living in one of the private cabins built to
house the summer students. “It was a very serious course,” Ann recollected.
“It gave me a chance to begin to integrate what I had learned from the ar-
chitects into dance. I was influenced by the way the designers worked, so
first I did an analysis of space based on the influences of the Harvard School
of Design, and then I designed this course for dancers. I would give them
a problem and they would have to solve it. We might study planes in space,
and then they would be required to design a dance in which they focused
on the element of planes in space. Or I might ask, ‘What is denseness and
sparseness? The outside space, the inside space, open spaces and closed
spaces?’”17

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 59

 Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1942, Larry had entered
a special accelerated program, designed to allow him to finish his degree in
landscape architecture in two and a half years so he could then enroll in
the navy. So Larry remained in Cambridge through the summer, taking
courses. For Ann, the New Hampshire summer of dance on the Mettler
estate was idyllic. It combined a secluded and spacious landscape, art mak-
ing, the sensual pleasures of hearty group meals, and much time outdoors,
presaging the model she would create at her California home two decades
later. As she recalled:

I arrived at Franklin station in New Hampshire along with a small group

of girls from various parts of the country who came to study modern
dance intensively at Barbara Mettler’s school. We were met by the school’s
station wagon, which carried us ten miles out of town to the recon-
structed farm where the school was located. The site was typical of New
Hampshire, with hills and valleys on all sides, big clear spaces above,
much earth, trees, and flowers below. When we first saw this magnificent
country we wondered how one could ever ignore it long enough to work
on dance. And yet at once we found we were aªected diªerently, for each
one of us became at one with the forces of the country, not merely a gasp-
ing spectator. We found that its beauty simply became an added stimulus
to the creative process.18

When Ann returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1943, she decided to ex-
plore the overlap of dance and architecture from the opposite direction.
She began oªering dance classes for architecture and design students two
evenings a week in the studio she rented. In her summer teaching, explor-
ing space, Ann had discovered how space that was restricted aªected not
only what one could do physically but also how one felt. These evening
classes were posed as problem-solving situations in which Ann asked the
architects to use materials in the room—chairs, tables, whatever—to build
an environment. Then she told them to “move” in the environment they
had just constructed:

We would continuously be working with creating these temporary

environments and then moving in them. Because as architects, if you
are building a house or a building, how is this going to aªect the people
living in it? How does this make them feel? What is the diªerence in
feeling between designing something that goes around in one way or
another? What does a curve feel like to experience in your body as op-

60 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

 posed to an angle? So I translated what I understood about space into
movement for the architects and into a conscious use of space for the
dancers. It felt like we were pioneering.19

Several years later, when Ann and Larry began teaching joint summer work-
shops on the West Coast for architects, dancers, and artists, this would be-
come one of their essential exercises. Whenever Larry later enumerated the
central ideas he was exposed to during the Harvard years, this linking of
space and form and the probing of the arts as an interdisciplinary investi-
gation were paramount.
Ann remembers Gropius as being particularly supportive of her dance
classes for the architects: “He was really pleased dance was going on.” Cer-
tainly the incorporation of theater and performance with design were fa-
miliar concepts from Gropius’s days at the Bauhaus, when Oskar Schlem-
mer created The Triadic Ballet, his famous 1922 study of form in motion,
in which performers moved through diªerent spatial environments in cos-
tumes that abstracted the body into geometric forms. Schlemmer described
the stage as an “architectonic-spatial organism,” in which all elements and
activities exist in a spatially conditioned relationship.
Earlier, during her first year with Larry in Cambridge, Ann had, on one
occasion, brought her presence as a dancer into the Harvard design circle.
Since June 1937, three months after his arrival in the United States, Walter
and Ise Gropius had been hosting parties at the end of the year for the grad-
uate students in the School of Design. The alcohol flowed freely at these
events, and the dancing and mood were wild. The first such party Ann at-
tended was a costume party where everybody came dressed in Bauhaus-in-
spired attire. Two photographs from that party show Ann and Larry in cos-
tumes clearly inspired by The Triadic Ballet. Larry wears a hat sliced by
stripes, which looks like a huge coiled snake on his head. Instead of a shirt
he sports a huge cardboard shoulder pad, which protrudes over both arms,
and a pair of dark tights with a spiral of ribbon running up one leg. Ann
wears a black leotard and tights and a pair of shorts with a tutu-like skirt,
made up not of fabric but of a network of thin strings. She gestures with
a bent arm toward Larry. In the other photograph, a smiling Gropius pre-
sents Ann with a large bottle of champagne while an audience of other stu-
dents, some in costume, looks on. Half of Ann’s face is painted like a Pi-
casso plate, and she looks poised and steadily in character as she stands in
a doll-like ballet first position with her feet. Again, she gestures formally

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 61

 with a bent arm, this time pointing toward Gropius and the champagne.
Larry built the costumes, but Ann performed them. She had never been to
a party as sophisticated or as liberated as this, and she felt in over her head.
Most of the time when she wasn’t teaching, Ann spent working alone in
her studio by herself. “I fended for myself at the parties,” she later said. “I
never drank. I was very shy, but I was a good performer at covering it up.”20

When she was not pedaling oª on her bicycle to teach children, Ann worked
most of fall 1943 in her studio creating several solos. One of these, The Lonely
Ones, emerged as her first major dance. Taking as its inspiration, and title,
the book of cartoons published the previous year by the New Yorker car-
toonist William Steig, Ann’s dance is a humorous three-part meditation on
the human condition. Each section—“Forgive Me I’m Only Human,” “I
Mind My Own Business,” and “Very Few Understand My Works”—refers
to a specific cartoon and character in Steig’s book.
Steig was an astute and insightful social critic whose cartoons had been
appearing in the New Yorker since 1930, but with the publication of The
Lonely Ones he became an instant celebrity. His figures were hailed in the
popular press as a new art form of symbolic, psychological drawing. Im-
ages from the book were reproduced on cocktail napkins, ashtrays, and greet-
ing cards. Other artists in particular rallied around his satires of the human
condition—the writer W. H. Auden compared his drawings to Goya’s Di-
sasters of War, and the photographer Walker Evans oªered to loan Steig hun-
dreds of photographs so he could study the faces.21 Couching his social com-
mentaries in psychological terms and relaying his criticism of the social order
through the aesthetic means of popular culture gave Steig’s work its edge.
Ann’s initial attraction to Steig’s work was more direct: “I thought I was
getting boringly serious and that I had not developed any humor,” she said.
“I needed to develop a sense of humor in dance. So I started looking at car-
toons.”22 Cartoons, like children’s dances, can seem innocent and free ini-
tially, but some of the most memorable ones expose the foibles of daily life.
Steig’s drawings pushed cartooning in the direction of deliberate intellec-
tual criticisms of the social order in which contemporary artists in more
mainstream art media were engaging.
Through Larry, Ann was part of a sophisticated, almost exclusively male
arts society at Harvard, but as a dancer and a woman, she was also out-
side of it. Her dance The Lonely Ones is a social commentary but also a self-
portrait. All three of the Steig figures Ann chose are men, and each is lonely

62 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

in his own way. “I Mind My Own Business” shows a smug little figure with
closed eyes and pawlike hands held limply in front as he spins away on feet
that whirl like propeller blades. Another cartoon, “Forgive Me I’m Only
Human,” depicts a dazed-looking little man, naked except for a pair of briefs
and a fedora. He stares anxiously upward, his eyes shadowed by the rings
of sleepless nights. In “Very Few Understand My Works” a regal figure sits
icily atop a hill.
Ann feminized all three figures, dancing at first in an old dress covered
with huge polka dots and a small, feathered, black hat. Although this figure
does not match Steig’s cartoons inside the book, it echoes an image he drew
for the book’s original cover, an image of a woman in a polka-dot dress and
little black hat.23 In the dance Ann’s character is hunched and tentative in
her gestures, her facial features twisted into an anxious and timid expres-
sion, as if just standing up straight were too bold a statement for her body
to make. This image of loneliness also suggests the gestural pose of an old
Yiddish theater caricature of a shtetl Jew. Everything about Ann’s The Lonely
Ones, from its inspiration to its tone to its cultural references, seems far from
the cool Germanic modernism of the Bauhaus world. The Lonely Ones was
Ann’s own “Cathy Dance,” as she grappled with how to find herself as a
dancer, alone. In his introduction to the original edition of The Lonely Ones,
Wolcott Gibbs makes the following observation about the Steig figures:

In “The Lonely Ones,” Mr. Steig oªers us a series of impressions of

people who have been set oª from the rest of the world by certain private
obsessions—usually it seems by a devotion to some particular disastrous
cliché of thought or behavior. They are not necessarily unhappy—some
of them, in fact, are obviously only too well pleased with themselves, and
loneliness, or singularity, is, of course, by no means an unhappy state—
they are simply not quite like the other girls and boys.24

In the fall of 1943 Ann premiered her new solos, including The Lonely
Ones, which had a piano score by Norman Cazden, at two small gather-
ings: one for faculty and students at the School of Design and the other
for the children and families from the South End Settlement House. There
is no record of the reception, but well into the next decade Ann continued
performing The Lonely Ones to warm critical acclaim.
For her opening pose, Ann copied literally the character’s position in the
Steig drawing; she then improvised nightly how that character might come
to life. As already indicated, for “I Mind My Own Business” she became a

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 63

 hunched little old lady, very rigid and set in her ways; she looked almost
motorized as she moved. With her white party dress covered with golf-ball-
sized pink polka dots, a prissy expression, and a small-brimmed hat with
an enormous tangle of feathers on top, she looked, in her own words, “some-
where between a little old lady and a parrot.” The second character, while
not specifically a man or a woman, was pitiful and dumb, a bedraggled clown
who seemed to have lost her place not only in the performance but in life
as well.
Between sections, Ann changed her costume by slipping quickly behind
the onstage set piece of a cardboard cityscape. In the final segment she reen-
tered wearing a long dark dress. Part fantasy, part mockery, this piece was
danced to programmatic piano music, sometimes played live by Cazden.
Seen by some as a thinly veiled comment on the modern artist’s continual
laments about not being understood, this last section climaxed with Ann
“skillfully flipping her entire dress over her head so that she is transformed
into a Mondrian-like abstraction.”25
Writing many years later in an appreciation of Steig’s book The Lonely
Ones, Roger Angell commented, “The title sounds like a warning. Survival,
we begin to understand, is the main event.”26 The same might be said of
the way Ann was learning how to survive as a dancer independent of other
dancers or a strictly dance environment. For the first time she, along with
Larry, found herself belonging to a mixed community of artists working in
diverse media and disciplines. This would be the kind of arts community
they would continue to thrive in.
Larry was already familiar with moving through organized academic pro-
grams and being the one whose interests crossed over the neat boundaries.
It was not so much that Larry was destined to be an architect as that, sud-
denly, architecture appeared as an arena in which he could address social,
aesthetic, and community issues. Ann would draw many of the same les-
sons as Larry from the years at Harvard.27 While Larry discovered that so-
cial problems and architecture were linked, Ann found dance could also be
an important arena to eªect social change, not just superficially as a topic,
but by really blending the practice of dance with the lives of the people you
wanted to help change. Larry learned that space and form were linked, and
Ann discovered how to focus on the space around the movement, outdoors
as well as indoors, as a critical partner in the dance. For Larry, the object
was no longer an object; it had to be integrated into the landscape. For Ann,
all objects in her dance came to have meaning and often the setting yielded
the objects used in the dance. Both Larry and Ann recognized that the arts

64 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

were not segmented. He discovered that there was no separation between
draftsman and painter or the painter and the object painted. She discov-
ered that everybody, every body, has a dance—both children and adults,
dancers and non-dancers. For both, Halprins process would become more
influential than the forms. Ann never called her working group of per-
formers a dance company; instead, she had a dancers’ workshop where every-
one generated the material for performance.
With its witty mood of innocence and yet sophistication, The Lonely Ones
revealed Ann’s use of irony and humor as distancing devices to comment
on social habits as well as her equally lonely status as an outsider to Larry’s
academic community. The work also suggested how much her children’s
dance classes could be useful as laboratories for her own choreography. With-
out a company and primed by H’Doubler to think proudly of herself as an
educator first, Ann would make her classroom her most enduring site for
creating and testing her choreographic ideas.

During the same period that Ann and Larry were assembling themselves
as artists in the shadow of the Bauhaus at Harvard, another important cen-
ter for Bauhaus influence in America was under way at Black Mountain
College in North Carolina. Headed by Josef Albers, a student of Gropius’s
at the Bauhaus in 1920, Black Mountain College became the center of
Bauhaus influence on the visual and performing arts, much as Harvard was
for design and architecture. Gropius was part of the advisory board for Black
Mountain, which existed from 1933 to 1956, and he acknowledged the suc-
cess of Albers’s approach.28
The Bauhaus also had an outpost in the Midwest, at the Chicago Insti-
tute of Design, which had opened in October 1937, under the name the
New Bauhaus, just seven months after Gropius began teaching at Harvard.
It was under the direction of László Moholy-Nagy, a close colleague of
Gropius’s and a frequent lecturer at Harvard who became a friend of the
Halprins. At the same time Larry Halprin headed east for Harvard in the
summer of 1941, the musician John Cage left California for the Chicago
Institute of Design, where he had been invited to teach experimental mu-
sic.29 Cage would subsequently influence the other important modern dance
innovator whose developing aesthetic intersected with Bauhaus ideas, Merce
Cunningham.
Cage and Cunningham first met shortly before the 1938 Bennington sum-
mer program at Mills, when Cage began to accompany Bonnie Bird’s mod-

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 65

 ern dance classes at the Cornish School in Seattle. Cunningham was then
nineteen, the same age Ann had been when she first met Larry. Cunning-
ham’s path would be diªerent from Ann’s, but both were aªected by their
early brushes with the Bauhaus.
Ann and Cunningham never formally met that summer at Mills, when
their paths first literally crossed, but in the 1940s their paths again crossed—
this time, conceptually—through their exposure to Bauhaus ideas. Although
neither ever studied directly with Bauhaus teachers, they made work, ex-
perimented, and taught in this circle and climate. For Ann, the architec-
tural end of the Bauhaus influence would be manifested in her spatial ex-
plorations of the body and the environments in which dance happens; for
Cunningham, the Bauhaus impact was more about breaking from the syn-
chronicity of gesture and sound. Two decades later, their separate paths
would merge as influences in the Judson Church movement of the 1960s.
Ann would give the next generation the ritual of daily tasks as a movement
vocabulary, and Cunningham would introduce aleatoric structures for free-
ing dance from narrative. Both dancers would also create new models for
using other artists collaboratively in their work, a more tangible aspect of
the Bauhaus legacy in their work.

In December 1943 Larry enlisted in the navy. By the time his bachelor’s de-
gree in landscape architecture was conferred, in January 1944, he and Ann
were already in Florida, where he had begun a two-month training pro-
gram to be a fighter director o‹cer on a destroyer. Ann stayed near the base
in Florida during his training, and her childhood friend Miriam Raymer
Bennett, whose husband was in the same program, joined her. In March
1944 Larry was sent out into the Pacific to join his ship, the USS Morris VII,
at Hollandia in New Guinea.
Ann went to New York, where she planned to dance and live with Larry’s
family. She hoped finally to be able to dance with Doris Humphrey, a dream
deferred from high school. Humphrey, however, was at the end of her per-
forming career, in constant pain from her severely arthritic hip.
“New York was a curious place in the 1940s,” Ann later said. “Things
were in transition when I came.” Among the “Big Four,” Doris Humphrey
and Charles Weidman were disbanding their company and going through
a reorganization, Hanya Holm was moving in another direction, and Martha
Graham was still going strong. “I came to join this great modern dance
movement in New York [and] I ended up on Broadway,” Ann noted. “It was

66 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

a little unsettling because my expectations were set at one goal and I ad-
justed to another.”30
At the end of the summer of 1944, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weid-
man announced they would be holding auditions for dancers for a new mu-
sical they were choreographing, Sing Out, Sweet Land!—a biography of the
nation told through a string of popular and folk American tunes, held to-
gether by a sparse plot conceived and written by Walter Kerr, then a thirty-
year-old beginning book writer for Broadway shows. Ann auditioned and
was given a part among the large cast of dancers who provided the period
background as the scenes moved from Puritan New England through the
Civil War to the Jazz Age. The show, which opened on December 27, 1944,
and ran for almost three months, featured folksinger Burl Ives singing “Big,
Rock Candy Mountain.” Ann was cast front and center for much of the
dancing, and her expressive face added a comic edge to her character. The
humor reached an unanticipated level one evening when, during the high-
kicking Civil War number, the elastic waist on Ann’s bloomers snapped and
she continued trying to high-kick across the stage as the bloomers pooled
around her ankles. One night a few weeks later she took on the part of the
comedienne, who had called in ill. “It turned out that I had a great flair for
comedy,” Ann said.31 She was subsequently approached to do other shows
as a comedienne, but she turned these oªers down.
Sing Out, Sweet Land! was a modest success, running for 102 perform-
ances before closing on March 24, 1945. Its run was undoubtedly aªected
by the fact that it had the bad fortune to open the day before the much
longer-running dance musical On the Town. When the show’s run ended,
Ann continued to live in Rose and Samuel Halprin’s apartment while she
waited for news about Larry. She did not have to wait long. On April 6,
1945, she heard the news that a kamikaze pilot had hit Larry’s ship. Forty-
five of Larry’s fellow seamen were killed and wounded, but he had survived.
He was alive, and he was coming home.

The bombing of the USS Morris VII was a prelude to the battle of Oki-
nawa, an invasion by land and sea that cost the Americans more causalities
than almost any other single engagement of World War II. Larry served as
an ensign on board the Morris, a flagship destroyer that saw extensive com-
bat action in the Central Pacific. He was trained both as a fighter director
o‹cer, in charge of squadrons of attack airplanes, and as a radar o‹cer,
able to pilot navigational systems as well as surface and aircraft radar.

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 67

 “I had both a wonderful time and a terrible time,” Larry later said. “The
terrible time wasn’t the war, but it was being compressed into a small uni-
verse that I couldn’t break out of.” He underlined the “loneliness and bore-
dom which any fighting ship [sailor] will tell you is di‹cult.”32
On April 6, 1945, while the ship was on patrol escorting transports and
cruisers, a kamikaze carrying a torpedo closed in on the ship. The destroyer’s
guns hit the plane, setting it afire, but they could not prevent it from crash-
ing into the ship. Fires caused by the explosion spread rapidly. Several hours
later, when the flames were under control, the Morris returned to harbor
and the crew was evacuated. Larry had narrowly missed being killed:

The guy who was sleeping in my bunk was killed by the kamikaze plane.
He was a young fellow who [had recently been] badly injured on a coªee
break. I [had] sent him out during an attack to get coªee, and he came
back and there was a lurch in the ship and it spilled the coªee all over him
and he was badly burned. So we put him in my bunk, and the next day
that bunk got destroyed, with him in it.

It was a tragic coincidence that haunted Larry long afterward. Many other
crew members also died in the explosion.
Larry was shipped back to the United States on survivor’s leave in late
April, arriving at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, and
quickly made his way to New York to visit Ann. There Larry and Ann went
to see Oklahoma! (the show that Sing Out, Sweet Land! had been intended
to challenge). Larry recalled catching a glimpse of Frank Lloyd Wright—
flamboyant in his signature cape—in the audience. Soon afterward Ann
and Larry spent a week at the Pennsylvania weekend home of Larry’s Uncle
Sydney. Larry loved this fifty-five-acre farm on the Delaware River, near
the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border, and did many watercolor drawings
there, giving Sydney some of these in appreciation.
Larry was then sent to Hawaii for a few weeks to teach his navigation radar
duties on the destroyer. Then he returned to San Francisco. Ann had stayed
on in New York for several weeks, continuing to live with Rose and Samuel
in their apartment. A sense of providence and, in retrospect, inevitability
framed the Halprins’ arrival in San Francisco. Shortly before her journey west,
Ann voiced her expectations in an exuberant note to a college friend:

I’m oª to meet Larry in San Francisco next month and we are going to
stay there permanently—I hope hope. We are going to have a guest room

68 THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

 so you must come and visit us and see the wild open spaces—I’m so
excited excited excited! . . . Now I’m glad I’m going to California—I want
to be left alone, live a normal resourceful life with a connection to the
soil and to the common pulse of ordinary people. I’m not interested in
acclaim—I’m only interested in creating out of the soil and the people a
healthy fresh dance that is alive and vital. I’m getting so sick and tired of
New York dance—it’s neurotic, eccentric and in many cases stale and in
most cases uninspired. I’m not being smug—I don’t say I can do better—
but I do say New York itself breeds a warped kind of a dance.33

Ann’s letter reads like an explorer’s farewell and a challenger’s manifesto. Its
images of creating out of the soil hint at a the kibbutznic idealism she may
well have heard from Larry or Rose Halprin. She already envisions life in
the West as a purifying adventure and a spur to her own creativity. For her,
New York represents the “neurotic, eccentric, . . . stale and in most cases
uninspired” in life and art, while the “wild” West promises to be “alive and
vital,” “healthy” and “fresh.”
Ann arrived at these sentiments in a remarkably short time. She had been
in New York just over a year and already she was eager to leave for good.
In consciously painting San Francisco as the social and aesthetic opposite
of New York, Ann handily omitted the two communities’ similar features.
In fact, the Bay Area had its own emerging community of modern dancers
who, at a meeting on October 29, 1944, had organized as the Dance League,
a “non-profit cultural organization dedicated to the promotion of dance as
a fine art.”34 By the mid-1940s California was already known in the dance
world as the launching pad for two women who reshaped the field of Amer-
ican dance—Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham.

THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE 69

 FOUR

Western Spaces
1945 – 1955

San Francisco is one of the easiest cities

in the world to live in. It is the easiest in America.
kenneth rexroth
1957

ann and larry had been in San Francisco only a few months when
the war in Japan ended. They were living in one of the cramped and spare
Quonset huts hastily erected at the southern tip of the city, on the grounds
of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, as temporary housing for military per-
sonnel, like Larry, who were out of combat on survivor’s leave but expected
to return to active duty shortly.
One of Ann’s most vivid early memories of San Francisco occurred late
in the afternoon, around 4 p.m., on August 14, 1945, when word reached
the West Coast that the Japanese government had unconditionally surren-
dered, five days after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki.
As the news spread, Ann and Larry climbed up a hilltop on the naval base
and watched as the entire city exploded in a massive spontaneous celebra-
tion of the end of World War II. “We were all without words,” she recalled,
describing how strangers embraced one another and cried with relief and
happiness. “Here I was, a young wife, unsure if Larry was going to be sent
back into combat—and suddenly I found myself in this ecstatic, exuber-
ant moment.”1 Ann observed fireboats spraying water in the fading light
and, later that evening, saw flares and fireworks cascade over the bay.
Oª the base, in the heart of the city’s financial center, San Franciscans
celebrated the war’s end wildly. In just the first twelve hours of the victory

70
celebrations, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, 6 local people died in
related accidents; 624 were injured; 95 autos were stolen, burned, or
wrecked; and scores of streetcars had their windows smashed by exuberant
revelers.2 Both the violence and the festivities continued. Although the war
in Europe had ended in May, San Franciscans had not felt as celebratory
then because enlisted men and women were still being sent from Bay Area
naval bases into the Pacific theater. Now, however, they were ready. In the
days following Victory over Japan (VJ) Day, the city’s daily newspapers—
the San Francisco Chronicle, the Call Bulletin, and the Examiner—ran huge
photographs of the masses of people who swarmed onto Market Street and
Van Ness Avenue, engulfing cars as they caroused, drank, and roamed.3 At
least four more people died in the next two days from “excessive partying”
as roaming crowds of sailors and civilians looted and smashed windows
along several blocks of Market Street.4 Spontaneously, the streets became
stages for performances of euphoria and anarchy. In 1945, then, the city cel-
ebrated the war’s end with a huge impromptu performance. Within two
decades, performances of war protest would be enacted in these same public
arenas, and Ann would move from spectator to choreographer.
For a choreographer and a landscape architect, both on the dawn of their
professional careers, these responses to VJ Day must have seemed like an
inauguration of the performance potential of the city itself, making use of
its public open spaces, its geography, its architecture, its citizens. In the
decade ahead, these aspects of the city would become elements of a new
theater of life for both Halprins. Years later, their daughter Daria would
observe of these initial years, “They brought themselves out here and were
part of creating what we now think of as California. Both its good aspects,
as well as its faddish aspects. I think what California did was that it allowed
them free rein to create their scene from scratch. [Ann] and Larry both
needed that. They’re both very big people. They needed the kind of space
that California allowed them in that time to create their own stages. Cali-
fornia was virgin land.”5
Taking the grand scale of nature and the urban landscape of the West as
their stage, and using the massive social and cultural changes under way in
American society as their themes, Ann and Larry began to explore space
and environment as critical silent partners in their arts. Indeed, thirty-two
years later, in 1977, Ann orchestrated her own broadly scaled urban per-
formance, Citydance, as a gesture of giving back to the city that had sup-
plied her with so many formative experiences since 1945. This participa-

WESTERN SPACES 71
 tory day-long event channeled dancing participants along the very same
stretch of Market Street as the VJ Day celebrations. Ann dubbed it “a gift
to the people of San Francisco.”6
The VJ Day image of the city imploding in drunken and chaotic im-
provisation proved a resonant visual metaphor, not just for San Francisco,
but for California as a whole. As the cultural historian Richard Cándida
Smith notes, during the mid-1940s “California transformed into one of the
world’s metropolitan centers.” Like most Americans in the postwar period,
Californians wrestled with complex, and at times contradictory, impulses
between privacy and anonymity, between personal goals and a larger public
responsibility to world culture.7

California’s geography added to the sense of openness and possibility. As

Larry recollected:

I was terribly aware of being on the edge of the ocean. I was terribly
aware of the mountains around Mount Tamalpais. The hillsides of Marin
County, the foliage, the redwoods. It was just incredible. I can’t remember
any other place that was as beautiful in its natural environment. What I
found also was the incompleteness of San Francisco, that it had a feeling
like a forest with young seedlings growing up in the underbrush and that
there was lots of change about to happen. San Francisco just seemed ripe
for growth. Ripe for opportunity.8

That growth entailed a special responsibility to California’s landscape was

an idea that the Harvard philosopher George Santayana had suggested in
a lecture in Berkeley many years earlier, in 1911. He pointed out that Cal-
ifornians are “surrounded by a virgin and prodigious world of mountains,
forests, and sea.” As a result, he argued, “You cannot feel that nature was
made by you or for you. . . . You must feel, rather that you are an oªshoot
of her life; one brave little force among her immense forces.”9 Santayana’s
message to Californians was that their environment oªered alternative ways
of seeing nature and society and, most critically, our relationship to both—
that we are not the center of the universe. The Halprins would come to
learn this as well, and their work would posit a diªerent dynamic between
environment, artist, and art, in which the individual was no longer at the
center of the world.
By the mid-1940s, with the specter of World War II’s human and envi-

72 WESTERN SPACES
ronmental devastation, Californians were becoming nostalgic for aspects of
wild nature vanishing from their own landscape. Several environmental or-
ganizations and projects were by now firmly established. The oldest was the
Sierra Club, founded in 1892, which had become an active force in purchasing
and preserving the last untouched stand of redwoods in Marin County, Muir
Woods, as well as the adjacent Mount Tamalpais, near the Halprins’ future
home. The rustic suburbia of Marin County, just across the Golden Gate
Bridge from San Francisco, attracted the Halprins with its proximity to both
nature and city life. In the nineteenth century the gold in California’s streams
and mountains had pulled people west, but now the streams and mountains
themselves were coming to be regarded as golden treasures.10
The historian Kevin Starr has described the California landscape as “not
a subtle drama, but a bold confrontation of flatland, mountain and valley.
Topographically California had few secrets.”11 This sense of “full disclo-
sure” in the geography is helpful in understanding Ann’s work. Over the
next two decades her dances pushed for psychological and physical candor
in the geographies of the mind and body.
In the eyes of David Starr Jordan, the East Coast–bred first president of
Stanford University, at the turn of the century, the California landscape
“helped social and psychological imperatives.” He asserted that “people in
California minded their own business, tolerating everything except untruth
and hypocrisy. With plenty of elbow room, traits of personality expanded
in all directions.”12 The landscape seemed to invoke freedom and encour-
age expansion, as Larry observed in his description of San Francisco’s “seed-
lings.” For both Halprins, San Francisco oªered an ideal place to begin their
professions unencumbered by obligations to the past. It seemed to prom-
ise sweeping freedom and inspiration.
For Ann, the California landscape prompted the development of a new
attitude to stage space, as well as to time and the performer’s force—the
basic materials of dance. The California outdoors, the expansive vistas of
water and land, would soon be reflected in dances that used the body less
as a vehicle of representation and discursive reason and more as a presence
in the environment. Ann, like Larry, relished the privacy of the West. “There
wasn’t a dance movement in San Francisco and I liked that,” she later said,
suggesting it was a city of individual dancers not linked by any uniform
stylistic traditions.

It gave me more space to develop my own point of view and my own

vision. Although I wasn’t appreciative of that in the beginning, I learned

WESTERN SPACES 73
 to appreciate the challenge. The isolation I put myself into required me
to reinvestigate what dance was, what was the meaning of dance, what
was the purpose of dance, why was I dancing, and so it put me through
a kind of quest that was a very healthy experience to go through.13

Over the next decade both Halprins would explore the tensions between
individual freedom, nature, and societal obligations by investigating the
moving body’s negotiations of space. Ann’s work in particular hinged on
her intuitive capacity to use dance as a way to foreground non-dancing bod-
ies, or what the cultural theorist Susan Leigh Foster has called “bodies fash-
ioned by other cultural pursuits.”14 Ann would not only have dancers use
non-dancers’ actions but also put non-dancers in the situation of dancers.
For Ann, the imaginative rub of diªerent kinds of bodies and bodily ac-
tions was as useful as a rehearsal strategy as a performance method.
For both Halprins, the conceptual, geographic, and aesthetic dimensions
of space—whether space in nature, living or domestic space, theatrical space,
or architectural space—would be lifelong concerns. Just as the painters
Clyªord Still and Mark Rothko were bound together in what the art crit-
ic Dore Ashton has described as “their search for a new space for express-
ing emotion independent of discursive reason,” Ann and Larry reconceived
space as a dynamic partner not limited by conventional narrative.15 A clear-
ing of the ground in physical space has long been linked with pioneers in
the West, but for Ann and Larry it was the poetic space of the cultural and
aesthetic imagination that they surveyed most hungrily.

Living in California at the birth of the postwar era, the Halprins found
themselves in what was an enormously charged psychological climate for
many artists. San Francisco avant-garde artists, like their New York coun-
terparts, participated energetically in what Dore Ashton called the “post-
war climate of rebellion fed by the release of dammed-up emotions and the
inevitable hope for something fresh to come.”16 The Halprins, too, turned
away from the classical and romantic traditions in their respective art forms,
finding their new aesthetic community in the bohemian underground—
with Beat poets and filmmakers, musique concrète musicians, and abstract
expressionist painters. Ann would collaborate directly with the poets
Michael McClure and James Broughton and the visual artist Bruce Con-
ner, and both Ann and Larry collaborated conceptually with Hans Hof-
mann and Jackson Pollock.

74 WESTERN SPACES
 The Halprins’ developing aesthetics echoed the art critic Harold Rosen-
berg’s pronouncement that for this generation of visual artists painting had
become an encounter of material and direct activity without any precon-
ceived image.17 For Ann, this encounter involved the physical as well as
psychological logic of the human body unmodified by training in specific
dance techniques. For Larry, it meant emulating the implicit functionality
and design of California’s rugged environment.
For the visual artists Rosenberg described, painting became an act that
was inseparable from the artist’s biography and gestural actions. This aes-
thetic “permission” to make that which is immediately personal present in
one’s art must have felt particularly freeing for Ann, and at the same time
curiously familiar. The task to discover the logic of one’s own body through
movement had been the mantra of Ann’s college dance classes with Mar-
garet H’Doubler. H’Doubler’s pedagogy, however, stopped far short of ex-
ploring the dancer’s emotional or psychological dimensions.
Although in moving west Ann had isolated herself from the East Coast
modern dance world, she was able to insert herself into other influential
aesthetic contexts. Her reinvestigation of dance became more of a radical
repositioning of dance. Henceforth, dance for her would exist as a perfor-
mance practice somewhere between the stage, the environment, and the
home.

The end of the war permitted Larry to finally start looking for a job as a
landscape architect. Larry immediately contacted the distinguished archi-
tect William Wurster, with whom he and Ann had become friends at Har-
vard. Wurster, whose o‹ce was still based in San Francisco, had left the
year before, in 1944, for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where
he had been appointed dean of the School of Architecture. Wurster, a pre-
eminent American residential architect, favored a style of regional modernism
that looked for the a‹nity between architectural form, materials, and the
needs of the client and setting. It was in this Bay Area tradition that Larry
found his initial identity. Wurster stressed the unity of architecture and land-
scape architecture, calling the two disciplines “separated only as to materi-
als and technique, not as to basic approach.”18 Indeed, Larry has at times
described himself as more than a traditional landscape architect—as an en-
vironmental designer.
In the fall of 1945, at Wurster’s suggestion, Larry joined the Bay Area land-
scape architecture firm of Thomas Church. Church, like his friend and life-

WESTERN SPACES 75
 long associate Wurster, saw the house as a backdrop for private family life
and the garden as the frame for the life outside. In this view the house served
as a refuge from the “occasional” bad weather in California while the gar-
den was the real center for living. Church extended this vision into an aes-
thetic that stressed the bond between indoors and outdoors among homes
in the California landscape.19
“You know there are two important things you do: one is who you de-
cide to marry or fall in love with, and the other is who you work for or ap-
prentice to in your first job,” Larry once remarked. “That’s terribly impor-
tant because inevitably working under a master influences your attitudes,
your value systems, teaches you less about aesthetics than about how you
approach life in your profession, and Tommy [Church] was wonderful at
that. . . . He had such an incredible feeling about land and landscape . . .
how to run roads up around hills without hurting them. . . . It was a re-
markable experience.”20
Church was linked to an earlier generation of Bay Area architects, fore-
most among them Bernard Maybeck, whose structures radiated a sense of
modest e‹ciency, aesthetic simplicity, and reverence for nature. “There was
a California attitude about the use of wood, the use of humility in archi-
tecture, the use of simplicity and plainness,” Larry said of Maybeck’s work.
It was a model that deeply influenced Larry. As a result, he explained, “I
had a kind of social concept of architecture in that I wasn’t only interested
in the aesthetics of architecture, which I was profoundly, but I also had a
profound feeling that architecture and the design of the environment could
aªect social behavior.”21
The field of architecture in America was less professionalized in this period.
Good drafting skills, which Larry had in abundance, and an ability to learn
on the job were critical. “Frank Lloyd Wright never had a degree in archi-
tecture, nor did Louis Sullivan,” Larry remarked long afterward. “So I could
have been fine. I would have apprenticed for a couple of years and been a
good architect.” Indeed, as he explained, after he left the navy he promptly
found himself with job oªers from the two top architectural firms in the
Bay Area: “I went to Bill Wurster’s o‹ce and they said, ‘We’ll hire you right
away if you want, because Bill said to. But Tommy Church has dibs on you
and he’s downstairs.’ Tommy said, ‘I’ll hire you tomorrow, if you’d like. In
fact don’t waste your time upstairs; come with me.’ So I had to decide whether
I wanted to be an architect or a landscape architect.”22
Larry’s involvement with Bay Area regional modernism would have an
impact on Ann’s work as well. A central tenet of this school—the belief

76 WESTERN SPACES
that social trends needed to be interrelated with design, and that both needed
to bow to the natural influences of nature in order to create an architecture
that acknowledged its time and place—would find an echo in Ann’s radi-
cal repositioning of dance. She would try to forge a new relationship be-
tween her art and nature and society, envisioning dance as a performance
practice existing somewhere between the stage, the environment, and the
home.

Before the end of 1945, the Halprins had rented a duplex apartment in Marin
City, an undeveloped suburb of San Francisco at the time. Although the
Golden Gate Bridge, connecting the rural communities of Marin County
to San Francisco, was completed in May of 1937, it didn’t become a major
thoroughfare until after the war. After a few months the Halprins moved
into public housing in a project built expressly for navy families. As Larry
recalled, the navy housing was “beautifully designed by one of the best of
the architects here [in San Francisco] at the time. They were temporary
buildings made out of wood, and very nice.”23 For the Halprins, this hous-
ing held another advantage, beyond its aªordability and attractiveness: it
brought them closer to Ann’s Uncle Jack Schiª, her mother’s oldest brother,
who lived in nearby San Rafael with his wife. (Uncle Jack was the brother
who had been disowned by his parents when he married a non-Jewish
woman.)
The Halprins lived in the naval housing for a little over a year before pur-
chasing a small house in Strawberry, another rural community in Marin.
Larry remembers the house, which had originally been built for workers
from the nearby shipyards of Sausalito, as sweet and little (only nine hun-
dred square feet), with two bedrooms, a bath, and a living room. They con-
verted the garage into a workspace for Ann. (Eventually they would hire a
live-in nanny to care for their firstborn, and she would live in this space.)
Larry also promptly began creating a small backyard garden, which came
to be featured in Sunset, the leading western home and garden magazine,
as a key example of how design can enhance people’s lives—in this instance
by retooling a functional wartime home into an aesthetic and pleasurable
postwar domicile.24
The article that appeared in the July 1947 issue of Sunset was both writ-
ten and illustrated by Larry, and prophetically subtitled “Good Theater
in the Garden.” The introductory remarks describe how Larry began with
“a GI house on a 50'×150' lot in a typical subdivision north of San Fran-

WESTERN SPACES 77
 cisco” and, in what sounds like a fairy-tale narrative of transformation,
“‘kissed’ a toadlike house on a muddy lot into a thing of beauty.” Larry
then suggests how to create an inviting and stimulating exterior scenic de-
sign by using carefully thought-out lighting, ambient sounds from nature,
and the choreographed motion of water, birds, and people. “When you
set the stage for entertaining in the garden— or just plain living—there
is nothing dishonest in following a few ideas that make for good theater,”
Larry writes while showing a sketch of a garden illuminated at night by
dramatic spotlighting.25
Over the next two years House Beautiful, Living Magazine, and the Los
Angeles Times also published features on the Halprins’ first home. The Los
Angeles Times article celebrated Larry’s economical recycling of fence and
lawn materials as much as the spacious illusionism in his curved and an-
gled designs for lawns, a badminton court, and paving.26 Already in his early
projects, Larry built part of his design around “found” objects—in this case,
existing materials in the yard.
In an eight-page feature in House Beautiful Larry and his coauthor,
Thomas Church, prompted homeowners to “discover the gold mine on your
property”—their backyard. The first of the “buried riches” that they list is
privacy. “Everyone needs a place he can go to shut out the world,” they write.
“Your backyard should be one of these places. You should be able to rest,
play or entertain in your yard without sharing the time with idlers. . . . Pri-
vacy doesn’t mean isolation, and you needn’t own a big lot. But you do need
to cut oª the view of those outside your yard. Then you can wear what you
please, romp with the children and the family pets, or spend the afternoon
asleep in a hammock.”27 This idea of the backyard as a sanctuary from the
public gaze, a site where one could retreat from the neighbors’ gaze and gos-
sip, occurs repeatedly in Larry’s articles of this time. It suggests how desir-
able a space outside of the public gaze had become for the Halprins, and how
idealized the garden was as a sanctuary for personal expression and candor.
Early in 1948, his third year with Church’s o‹ce, Larry had collaborated
with Church on a garden design for Mr. and Mrs. Dewey Donnell in
Sonoma, California. This garden, for which Larry was named as associate
designer, is regarded as one of the landmarks of American landscape archi-
tecture. Combining a bold statement with stark simplicity, it is remarkable
for the breathless balance it strikes between the huge cantilevered terrace and
pool and the surrounding vistas. 28 In this dramatic dialogue between gar-
den, architecture, and greater landscape, the deck daringly juts into the air,
appearing to float over the wetlands, creek, and bay in the vista beyond.

78 WESTERN SPACES
 In its own way the Donnell terrace anticipates Larry’s most important
work of dance architecture, the dance deck that he and Arch Lauterer would
make for Ann in 1954. Both structures are filled with motion, force, and
energy—the key elements of dance. They oªer a vantage point from which
to view the natural surroundings, giving the illusion of nestling in nature.
Yet at the same time they are clearly man-made sites, boldly challenging
nature as they lunge outward oª the hillsides, anchoring air to ground. Larry
remarked of the Donnell project: “That was a beginning of trying to do
ecological design in the sense that you formulate the form that you’re do-
ing based on the natural configuration of the landscape around it. . . . It
has actually always influenced what I’ve done ever since.”29 For Larry the
environment came to function as both a collaborator and a teacher. Na-
ture’s contrasts of form, color, texture, and scale served as aesthetic tem-
plates that could be echoed or “cited” in his environmental designs.
After four years of working with Thomas Church, Larry decided to set
up his own private practice. “I got a wonderful apprenticeship with Tommy
Church,” Larry said, but he realized that he was essentially a socially minded
loner. “Tommy was not basically interested in social problems. I was in-
terested in public spaces more than private gardens,” he said. “I was inter-
ested in communities and the building of communities. I was interested in
how you take vast areas and develop parks and networks of open space. I
felt the need to expand and look at the total landscape, the total environ-
ment with architecture in it for the public.”30
On September 1, 1949, Larry opened his own o‹ce at 802 Montgomery
Street in San Francisco. “For the practice of landscape architecture,” his an-
nouncement read, “Lawrence Halprin—Landscape Architect.” That same
year Larry intensified his apprenticeship with the natural environment of
the Bay Area. During the summer he had made his first visit to Phoenix
Lake in Marin County, a place where he would spend many hours over the
next four decades hiking, sketching, and observing nature.31 Over the next
several decades he would also spend weeks hiking and sketching in the Sier-
ras, teaching himself to see nature’s aesthetic dimensions and design forms.

The apprenticeship in dance that Ann set up for herself in the Bay Area
had strong parallels to the model Larry was creating for himself in land-
scape architecture. Both artists arrived in the West steeped in the formal
training of their respective disciplines yet open to California itself as a
unique form of postdoctoral education. For both, living in the West

WESTERN SPACES 79
 brought a certain isolation from more established communities of dancers
and architects, but it allowed them easy access to nature and involved them
in interdisciplinary communities of artists and cultural activists. It also im-
mersed them in the practical realities of how to make a living from their
art. Just as Larry felt the need to apprentice with an established firm be-
fore striking out on his own, Ann spent years teaching children and adults
of mixed ability before settling into an ensemble with which she could
create challenging group work. They did not consider this wasted time.
They were discovering how art intersects with daily lives and how those
lives shape art.
Determined to continue the exploration of her body’s natural movement
that she had begun in Cambridge, Ann began renting a small studio in late
1945. There Ann embarked on the dancer’s equivalent of quieting and teach-
ing herself to sense the natural world by spending hours working by her-
self. She shared the studio with a group of folk dancers, but they used it
only in the evenings and allowed Ann to use it by herself during the day
in exchange for cleaning and maintaining it. The studio was in North Beach,
San Francisco’s old Italian neighborhood and an emerging center of bo-
hemian life in the late 1940s.
Initially, Ann used the studio to prepare for her December 1945 perfor-
mance in the audition winners’ concert at the Ninety-second Street Y in
New York. Encouraged by Doris Humphrey, who had been hired as direc-
tor of the Y’s dance center earlier that year, Ann auditioned in the spring
of 1945, shortly before leaving to meet Larry in San Francisco. That sum-
mer she learned that she had been named an audition winner and was in-
vited back to perform on a December 30 afternoon program. Ann flew back
for the concert, sharing the program in the Y’s Theresa L. Kaufmann Au-
ditorium with Ethel Winter, Yuriko, Miriam Pandor, and Helaine Blok.
Ann performed her comic solo The Lonely Ones, which was enthusiastically
received, and a new solo about the Holocaust that she had created for the
occasion. Titled Bitter Herbs, it had an original piano score by Norman Caz-
den. It was not well received, and Ann never performed it again.
A few months later, in spring 1946, Ann took a fortuitous afternoon break
from her studio work and went to the nearby Washington Square Park in
North Beach, where she struck up a conversation with a man who hap-
pened to be the dancer Welland Lathrop, who was sitting on a bench near
her. Lathrop, who had initially trained in San Francisco, had gone on to
teach at the Cornish School in Seattle, where he served as chair of the dance
department, and had then taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse School

80 WESTERN SPACES
in New York. He had danced with Martha Graham’s touring company and
in his own concert group, as well as in Broadway productions.32 Experi-
enced not only as a dancer but also as a designer of costumes and sets, La-
throp was teaching design at the Rudolph Schafer School in North Beach
when he met Ann. In his own choreography Lathrop remained loyal to Gra-
ham’s angular and dramatic movement style, and he tended toward bibli-
cal and mythic narratives as in Graham’s early works.
Ann and Welland made for an unlikely partnership, with little to con-
nect them other than their substantial training in modern dance. But the
community of highly trained dancers in the Bay Area was tiny at the time,
and the financial risks for a single teacher with her own studio as well as
production costs for a solo concert were high. By the fall of 1946, Ann and
Welland joined forces to rent an old Victorian-era building at 1831 Union
Street in Cow Hollow, near North Beach, turning it into one of the first
modern dance training centers in San Francisco. The space was ideal for
their purposes. The ground floor had a spacious parquet wood floor ready
to dance on, as well as a small foyer that easily served as a lobby. There was
also a small raised stage area with curtains and a small garden behind the
building. Upstairs there was a spacious apartment, which Lathrop imme-
diately occupied. For the next eight years, the Halprin-Lathrop School be-
came the center of Ann and Welland’s shared teaching, choreographing,
and performing. John Graham, an actor who studied dance there, recalled
that the studio accommodated only ten to fifteen students comfortably, but
no one ever described it as too small.33
That Ann and Welland were an odd team aesthetically as well as tem-
peramentally is attested to by Nina Lathrop, who met Welland in 1955, just
as his studio partnership with Ann was breaking up, and who married him
in 1960, at which point Ann and Welland had long since parted ways. Nina,
a Russian-born psychotherapist who was forty-five when she began dating
Welland, was ten years older than Ann, and her clipped comments decades
later suggest she saw Ann as an emotional as well as a romantic rival. “I had
the feeling that they didn’t see eye to eye,” she said. “I remember that a cou-
ple of years after they got together, I heard Ann announce on some occa-
sion that she was tired of dancing; she wasn’t going to dance anymore. She
was more interested in social problems than she was in dance at the time.
Welland was interested in social problems, but they never took precedence
over dance.” Although Nina admired Ann’s “gift for comedy,” indicating
that Ann “could be extremely funny,” she stressed, “I was never impressed
with her movement quality. The thing that impressed me about Welland

WESTERN SPACES 81
 was the movement part. There was never a gesture or movement that was
not quite enough or too much.”34
Reviewers also saw diªerences between the two dancers’ styles, contrast-
ing Welland’s earnest narrative dramas with Ann’s lively, often humorous,
and always lushly movement-based works. When they gave a recital at the
California Palace of the Legion of Honor under the auspices of the San Fran-
cisco Dance League on October 26, 1947, Alfred Frankenstein, San Francis-
co’s leading art, music, and dance critic, reported:

Miss Halprin, as these columns have repeatedly noted, is particularly

fortunate in her vivid and compelling personality. She was born for the
theater, and would have made an excellent actress if she had not chosen
to be a dancer instead. She has a thorough command of all dance tech-
niques, and uses them brilliantly in the service of intelligent, important,
and at times highly entertaining ideas. . . . Most of Mr. Lathrop’s pieces
seemed to be much less well realized except for his “Three Characters
for a Passion Play,” wherein the emotional atmosphere of three medieval
types was beautifully set forth in movement.35

In another review from 1947, for a diªerent program sponsored by the San
Francisco Dance League, Frankenstein wrote:

Miss Halprin has a superb choreographic and theatrical sense, and she
used them splendidly both in her dramatic solo, entitled “Entombment,”
and in her satire on the ordinary events of daily life called “People
Unaware.” The several works of Welland Lathrop which were presented
were, I thought, excellent in idea, but somewhat static and relatively
uninteresting in realization.36

Another critic, with the unlikely name of Spencer Barefoot, had a similar
response to this program:

The work of Miss Halprin was the better integrated, and the more dra-
matically and choreographically forceful of the two. Mr. Lathrop’s dances
suªered at times, as they have in the past, from a failure to project with
complete conviction the elements of story, movement and emotion on
which the dances are based. This failure seems at least in part to be a
result of movement that is not always meaningful and necessary and of
a choreographic structure that does not always allow for proper climaxes
and dramatic development.37

82 WESTERN SPACES
 These reviews suggest that, even in this early work, Ann commented
ironically on the ponderously dramatic and self-consciously meaningful
nature of much contemporary modern dance. While this delighted the
critics, it may have distanced her further from Lathrop, particularly when
her buoyant little comedies were performed side by side with Lathrop’s
ambitious and weighty works like Hamlet. Perhaps in response to Ann’s
success with her humorous dances, Lathrop dabbled in comedy—with
mixed results. Here too his meaning did not seem to read clearly through
the movement, and for the critics the result was disappointing. About Lath-
rop’s Drawing Room Comedy, Barefoot wrote: “Mr. Lathrop had an excel-
lent idea, but a certain diªuseness of movement kept it from achieving
the desired results.”38
In her classes as well as her performances Ann oªered an alternative to
established modern dance. She used her background in education to shape
dance experiences for her students that encouraged cognitive and technical
growth rather than specifically preparing them for performing or requiring
the absorption of a defined body of material. In keeping with John Dewey’s
notions of Progressive education that she had absorbed from H’Doubler,
Ann challenged behavioral conformity and what Dewey had identified as
the “fundamental authoritarianism” of existing educational models.39 In-
stead, she oªered a “student-centered curriculum” in which her young
dancers took an active role in choosing and designing their dances, cos-
tumes, music, and stories. Gale Randall Chrisman, who in 1948, at age seven,
began studying with Ann, describes this experience as a “transforming
influence” on her life:

I fell in love with the dance classes. I would get on the bus on Saturday
with a hard knot of excitement in the pit of my stomach. The studio was
like all dance studios, wooden-floored with a piano in one corner, mirrors
along one wall. One area, with curtains, was raised up a few steps and it
could function as a primitive performance space. There were changing
rooms in a corridor behind. Facing the main studio area was a small railed-
oª area where parents could sit and watch the classes and wait for their
children to finish. . . .
I think Ann was a very highly gifted dance teacher of children. She
wanted children to love movement, to explore and extend their pleasure
and joy as dancers. I also think that as a dancer (and I could see this even
as a young child) she herself was riveting, compelling. She moved with
a feline grace and confidence, totally comfortable with her body and her
technique, which was not virtuosic, but somehow just right.40

WESTERN SPACES 83
 “I don’t recall anything being tense in Ann’s classes,” Chrisman recol-
lects. “Ann was a smiling, encouraging presence. The rehearsals and per-
formances were casual, open-house events, as I recall. Lightly costumed.
More a chance for parents to see what classes consisted of.”41 A photograph
taken by Chrisman’s parents at a 1949 student demonstration at Ann’s stu-
dio shows five boys and five girls, one of whom is African American, mess-
ily but enthusiastically galloping at full force across the studio while Ann
stands to one side, supporting their actions with the simple beat of her clap-
ping hands.42 She seems to be discreetly shaping, but not dominating, the
children’s excitement. They are all but oblivious to her presence, so engrossed
are they in flying across the studio. In another photograph the group sits
sprawled on the floor, avidly watching a classmate in a silly hat who bran-
dishes a handmade sword as he energetically gestures toward his classmates
with a lifted foot and upraised arm. All of the children are barefoot; the
boys wear t-shirts and slacks, the girls blouses and skirts—routine play-
clothes of the time. The message is clear—the dancing body is also the every-
day body. It transforms into an expressive art medium in a special space
with sound, light, and the dancers’ concentration.
In the most revealing photograph Ann, dressed in a leotard, tights, and
a long wrap-around dance skirt, holds a baton in her hand as she faces a
row of seven ten- to eleven-year-olds, each of whom pounds vigorously,
and completely out of unison, on a long row of lacquered Japanese drums.
Behind the children, some squiggly line drawings are pinned to the wall,
visual footprints of the movement paths of dances they have made. In all
the photographs Ann remains on the sideline while the children are the ac-
tive ones, with each child unselfconsciously immersed in his or her task as
dancer, musician, or audience. The blending of technique, improvisation,
composition, and visual art into a sweeping dance experience comes across
in Chrisman’s description of Ann’s teaching:

Classes began with a bit of tumbling work (somersaults, cartwheels). I

don’t remember how much technical training was incorporated into the
work we did as young children. But I remember it involved floor stretches
to develop flexibility (soles of the feet together, head down, bounces) and
quite a bit of cross floor movement (runs, gallops, leaps). Ann accompa-
nied her classes with drum, a gong, and she had us working with percus-
sive instruments as well. The emphasis, for the young children, was on
developing creativity. Each class ended with us drawing to music. We also
were encouraged to make up our own dances. I remember one performance
based upon a circus theme.43

84 WESTERN SPACES
 Just how unusual Ann’s approach was is clear when one compares pho-
tographs and descriptions of San Francisco’s other leading creative dance
studio of the era, the Peters Wright School of Dancing, headed by Lenore
Peters Job. In a 1946 photograph, a class of ten preadolescent girls, all white
and all in leotards, their hair neatly clipped back or braided, sit on the floor
grouped evenly around Job’s raised figure, on her chair. The air is formal
and reverential, suggesting a teacher-centered classroom that Job’s descrip-
tion of the workshop’s signature dance, The Picnic, confirms:
In quaint costumes three pairs of children are discovered downstage right,
back to the audience facing an imaginary rowboat. The music says, “Get
in, get in, get in, sit down,” and in turn they do just that: six children and
a chaperone. She sits facing them in the prow of the boat and they row and
wave to the shore. Next, having arrived at their destination, they “Get out,
get out, get out” upstage. Then they look around for a good place to settle
in, find it and run to the upper right stage and sit down. The next strain of
the music is legato when they eat their lunch supervised by the chaperone.44

There was definitely competition between the two studios. Job’s daugh-
ter, a dancer, teacher, and eventually director at the school, once commented
that when Ann arrived in town she seemed to dry up all the resources. Chris-
man confirmed the edginess, recalling once having attended a concert of
Lenore Job’s work with Ann. “It included an anti–Joe McCarthy dance
called, I think, The Informer,” Chrisman said. “It was full of ugly, pointing
movements, slithering, snakelike movements. Ann was quite dismissive of
the political content of the dance.”45
Over the school’s first three years more than two hundred adults and
children had enrolled in classes at the Halprin-Lathrop studio. This figure
included a sizable number of recreational dancers, an emphasis Ann delib-
erately brought to the studio. “Dancing is a way of life,” she claimed in a
feature in the San Francisco Chronicle, which lauded Ann as “one of a group
of young artists throughout the country with a new and vital approach to
the dance—a conception of it as something belonging to everyone, not
alone to highly trained virtuosos.”46 As in her children’s classes, Ann wel-
comed students of diªerent races in her adult classes. Ruth Beckford, an
African American dancer whose modern dance teacher at the University of
California at Berkeley sent her to study with Ann and Welland, explained:
“Everywhere we went people weren’t prepared for a black dancer and they
gasped. It was courageous for them to open the door to an African Amer-
ican dancer back then.”47

WESTERN SPACES 85
 Beckford also commented on Ann’s and Welland’s diªerent teaching styles,
noting that “Welland would say, ‘You have to pull up!’ He had kids running
out of the room crying. Ann was strict, but kind. They were both good
people.” Lathrop, who was gifted as a designer, began to oªer classes in cos-
tume design as well as Labanotation and Graham-based modern dance. Ann
veered oª in another direction, teaching classes in the Humphrey-Weidman
technique and a new area that rapidly became her signature—improvisation,
for both adults and children. Before long her hugely popular children’s’ classes
were supporting the rest of the studio.
Almost from the start the studio had oªered a special six-week summer
session. The 1948 summer session, for example, included classes in rhythmic
analysis, design, composition, contemporary dance technique, and ballet
for adults; children’s classes; and a seminar for teachers of children. During
the 1948 summer session the students and faculty decided to begin a dance
magazine. Impulse Magazine (later shortened to Impulse) debuted in the fall
of 1948 as a thirty-eight-page hand-typed journal edited by Murray Louis,
a student in the adult classes at the time. The inaugural issue, which had a
dramatic photo of Ann in profile, included articles by Louis, Jim ( James)
Waring, and Ann as well as commentaries by students, witty sketches by
Larry, and photographs of a concert and the students. Its goal was “to erase
some of the cloudy mysticism that generally surrounds modern dance” and
“to communicate to the community the activities in a dance school.”48 Ann
also tried to involve her students directly in the community, requiring that
those in her teacher training program do practice teaching of dance in lo-
cal schools, echoing the model she had experienced at the University of Wis-
consin. One of Ann’s advanced students, Jenny Hunter Groat, later clarified
the philosophy behind this practice: “Ann told us to read theory. We read
[ John] Dewey, Herbert Read. Ann mentioned H’Doubler all the time.”49
More and more, Ann was turning to improvisation as a major part of
her approach to teaching, using it to heighten students’ movement inven-
tion. She took H’Doubler’s fundamental kinesthetic exercises and explo-
rations of the actions of individual limbs and recontoured them into ways
of investigating internal emotional states. In doing so, she was consciously
reconfiguring H’Doubler’s movement investigations into devices for ac-
cessing fresh movement material. The beginning point for improvisation,
then, was always an exploration of the body’s natural movement tenden-
cies. “My training [was] in anatomy so it was easy for me to go into the
bone and muscle structure and to work like a kinesiologist,” Ann told
Yvonne Rainer in a 1965 interview. “When we improvised we were finding

86 WESTERN SPACES
out what our bodies could do, not learning somebody else’s pattern or tech-
nique. We would improvise with rotation or flexion or other anatomical
structures.”50
John Graham, who began taking classes at the Union Street studio in
1947 while a freshman at San Francisco State, was immediately captivated
by Ann’s experiments with improvisation. He had been taking Lathrop’s
classes regularly when he became intrigued by Ann and her interest in dance
as education. “I was fascinated by the kinds of things she would do with
young people,” Graham said. “She used ropes and stones and bells.” When
she oªered an hour-long improvisation class for anyone who could stay af-
ter the usual classes, Graham decided to try it. “The first instruction Ann
gave us was to curl one of our fingers and follow it,” he recalled. The struc-
ture of this movement investigation resembles H’Doubler’s approach, but
H’Doubler’s directives generally focused on the actions of big joints. The
idea of using a single finger to lead the entire body into movement carried
Ann’s unmistakable stamp, in both its whimsy and air of earnest question-
ing. Even years later, Graham was enchanted by the novelty and simplic-
ity of Ann’s instruction. “To me that was the basis of all of Ann’s work—
that attitude to make it simple, possible and available. And she made you
feel that you were such a success at it. . . . The whole process was about dis-
covering things for yourself.”51
Ann’s high-velocity personality was also an important part of her draw
as a teacher. “Ann had this incredible magnetism—physical, personal,”
Hunter Groat said, drawing a vivid verbal portrait of Ann as a dancer in
her early thirties. “She was an enormously charismatic person. . . . She was
gorgeous and willowy, with a beautiful body. She was long-waisted, flexi-
ble, with a closely knit body and her hair was frizzy and full. Her arms, her
hands, and the sensitivity of her toes and feet were extraordinary. When
she did whole body movements she was totally in command.”
Ann shaped her experiments in improvisation into what she called “or-
ganic choreography,” in contrast to the “representational choreography” of
most modern dance.52 Critical to her use of improvisation was her view of
it as a compositional and physical training device as well as an ideational
one. In almost the reverse process of Merce Cunningham’s aleatoric meth-
ods, Ann stepped outside of an approach to dance that put the conscious
shaping of the mind first, before gradually addressing the body. Instead,
she asked her dancers to first move and then think, edit, and shape their
material, progressing from raw improvised action into dance with an emo-
tional resonance. Ann carefully qualified the nature of this emotion, in-

WESTERN SPACES 87
 sisting that “emotion in art must become impersonal,” not so much im-
mediately felt as broadly represented.53 In the postwar conservatism of the
time this was a critical sequencing, leading the dancers gently into the rad-
ical act of dancing about oneself.
In a lengthy essay published in the 1948 Impulse Ann recounted an
anecdote about how teaching children at the studio led her deeper into
improvisation:

The children had arrived early as usual, and started to play with the
instruments and tumble on the mats in the studio. A few moments later
an excited youngster came running in the back patio to find me and
breathlessly ask me to come and help them with a dance. Apparently
they had come across a record of a Prokofiev classical symphony and had
started to play it on the record machine. The children had started, almost
involuntarily, to dance around the room. Their movements were com-
pletely undisciplined and disorganized. Although they felt a deep desire
to dance to the music, they had soon realized that they had exhausted
their own possibilities and needed help.
What these children had experienced in this first complete free period of
reaction was the basic springboard which all creative artists experience. No
matter what the age or the art medium may be, there is always a strong
compulsive urge towards improvisation as a result of a specific stimuli.
I immediately realized the challenge this placed before me as a teacher.
I had to preserve the spontaneity and the high enthusiasm that these
children-artists were bubbling with, and at the same time I had to channel
it and give them the sense of organization they felt they needed. Only in
this way could they feel a sense of progress and accomplishment.54

In lauding the innocent wisdom of children as a source for her own in-
vention and at the same time acknowledging the way structure contrasts so
productively with freedom in art, Ann echoed the sentiments of other con-
temporary visual and literary artists who were looking to “innocent”
sources—non-Western cultures, precolonial tribes, and children—for fresh
inspiration in their own work.
In a 1949 essay for Impulse, Ann described how her children’s dance class
progressed from follow-the-leader locomotor explorations, strongly rem-
iniscent of H’Doubler’s approach, to leading her students into assembling
short movement phrases as the kinetic translation of visual images or
sounds and finally into imaginary trips, which each child narrated silently
through a vocabulary of movement gestures. This experience seems very

88 WESTERN SPACES
full for the child and incredibly demanding of the teacher. At the same
time the child is learning various paths into a rich improvisatory experi-
ence, the teacher, Ann, must improvise the “tasks” that will keep engag-
ing the children.

It is important that the child’s everyday experience be brought into focus

by the teacher in the dance class. It is also an enhancement that the teacher
add to whatever is lacking in the child’s realm of experience. The teacher
can bring this approach to his class by knowing the child’s age level char-
acteristic, being aware of his background influences and keeping up with
subjects he is learning at school. The teacher must also have established a
friendly and sympathetic atmosphere in the classroom so that the children
are free to respond. From the response of the children the teacher can
get his cue whether to dance about fairies and flowers or fire engines and
scribble houses, or just a wiggly movement with a sudden stop. Teaching
this way you never know what will happen in advance of a class.55

Ann’s essay also warns that “the teacher must not let the children merely
pantomime a story but rather guide them to give simple form in pure move-
ment to their own creative imagination. The teacher should also cultivate
good motor skills and develop pattern to an otherwise bedlam of noise and
uncontrolled activity.”56
In the 1955 issue of Impulse, Ann oªers further thoughts on improvisa-
tion, stressing it now as “a means of execution and a way for releasing the
free flow of intuitive intelligence.”

The basic method in improvisation is twofold. The first and most impor-
tant is that the dancer must have no other factor but the kinesthetic sense
to rely on in the process of improvising. The second requirement is that
there be absolutely no preconceived notion to direct the action. . . . He
must be a craftsman as he uses his kinesthetic sense, and a creator as he
thinks with it. He will improvise as a way of unleashing inner experiences,
and will shape and define this experience with his creative intelligence.57

In order to make improvisation a serious choreographic method, Ann

consciously bled it of spontaneous messiness. She shaped it as discovery
within parameters where movements originated in an intuitive union of
feelings with actions. It was also great fun, particularly for the children, most
of whom had few outlets oªering this kind of freedom.
The dance training Ann favored, as she explained in a 1957 essay in Im-

WESTERN SPACES 89
 pulse, was one that “integrates technique with expression at every level of
the child’s growth [in order to] bring forth a child who dances with spon-
taneity, a freshness and a vitality with the expressive mind flowing through
the muscles and nerves.” To encourage children (and adults) to move “with
grace and freedom,” she reconceptualized dance as “training for expression”
rather than “senseless activity and a needless waste of time and energy that
will only end in stifling their creative impulse by exhausting it with frus-
trated eªort.”58
Although the value of improvisation was well recognized by jazz musi-
cians, who had always associated it with a special kind of virtuosity, im-
provisation in dance training was almost unheard of when Ann started using
it. Most children’s dance teaching of the time focused on structured warm-
up exercises and movement pantomimes of poems and simple stories—
just the kind of thing Ann said exhausted children’s creativity. That Ann
directed her young charges, as well as her adult students, to really move with
great abandon and invention was radical.

Ann’s belief in the value of improvisation received critical support from

Doris Dennison, an accomplished musician who became the music direc-
tor and accompanist at the Halprin-Lathrop School. Dennison, a gradu-
ate of a two-year program at the Dalcroze School of Eurythmics in Lon-
don, had met Lathrop at Seattle’s Cornish School, where she taught from
1938 to 1940 under the head of the dance department, the former Graham
dancer Bonnie Bird. A young musician named John Cage was Bird’s ac-
companist and Dennison was quickly enlisted as a second. “I was helping
John play the piano,” Dennison said years later. “I’d play one hand and John
would play the other.”59
In the summer of 1940 Cage was invited to give a percussion concert at
Mills College in Oakland, and he brought Dennison and another musician
from the Cornish School with him. Dennison had a great time at Mills and
the following year she relocated to the Bay Area, taking a job accompany-
ing movement classes at a gym in Alameda. Then, in the fall of 1941, the
dance accompanist at Mills left and Dennison was hired, remaining at Mills
for thirty years. She started accompanying classes at the Halprin-Lathrop
studio in 1946.
“I thought she was very good,” Dennison later said of Ann. “Ann had
fire. You watched her. But her and Welland’s approach to dance was so diªer-

90 WESTERN SPACES
ent. I had some troubles with her classes. She did beautiful free classes for
children. But as far as her work with adults or in composition—there was
a lot of improvisation. She had created such an atmosphere of freedom that
little kids would come into the studio before class and just start moving
without a word. They would just get in there and improvise and I’d do the
same [on my instruments].”60 For Dennison, improvisation seemed okay
to use for children’s dance or as a musical accompaniment, but an entire
adult dance class of improvisation was taking things too far.
Elaborating her views on improvisation and musical accompaniment in
a short essay for the inaugural 1948 issue of Impulse, she underlines the in-
timate physical responsiveness an accompanist must have to a dance teacher.
Perhaps reflecting her early association with Cage, she also suggests silence
as a useful feature of accompaniment at certain moments in a dance.

The dictionary defines improvisation as a process of playing or doing

without preparation, and that is what must be constantly kept in mind.
There must be no preconceived idea limiting or in any way blocking the
unity between the pianist and the dancer. This policy is of course varied
to the instructions of the teacher, but in almost any case the fluctuating
ability of the musician must always be present. Often when a rhythm
has been established the accompanist will find himself in the position
of being unnecessary to the students moving across the floor, in which
case he may stop playing and let the dancers continue their own count-
ing, but he must remain so much a part of the entire movement that
the moment the tempo falters or slackens, he can enter the picture and
support the class.61

Ann’s experiments with adult improvisation in the late 1940s may not have
profoundly impressed Dennison, but they influenced an important quar-
tet of adult dancers—Murray Louis, James Waring, Richard Ford, and
Nancy Cronenwelt Meehan—at a significant moment in the beginning of
their careers. Ann’s eªectiveness as an improvisation teacher for adults lay
in her ability to inspire her students with the infectiousness of her own high
energy and then to give them just enough direction to set them in motion
but not so much as to foreclose their own invention or overdetermine the
outcome.
Murray Louis arrived at the Halprin-Lathrop studio in the late spring of
1946, soon after he was discharged from the navy in San Francisco. A na-
tive of Brooklyn, Louis had been drafted in 1942 at the age of eighteen. His

WESTERN SPACES 91
 sisters, both modern dancers, had studied with the Jewish dancer Benjamin
Zemiach, a 1920s Russian émigré from the Habima Theater in Moscow,
and at sixteen Louis had turned the pages for a pianist at one of Helen
Tamiris’s concerts.62 So Louis knew about modern dance, and he had made
up his mind that he too was going to dance after he was discharged. “I knew
I was going to dance, I was a natural dancer,” he recollected. “So I went to
see the Halprin-Lathrop studio on Union Street. The little arts commu-
nity in San Francisco knew about her.”63
Initially, Louis took technique classes with Lathrop. “They were agony
for my body,” he recalled of those Graham-based lessons. “I also decided I
wasn’t going to be a ballet dancer because I didn’t like those Russian shoes
you had to wear where you rocked on a slab of leather.” Then he found Ann:

What I discovered with Ann was an improvisation class. I just gravitated

to it. She was high energy. Everything about her was vital. The way she
moved. The way she talked. She contacted on an energy level that was my
level, and it was vital for me. With Ann it was a free experience of being
in the movement. It all dealt with experience, and later when I discovered
John Dewey I recognized it.
I responded to Ann’s vitality—all the people she attracted responded
to that vitality. James Waring was in that class, and Doris did the percus-
sion. With Welland I stepped on the brakes, but with Ann it was releasing
my energy. She taught me to step on the gas. It was in her improvisation
classes that I decided I would be a dancer.64

Ann remembered Louis with equal aªection: “Murray was a very lively stu-
dent. Very bright and he loved the work. He and I just hit it oª. He was
there for about three years and I really enjoyed him. He was a very upbeat
guy and he was certainly talented. With Murray the work we did together
was an entranceway for him to work with Nik [Alwin Nikolais]. I was de-
lighted they found each other.”65
After meeting Nikolais in Hanya Holm’s summer dance program in Col-
orado in 1949, Louis moved to New York and began developing the
children’s dance program at the Henry Street Playhouse, where Nikolais’s
work was based. Louis immediately began incorporating what he had
learned from Ann, and improvisation became a central element of his classes.
As he later explained to Jennifer Dunning of the New York Times, “We’d
improvise with the arms or feet, all of the things an arm or foot can do.
This became a way of exploring the body and strengthening it, of giving

92 WESTERN SPACES
the children a taste for the range of movement rather than the limitation
that a technique class imposes.”66
James Waring, like Louis, studied improvisation with Ann in the first
few years of the Halprin-Lathrop studio and then took that experience with
him to New York in 1949. The dance critic Mindy Aloª once described
Waring as “a teacher of classical ballet known for his highly individual and
often fantastical dances of the 1950s and 1960s, works which influenced the
founders of the Judson Dance Theater.”67 Unlike Louis, however, Waring
did not tend to credit his study at the Halprin-Lathrop studio as influenc-
ing his later life as a choreographer.
It wasn’t Waring’s dancing so much as his physical presence that made a
vivid impression on Ann. “Waring was very frail and thin and delicate and
very introverted,” she recalled. She knew he had been a ballet dancer and
that now he wanted to experience modern dance. “I was such a purist that
I didn’t take him seriously,” she said. “I thought, ‘How can you be a ballet
dancer and a modern dancer?’”68
Waring, however, was determined to study both dance forms. In an ar-
ticle for the 1948 issue of Impulse, he ruminated on the ideal technical prepa-
ration for a dancer. He concluded that, with the exception of “a great ge-
nius” like Isadora Duncan, who “has no need of technique at all,” it is
“imperative for a professional dancer to equip himself with at least two
diªerent conceptions of dance movement—classic ballet and contempo-
rary dance.”69 Waring was sampling dance styles, and while improvisation
was not on his list, Ann must have presented her approach to movement
invention with enough rigor to make him willing to include it in his reper-
toire of dance forms that year.
Although Waring didn’t have any money, Ann invited him to take the
improvisation class for free rather than watch it, as he initially requested.
Because her movement approach was radical at the time, she worried that
anyone simply observing it wouldn’t understand it. “I was a little embar-
rassed to have people watch,” she confessed. “Perhaps I thought it might
have looked chaotic because at that time I was drawn to children’s freedom.
I was looking for something more. I wanted to free things up.”70 Waring
stayed at the studio for a year, teaching ballet for Lathrop while he studied
with both teachers and watched Ann develop her methods for teaching im-
provisation. In the late 1940s Jim Waring left for New York.
Louis and Waring both filtered what they had learned from Ann’s im-
provisation classes into their own choreography and teaching, but Richard
Ford took his experiences in her classes into the highly visible arena of public

WESTERN SPACES 93
 television. Ford, who arrived at the Halprin-Lathrop studio the year it
opened, was soon performing in Ann’s and Lathrop’s dances and subse-
quently taught at the Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative Ann started in
1948. Tall, with the lanky grace of Dick Van Dyke, a popular actor at the
time, Ford parlayed his knowledge of improvisational dance for children
into Hop, Skip and Dance, a popular half-hour program on San Francisco’s
public television station, KQED. The director of KQED had initially ap-
proached Ann, asking her if she might be interested in creating a television
show out of her children’s improvisation classes. Although she thought it
was a great idea, she said it would be nice to have a male dance teacher be-
cause it might help to draw young boys into dance. What Ford taught was
Ann’s approach to dance improvisation. Even the title of the show reflected
Ann’s approach of sliding gently into movement improvisation as just an-
other step in an easy progression from play and games to dance.
In a 1953 article for Impulse, Ford echoed Ann’s emphasis on the impor-
tance of having a male dance teacher model: “I feel that, if possible, boys
should have a man teacher for their introduction to dance because, for the
boys’ safety, physical strength is necessary in teaching tumbling feats, and,
more important, the leadership of a man gives a masculine model. There
is such a fear of being considered a ‘sissy’ that even the wearing of shorts
in class has been on occasion a stumbling block.” Ironically, while lament-
ing traditional biases against men in dance, Ford tacitly confirms some of
them in his insistence in presenting himself as a “non-sissy” dancing male
who uses masculine props and sports games to ease boys into creative dance
and improvisation.71
Among the female dancers Ann influenced was Nancy Cronenwelt Mee-
han, who began taking classes at the Halprin-Lathrop studio in the summer
of 1953, right after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley,
with a BA in sociology. Meehan’s real passion was not sociology, but the
arts, and she was already an accomplished pianist and had trained as a dancer
at the San Francisco Ballet School before arriving at the Union Street stu-
dio. “When I first came to the studio, Welland was teaching and he im-
mediately oªered me a scholarship and welcomed me so wonderfully that
I fell in love with being there,” Meehan recollected.72 Within a few weeks
she discovered Ann’s Wednesday night adult improvisation class, and for
the next three years she regularly took evening and weekend classes, study-
ing Graham technique and Louis Horst’s approach to composition with
Lathrop and improvisation with Ann. “Both of them had commitments to
dance that were so strong, positive, and generous; it was very inspiring,”

94 WESTERN SPACES
Meehan remembered. “They created a whole atmosphere that was like a
total world of art and theater and dance. It wasn’t just technique. There
was this feeling that it was a whole part of your life, and everybody pitched
in. We all helped with everything, making the costumes, etc. It was really
quite idyllic in a way.”
According to Meehan, H’Doubler’s influence was pronounced in Ann’s
improvisation class in that the emphasis was on self-discovery. “It didn’t
have an end in sight that I could specifically see,” she recalled. “It was about
freeing you up and getting you to sense what you were doing, rather than
just copying an external form.” It was while she was at the Halprin-Lathrop
studio that Meehan began choreographing, premiering her first work on a
program that Ann arranged.
While Ann was influencing young dancers like Louis, Waring, Ford, and
Meehan, she herself continued to be influenced by others. One such influ-
ence was the dance educator and anthropologist Francesca Boas, who be-
came a guest teacher at the Halprin-Lathrop School during the summer
of 1953. Boas, a graduate of Barnard College, was the daughter of the fa-
mous German Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas, an expert on the North-
west Coast Indians and the pioneer of American anthropology. A.A. Leath,
who joined Ann as an assistant that summer, remembers, “Boas’s accom-
paniment was from her primitive self and Ann picked up on this,” using
it later in her improvisation classes for interested adults.73 Gertrude Lip-
pincott, an influential Midwest dance educator, head of the Modern Dance
Center in Minneapolis, also taught in the 1953 summer program at the
studio.

One of the most important influences on Ann, not only while she was run-
ning the studio with Lathrop but throughout her career, was her husband,
Larry. In their early years together, the Halprins were very open about the
stimulation and insight each gained from the other’s work. In 1949 Larry
wrote a contemporary fable about the theatrical nature of gardens over time,
illustrating it with his own whimsical Steig-like line drawings:

Our lives have changed over the years. So have our dances, and our gar-
dens. We are no longer content to sit sti›y in the garden in our best Sun-
day clothes, protected from the sun by a frilled umbrella. Our gardens
have become more dynamic and should be designed with the moving
person in mind. Our garden space has become a framework within which

WESTERN SPACES 95
 activities of all sorts take place. . . . As a framework for movement activities
the garden can influence our lives tremendously . . . it can influence people’s
movement patterns through its spaces taking on the fine sense of dance.74

His vision of a garden here is of a space whose design has a rhythm that is
visual as well as kinesthetic. Landscape is choreography in the model of de-
sign Larry describes. He concludes his essay with the promise that a well-
designed environment has the capacity to “give our lives the continuous
sense of dance.” The full implications of that are still a few years away, yet
his essay gives a sense of the capacity of space to animate actions and emo-
tions and for dance to stand as the ideal model of the body deployed har-
moniously, and yet socially responsively, in the world.
For both Larry and Ann, their artistic careers were interwoven with their
life together. Ann, for instance, continued teaching until just a few days
before giving birth to their first child, Daria Lurie Halprin, on December
30, 1948. And she resumed teaching two weeks later. The birth announce-
ment Larry designed is a jaunty line drawing showing an elaborately cos-
tumed clown ceremoniously drawing back a curtain to reveal the text: “Daria
Halprin, Dec. 30 1948, Ann, Larry.” Although parenting would be a ma-
jor collaborative production for Ann and Larry, it would not slow their de-
veloping artistic careers.
Four months after Daria’s birth, on April 30, 1949, Ann, Lathrop, and
Ford presented a full-length dance concert, which sold out, at San Fran-
cisco’s Marines Memorial Theater. A few days later they reprised it in South-
ern California at Royce Hall Auditorium on the University of California,
Los Angeles, campus, under the sponsorship of the university and the phys-
ical education department. Ann performed in five of the eight dances pre-
sented, including her solos The Lonely Ones and The Prophetess. If she had
once worried that motherhood would end her career as a dancer, she seemed
determined to demonstrate emphatically that it would not. In fact, it seemed
to accelerate it.
For Larry, the year following Daria’s birth was also a productive one, with
the opening of his o‹ce on Montgomery Street in September 1949. Before
the year was out he designed his first major garden in collaboration with the
architect William Wurster. The clients were Mr. and Mrs. Isadore Schuman
(Ann’s parents), who had moved to California in order to be near Ann and
Larry and their new family. Working on four level acres in Woodside, not
far from San Francisco, Larry created a huge meadow of golden poppies as
the centerpiece of the garden. In a March 1955 feature in Sunset on the Schu-

96 WESTERN SPACES
man garden, Larry said that it was “conceived as a space for movement—
movement of people, and of birds, rabbits and other wildlife.”75 He made
several home movies of Ann and her dancers performing Jewish-themed
dances in the dense meadow as if it were the promised land.

Interestingly, just when Ann was about to become a mother herself, she in-
creased her involvement in teaching dance to children. Early in 1948, soon
after she became pregnant with Daria, Ann was asked by the parents of a
co-op nursery school in Marin to teach some creative dance classes for the
children. The classes proved very successful, and within a few months Ann
joined a group of liberal mothers to organize a new cooperative that would
focus exclusively on creative dance for children. Incorporated as a nonprofit
community organization, this dance co-op had strict rules—drafted by the
parents as part of its by-laws. Mothers and fathers were asked to partici-
pate with their child, and at least twice a semester parents were required to
assist in the dance classes, escorting children to the bathroom, tending to
the injured, and helping the dance teacher demonstrate movement games
like “floppy flop.” Within a few years the program grew to include more
than eight hundred boys and girls between the ages of three and sixteen
studying modern dance at six sites throughout Marin County.
“I was captivated by the unpredictability of what the kids would do,”
Ann later said of the open-structured movement exercises she designed for
this program. “I was interested in getting the children to be present. I might
say something like ‘Skip’ and then I would close that direction by saying
‘backwards,’ ‘faster,’ ‘smaller.’ I was most interested in just generating an
idea.”76 As with her own work Ann preferred that movement have its own
meaning rather than stand as a symbol for something else. And the way
one arrived at this meaning was through guided improvisatory work. “I can-
not approach art symbolically or literally with any enthusiasm,” Ann
would write in a letter to the parents of her young students in 1960, “and
therefore I cannot teach this way. The most rewarding part of teaching
children is that the child’s art is one of complete immediacy. It is impossi-
ble to bottle it up into the art labels of adulthood.”77
A.A. Leath remembered these improvisation classes as being a complete
revelation for him when he arrived in San Francisco in August 1953. Ann
had asked H’Doubler for help in finding a good teacher to assist with her
booming children’s classes, both in Marin and in the city, and H’Doubler
responded by sending Leath, a doctoral student in biology who had been

WESTERN SPACES 97
 auditing her dance classes at the University of Wisconsin. Compact, mus-
cular, and delightfully unpredictable as a dancer, Leath connected instantly
to Halprin’s improvisation classes.
Teaching children served Ann both as an educator and as an artist. Indeed,
Leath always insisted that he and Ann were educators first. “The dance pro-
ductions were, in a sense, by-products of our discoveries of teaching and
making the development of one’s creativity possible,” he said.78 The cre-
ation of conditions in which learning could take place would prove to be
one of Ann’s steadiest gifts as a dance maker. Her first choreographic goal
was never just generating the movements themselves, but rather imparting
to dancers the tools for unlocking movements within themselves and learn-
ing to read their environment for movement scores.
In linking her children’s dance classes with the beginning of her own
family, Ann was also probably acknowledging the conflicting tensions of
the time, which saw satisfaction for women largely tied to the fulfillment
of their duties as wives and mothers. Ann had already opted for a personal
life over a strictly professional one when she left the East Coast for the Bay
Area. The Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative, although it eventually
proved profitable and artistically inspirational for Ann, was, in its early
years, a means of keeping the two halves of her life—the domestic and
the artistic—connected.79
Ann worked with the Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative for twenty-
two years, until 1970, the year her second daughter, Rana, graduated from
high school. “My whole concept in working with children was to have them
appreciate their aliveness,” Ann later said. “I wanted to give them a sense
of believing in themselves so they weren’t worried about being right or
wrong. It takes a lot of self-confidence to be a dancer because you are to-
tally exposed all the time. It takes the most courage [of any performing art].
Kids have to grow up believing they are just fine the way they are. I did this
through improvisation because with improvisation you aren’t right or
wrong, you just are.”80
“Improvisation was a tool, the most important tool, I used with the
children’s dance collective,” Ann emphasized. And she used this tool to link
movement to other arts. As she stated in Dance Magazine in 1957:

All co-op teachers share [my] underlying conviction about the impor-
tance of imbuing and maintaining in the children a genuine pleasure for
discovering dance ideas in all their experiences. The primary motivation
is to encourage each child to realize and understand the basic values of

98 WESTERN SPACES
 creative movement. He is instructed in percussion and singing, so that
dance becomes an integrated art experience. Classes draw upon the multi-
ple stimuli of poetry, drama, painting and sculpture.81

A fragment of black-and-white film footage dating from 1957 or 1958 gives

a sense of these early children’s classes in improvisation and their strong en-
semble quality. Shot by Larry with a hand-held camera, this film unfolds
as a slice of spontaneous play. It begins with a chain of little girls, led by
Ann’s daughter Daria, dashing downhill across the stairs that led to Ann’s
outdoor dance deck. Like nymphs from the woods come to frolic in a forest
glade, they skip wildly around the gnarled madrone trees that poke through
the dance deck, each child a study in the naturalistic beauty of simple skips,
jumps, and running turns.
Next, faces serene and bodies blissfully limp, the children lie on the deck
and take turns relaxing and letting each other gently lift and rotate their
arms and legs in a sequence Ann called “floppy flop.” One little girl in a
black leotard lies on the floor, looking as if she were dreamily floating, while
another child softly tugs her limp arms and legs until her whole body flops
over in a sleepy roll. One of the most touching passages is between Ann’s
oldest daughter, Daria, about nine years old, and a younger child whom
she tenderly pulls to standing. There is an air of intense investment in the
immediate task that Daria conveys as she leans back to get more leverage
on the soft body she is tugging. Her concentration is both focused and aªec-
tionate. She is performing a task, yet one is also aware of how the trusting
little child gives Daria complete authority to shape her body. (One can imag-
ine the attraction this kind of meditative focus must have held for adult
performers a few years later, in the 1960s, when “being present” was such an
important social as well as aesthetic goal.)
Ann’s belief in improvisation as a serious tool of dance invention is most
apparent, ironically, in the way she frames it as something for which the
body must be physically and emotionally prepared. The “floppy flop” ex-
ercise would become a staple of Ann’s teaching and a means for attending
to the first murmurings of the conversation with one’s body that improvi-
sation initiates. She also developed lucid warm-ups designed to prepare the
body for improvisation that were later codified into a form she called move-
ment ritual. This movement practice is “about coming back to feeling the
body and feeling the integration of yourself,” she explains. “It’s a basic
identification of how you are as a dancer.”82
The final few minutes of the dance co-op film footage show three girls

WESTERN SPACES 99
 in a pose that echoes the twisted lines of the large madrone branch that
lies next to them on the dance floor. One by one they propel themselves
around the branch, echoing the form of its smaller branches with reach-
ing arms and stretched legs. What is most captivating about this section
of film is not its fascination as a performance product, which even Ann
would probably agree is negligible, but what it reveals about the dancers’
attention to their environment. These girls are looking seriously at the
branch, feeling its linearity, its stiªness, and the arabesques of its curving
wood. It seems that a first step in finding out what is inside is to ac-
knowledge and respond to the forces of the surrounding world that im-
pinge on our protected interior.
In the late 1950s, in an address she gave before the annual recital of her
Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative, Ann noted: “We are children once
in a lifetime of art. The way we experience [art] in our youth may open its
world of seeing, enjoying, creating for the rest of our lives.”83 So here is an-
other key attraction improvisation held for Ann: it is about a process of
discovery, of engagement with the world that, once revealed, can become
a path and a process to be visited again and again. For Ann, improvisation
and its discoveries are a way of being in the world and of fashioning reli-
able paths through its complexities.
This view of improvisation as a way of discovering the world comes across
in a second film of her Marin Children’s Cooperative Dance classes, dat-
ing from the early 1960s, which documents an indoor end-of-the-year fes-
tival. The dancers range from toddlers with their mothers to teenagers, and
for each age group the reality of their moment now in the world is also the
text of their dance. This is particularly evident in a curious exchange be-
tween two adolescents, a dark-haired boy and a long-haired blond girl. Fac-
ing each other, they stare for a long moment into one another’s eyes and
then the boy dodges as the girl lunges for him, their play fraught with the
awkwardness of budding sexual attraction.
Ann was on a mission to foster creative vision by letting her students be
themselves. “I had begun to realize that a class didn’t have to be orderly,
that it wasn’t so bad if a class was unstructured,” she remarked. “If a cer-
tain amount of chaos didn’t bother the children, why should it bother me?”84
She did, however, worry that the term improvisation might be misunder-
stood, as the word was too often associated with casualness, a casualness
antithetical to what she saw as the real purpose of her children’s dance classes.
For her the classes entailed the serious task of enhancing a child’s natural

100 WESTERN SPACES

awareness while, in her own words, “providing a method of training that
would let the child grow, develop, and mature.”85
As she explored the uses of improvisation, Ann kept returning to
H’Doubler’s model. In class H’Doubler had spent hours having students
explore the motion of various joints of the body as the wellspring of move-
ment invention. For Ann, this notion of discovery within the body’s own
set parameters was a way to find oneself without relinquishing total con-
trol; it oªered a structure for learning about one’s own potential for cre-
ative movement. “I [wanted] structures I could use that told each child what
but not how,” Ann said. “As a guide I had to be open and flexible.”86
In the end teaching dance to children helped Ann find an open-structured
form of movement pedagogy for adults. “She had a real gift for teaching
children,” her daughter Daria remarked years later. “She just set up an ab-
solute playground, a fantasy stage. In a way she was such a child herself.
[She] was working with the imagination and play and speaking to the essence
of what it means to be a child.”87

Although the Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative represented a step to-

ward combining Ann’s domestic and artistic life, there were conflicts. Ann
still needed space both for rehearsing and for her teaching of adults, so she
continued to share the studio with Lathrop. In the fall of 1950, Mademoi-
selle magazine ran a feature on jobs and futures for college dance majors,
noting the financial hardships of a career in dance. Included among the five
college graduates in dance was Ann, the only one who was married and had
a child. “She teaches about half her working time, spends the rest practic-
ing for concerts or choreographing new dances,” the article stated, noting
that dancers had to teach if they wanted to earn a livelihood.88
In 1951, however, a change in the Halprins’ domestic world altered this
picture, giving Ann an opportunity to rejuggle her three-part balancing act
between teaching, choreographing, and caring for her family. The Halprins
hired the architectural firm of Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons to design a
simple, compact redwood and glass home for them on a dramatic three-
acre site Larry had picked out on the bayside flank of Mount Tamalpais.
The home was completed in the winter of 1952, and late that year Larry
and Ann moved into it, with Daria and their infant daughter, Rana Ida,
who had been born that June.
In addition to oªering a panoramic vista of the San Francisco Bay and

WESTERN SPACES 101

 marshes, the hillside site was surrounded by redwood and madrone trees.
As Larry described it:

The site is steep and covered with madrone, redwood, bay, California
live oak, and tanbark oak trees. Undergrowth is bracken fern, some sword
fern and wild blackberry. The views are south to the 300-ft. peak of Mt.
Tamalpais and eastward across San Francisco Bay to Berkeley. We are at
the end of a narrow road which has no other houses and winds down the
cliª ’s edge to a turn-around. One parks outside the fence and walking
through the low entrance gate sees the house for the first time ahead. This
entrance garden is a space confined on three sides by walls formed by the
fence at the entrance, a 25 foot vertical-cut bank on the left, and the two-
story element of the house ahead. But the space explodes outward to the
view on the downhill side—it is in eªect, an outward room opening across
a broad expanse of treetops forming a green, almost level carpet to the
view. This entrance garden is paved in red brick and the trunks of birch
form a sequence of space markers along its edge. The house has much
the same space configurations [as the garden]. You enter by the front door
into a low-ceilinged, confined entrance under the stair and, to the right,
the glass-enclosed living room extends out into the view with a high
ceiling which moves the space vertically as well. . . . I attempted in my
design to make the most of all these relationships, these elements; to use
the site to the fullest capacity; to put on the land what would enhance it,
and in that way to enrich the living environment of my family.89

The Halprin home and garden become in this description a stage set with
strongly determining influences on the kinds of “freedoms” one enjoys there.
What it invites is a structured improvisation. One is both in the midst of
the woods and observing them from the glass walls of the house’s main rooms.
In this house Larry and Ann would find the most extreme privacy one
could imagine in an urban setting. More than fifty years later the home re-
mains almost as secluded, remote, and secret as when it was built. The set-
ting is so private that the design of the house can be extraordinarily open
and revealing. And it seems interesting that, as he had done with their first
home, Larry took this intensely private house and presented it to an audi-
ence of unknown viewers in his May 1958 cover story for Progressive Archi-
tecture, the architectural magazine with the biggest circulation in the world.
In doing this, Larry was playing with the tension between the seclusion of
his daily domestic life and the broadly public presentation of the discover-
ies it allowed. Just as Larry began designing intensely private domestic en-

102 WESTERN SPACES

vironments and landscapes that he proudly revealed to huge audiences in
numerous drawings, photographs, and articles, Ann would make public art
about private issues germinated in the privacy of her home dance studio.
The need for a home dance studio came to the fore with the birth of
Rana, as Ann began to find commuting from Kentfield to San Francisco
increasingly burdensome. Now that Larry had his own architectural firm
he was feeling new financial pressures. Not only was the rent on the Union
Street studio a steady expense, but few, if any, of Ann and Welland’s con-
certs made money and the costs of production and theater rental were high.
Moreover, Ann had problems with the caregivers she engaged to help her
with the girls. One afternoon she was hurriedly summoned home by neigh-
bors when the woman caring for little Rana passed out in a drunken stu-
por on the sofa and started a small fire with her lit cigarette. Although no
one was hurt, Ann always felt uneasy afterward, wondering about the level
of care her daughters received in her absence.
Late in 1953 Larry engaged the respected theater architect and designer
Arch Lauterer to work with him in designing an outdoor dance studio for
Ann. The bringing together of their two areas of design expertise, Lauterer’s
with theaters and Larry’s with outdoor “rooms,” would result in the cre-
ation of one of the most legendary dance spaces in contemporary dance.
This outdoor dance deck would materialize physical and imaginary space
simultaneously, turning presentational space into a site of poetic transfor-
mation. In a 1954 essay he wrote for a Canadian architectural journal, Larry
argued for a new conception of garden design as “an art of shelter” and of
gardens as powerful utilitarian environments that enrich the lives of people
who live in them. “In the final analysis, the garden is simply one of the
most wonderful aspects of environment we can design and control. It is
our total environment and all the parts of it which we must transform
through design into a rich and varied work of art,” Larry wrote.90
One senses in his writing the growing enthusiasm of a man who is pas-
sionate about environmental design and determined to move it from the
fringes of daily life into the center of socially and aesthetically useful prac-
tices. The idea for the dance deck may have come in part from a commis-
sion Larry had completed the previous year, in 1953. In one of only a few
projects in which he designed the building as well as the landscape, Larry
created a modular glass, stucco, and plywood building for the Red Hill Nurs-
ery in San Anselmo. A feature about the project in Sunset suggests Larry
created the building because it was a nursery filled with plants and hence
close to landscape architecture. Another reason may have been that its sim-

WESTERN SPACES 103

 ilarity to the Halprin property permitted him to build a prototype deck on
a steep slope before he tackled the considerably larger deck he would build
for Ann’s dance classes and performances.
The nursery was set on hillside that sloped steeply down to a creek. To
increase the site’s usability, Larry extended a deck out over the creek, blend-
ing indoor and outdoor elements. When Larry and Lauterer built the dance
deck on the Halprin’s similarly steep acreage, the blending of indoor and
outdoor was also a feature, albeit more subtly attenuated on the dance deck.
In Red Hill the indoor building and outdoor deck were contiguous, while
the Halprin house and outdoor deck were linked conceptually rather than
physically. The oddly shaped dance deck was designed by Larry to echo the
angular pattern of the house, which is some fifty feet up the hill.
Within a few months of its completion, in the spring of 1954, the dance
deck, as this outdoor studio was called, not only transformed Ann’s life, it
profoundly changed her art. “Arch Lauterer and Larry have designed a
magnificently beautiful and straightforward dance deck in our own woods
that can also be used as an outdoor theater!” Ann wrote to her former stu-
dent Gale Randall Chrisman. “I feel my dance life is about to begin just at
a point when I was most unhappy feeling it was all over.”91
The dance deck creates theatrical space in the midst of raw nature. Walls
are replaced by trees, the ceiling is a canopy of trees and the sky, and the
sounds of this space are the muted calls of birds, the fluttering of leaves,
the hum of insects. Ann has described the smell of the deck as “fresh fo-
liage and the deep sweet smell of leaf mold.”92 Like the house above, with
its simple glass pavilion that functioned as the living room looking out into
the woods and a screened gazebo that serves as an outdoor dining room in
the summer, the deck is not architecture as a statement so much as archi-
tecture as response.
Reflecting on the significance of the dance deck years later, Larry ob-
served, “The deck was not an object, it did not become an object in the
landscape. It became part of the landscape and that is very diªerent. The
fact of its free form, which moves around responding to the trees and to
the mountain views and other things, has been a premise of mine ever since.
So it was a place that aªected [Ann’s] work and also aªected mine as a role
model for the future.”93
In several newspaper and magazine articles of the time, the deck was de-
scribed variously as “a flying deck,” “an outdoor stage,” and a studio in the
woods. Indeed, supported by hidden wooden beams, the dance deck does
appear to soar out into free, wooded space. One approaches it by follow-

104 WESTERN SPACES

ing a steep spiral of steps down the hillside to the floating performance is-
land below. Sitting just above it on the hillside are five angled tiers of benches
that seat a total of one hundred fifty. This spectators’ gallery looks out over
the deck, across a cluster of live oak, redwood, and madrone trees, which,
when the deck was new, framed a vista of San Francisco Bay and the ma-
jestic Mount Tamalpais rising to the right.
The deck was originally situated so that a pair of madrone trees formed
a natural proscenium arch and two others grew straight up through the
broad Douglas fir boards of the deck. Lauterer was envisioning a new the-
ater that would be literally transparent. “In contrast,” he later wrote, “vir-
tually every theater since the fifteenth century has been opaque, present-
ing a series of narrow pictures on a box-like stage hemmed in by scenery.
In this theater we are not attempting to present pictures. We’re trying to
create dramatic images out of movement.”94 Lauterer reportedly yearned
to make the place a stage as mobile and volatile as the dance it sought to
contain. “He labored to create, in eªect, a two-fold dance in which the po-
tential of stage-space—its capacity to vibrate in a frame like a painter’s pig-
ments or a poet’s rhetoric—could penetrate the dancer’s invention and ac-
company its progressions.”95
In one of his descriptions of the design concept, Larry makes it sound
as if the deck were dancing with the woods:

The form of the deck responds to the site—it meanders to avoid tree
clumps, it reaches out to open spaces—it elongates to include trees as
anchor points and finally it returns to the hill. The deck is a level plat-
form floating above the ground where it almost touches earth. It is half
a foot from ground level—at its highest point it stands 30 feet above the
sloping ground.
The deck floats above the ground but the trees anchor it in its space.
Along the East face it is closed by a grove of redwoods which form a back-
drop and sound reflector. Downstage two great madrones pierce the deck
and form a 35 foot proscenium arch. Upstage a third madrone forms the
apex of a tree triangle.96

As Larry’s remarks suggest, the deck is a highly theatrical space, not just be-
cause its nonrectangular form invites movement, but also because of the way
it is situated in the environment to reflect the changing nature surrounding
it. It is a primed canvas in a setting of shifting lights, sounds, colors, and
temperatures. Larry, with his painter’s sensibility, noticed this immediately.

WESTERN SPACES 105

 There is great change on the deck. The light moves through the trees
and various parts of the deck shift from sun to flickering shade to deep
shade. The seasons change and the madrone sheds first its bark and then
its flowers and finally its fruit on the boards. . . . The shifting light on the
deck and the varying degrees of heat and coolness in the air give another
dimension of stage movement.97

One senses in Larry’s comments his delight as an architect in discovering

how every design consideration he made in fashioning the dance deck has
such a direct impact on the thoughts, actions, and interactions of the dancers
working on it. Somewhat more than a year after the deck’s completion Ann
made the following observations about its eªect on her work:

I find much less need for constant sound as background and am much
more content with silence. Simple sounds work well within this frame-
work. . . . Since there is ever changing form and texture and light around
you, a certain drive develops toward constant experimentation and change
in dance itself. There develops a certain sense of exchange between oneself
and one’s environment and movement develops which must be organic or
it seems false. Movement within a moving space, I have found, is diªerent
than movement within a static cube.98

The dance deck would prove to be Ann and Larry’s most enduring and
complete collaboration. Space, presence, the environment, and time were
fundamental and constitutive of both of their art forms, and now the over-
lap had been made material.
On a July evening in 1957, on a date that happened to be Ann’s thirty-
seventh birthday, Merce Cunningham presented a lecture demonstration
on the dance deck. Unaccustomed to the foggy chill of summer evenings
in the Bay Area, he opened his lecture by joking about the weather. Later
he questioned the outdoor setting of Ann’s dance studio, asking, “But where
do you live in the winter?” as if a habitation this intertwined with nature
could only be seasonal.99 Ann, in fact, was learning to work in all kinds of
outdoor climates. “I became almost animal-like in that I could adapt my
body temperature to work in all kinds of weather,” she said later. “Some-
times I would be dancing with mittens on or with shoes on. I even got so
that when it rained I would accept the rain as being part of the environ-
ment.” This marked the beginning for Ann of redefining movement to ac-
cord with nature and her manner of operation. “I began to simply shed all

106 WESTERN SPACES

of my old patterns, and I had to start anew with new ideas of what is the
nature within me and how did that nature and my nature interface. That’s
where I began to develop a new approach to movement.”100
It is tantalizing to imagine Cunningham’s presentation on the dance deck
that evening, because the typewritten rough draft of his text, which Ann
saved, reveals he was searching for the same kind of balance between the
man-made and the natural that Ann was exploring. “Dance is an act of con-
centration taking visible form in a way that cannot be done otherwise,” Cun-
ningham said at the opening of his talk. “It is its own necessity. It is an old
art, and it is a manifestation of man’s activity. It has changed as man has
inhabited the world, and as man’s habits have changed. Yet of course it re-
mains the same. It is a realistic approach . . . done with the belief and full
conviction that man is part of nature and society and that he inhabits his
art actions with himself.”101
Here Cunningham distills his quest for a theater dance that could be “like
nature in her manner of operation.” Ann, however, was looking to the nat-
ural world of her immediate environment for direction. And the deck on
which Cunningham was standing that evening was the very lab where Ann’s
daily experiments were unfolding.

Cunningham was not the only distinguished visitor to the dance deck. In
August 1954, a few months after the dance deck was completed, Ann wel-
comed Martha Graham to her theater without walls. Graham and her com-
pany were on the West Coast to perform at Mills College in Oakland, but
Graham and Baroness Bethesbee de Rothschild were also canvassing in San
Francisco for emerging choreographers whose work they could present in
the invitational three-week American Dance Festival series at the American
National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) in New York the following spring,
which Rothschild was sponsoring. This search for new choreographers was
not a total surprise to Ann. Doris Humphrey had written Ann in the fall of
1953 about the upcoming festival and encouraged her to apply:

There was a meeting at which I oªered a number of suggestions, one of

which was to explore the possibility of presenting dancers [at the Ameri-
can Dance Festival] from other areas than NYC, and I commended you.
They wouldn’t take you sight unseen of course (there is, or will be, an
artistic committee on which I will serve). So I got to thinking how you
might manage to get here on the assumption that you want to. . . .

WESTERN SPACES 107

 Whether it’s right or not N.Y. is still the place that oªers the recogni-
tion, the most intelligent audiences and the largest, the two best critics,
etc. You know all that. . . . Reading between the lines and getting the
“feel” of your things, I gather that Welland’s dancers are not so good, but
that he would expect to share equally in any such endeavor. I hope this is
not the mill-stone around your neck. I can well imagine if this should be
so that you might find the Rothschild committee saying, “We’ll take her,
but not him,” then what?102

A few days before Graham visited Ann’s deck, Graham, along with the
baroness, and the baroness’s assistant, Malka Kenyan, had all come to the
Union Street studio, with the intention of seeing Lathrop’s work. Ann had
promised to be there out of friendship for Lathrop, who was very excited
about showing his work to Graham and needed Ann to perform the small
part of Rachel in his Jacob, an ambitious but convoluted allegorical tale
about man and his progress toward wisdom presented in the style of a folk
play. To showcase another side of his dramatic ability as a dancer, he had
asked if they could also perform Ann’s own biblical tale from 1953, Daugh-
ter of the Voice, the story of a pagan king (danced by Lathrop) who forces
a mother to sacrifice her seven sons.
After the studio showing the baroness and Graham simply thanked the
dancers and quickly left the studio. Ann felt slightly foolish; her role in Ja-
cob basically consisted of melodramatic acting gestures. She had never
thought it was a particularly good dance; it was decorative and stylized and
borrowed too heavily from Graham’s own style, she thought, but she said
nothing to Lathrop. Apparently, though, Ann’s Daughter of the Voice in-
trigued them, as did her presence in Jacob. Humphrey’s enthusiastic en-
dorsement of Ann was also probably important.
That evening Ann received an unexpected telephone call from Malka
Kenyan. Did Ann have any other dances, a solo perhaps, that she could
show Rothschild and Graham? Ann thought quickly. She mentioned the
solo she had created a few years earlier, The Prophetess. A showing was ar-
ranged for the following Saturday. Graham, Rothschild, and Kenyan would
drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to the Halprins’ mountainside studio
and home for an afternoon demonstration of Ann’s solo followed by dinner.
The Prophetess, created in 1947, was the first major dance Ann made in
the West. It told the story of the fearless biblical heroine Deborah. This
work was not just personal, but resolutely autobiographical, both privately
and culturally. It represented a distillation of the broad Jewish themes of

108 WESTERN SPACES

her earlier work, as encouraged by Rabbi Kadushin, into deeper personal
ones. In dance one can always find the traces of the choreographer’s body
in the work, indirectly through the predilection to certain gestures and ways
of linking movement phrases together, and intuitively through the man-
ner in which the choreographer intertwines or uncouples dance and mu-
sic, dance and narrative, and fits images of movement expression to the phys-
ical capabilities and limits of her or his own body. These same choices also
reveal autobiographical narratives of the artist. This was the case in Ann’s
The Prophetess, where the subject of the dance became the immediate eth-
nic history of the dancer—an Eastern European Jewess, exotic to main-
stream America, yet in reality so acculturated that she had to reinvent pieces
of the shtetl culture her parents left behind.
In the visual arts during this period, a similar impulse toward autobiog-
raphy was resulting in an emphasis on the process of making an artwork.
For example, in the abstract expressionist painters’ canvases, as Dore Ash-
ton has noted, “the process was becoming so important that the act of mak-
ing a work of art could interest the artist psychologically almost as much
as the final product.” While this might be read as an anti-materialist pos-
ture, it is also “a gesture of heightened self value, suggesting even one’s ten-
tative actions in making an object are worthy of a framing and considered
regard by viewers.”103 This concern with the processes of creation, and par-
ticularly the spontaneous moment of invention, would become very im-
portant to Ann and other West Coast artists and performers. As Richard
Cándida Smith noted, for this generation of Bay Area painters, following
the lead of the New York abstract expressionists, painting became an “en-
counter of material and direct activity without any preconceived image
[which] led to a ‘painting that is an act inseparable from the biography of
the artist.’”104 This focus on biography as process had immediate and pro-
found implications for Ann’s work, particularly as it played out in the new
explorations with improvisation that marked her early work in the West.
As Ann rehearsed her solo The Prophetess on the dance deck for the com-
mand performance for Graham, she went through the entire dance, be-
ginning with the dizzying opening spin. She kept her gaze inward and her
feet paddling in pumping steps as her body revolved and her head snapped
around like a wobbly beacon in a lighthouse. Her goal in putting this spin
in the opening section of the dance was to actually alter her state of mind.
She let the act of spinning transport her into a vortex of discovery, into
“Inner Conviction,” the first of what she called the dance’s three “moods.”
This was how Ann thrust herself into the character of Deborah, the Old

WESTERN SPACES 109

 Testament prophetess who helped the Israelites free themselves from
tyranny, and the woman for whom Ann had been given her middle name.
Ann slammed her bare feet into the wooden deck. Then, as she envi-
sioned the Israelites being attacked, she thrust her arms outward on rigid
diagonals for the “Proclamation” section. Next her arms snapped inward
sharply from the elbow as she swung one leg up with the force of a flag
bearer raising his pole to lead a regiment into battle. Bold and command-
ing, Ann’s actions were large enough to stand as both the harbinger of dan-
ger and a symbolic enactment of the advancing battalions of warring sol-
diers. Hearing the two-piano score of Alan Hovhaness’s music, its sharp
percussive tones a sonorous echo of her vengeance and determination, Ann
saw herself launching into the final section of the dance, “Victory.”
Splaying her fingers in the spiky pose of a seer about to utter a prophecy,
Ann began gesturing violently, her torso twisting with tension and her legs
and arms moving urgently. As if summoning the Israelites in big lunging
and gathering gestures, she directed her invisible army to assemble for the
final attack. Ann later reflected on how she drew this part of the choreog-
raphy from her adolescent memories of the mystical hand motions her fam-
ily rabbi made when he blessed the Torah or oªered a Shabbat blessing over
the bread and wine.105 She was not so much interested in the religious roots
of these actions as simply hungry for movement that was outside the tra-
ditional modern dance vocabularies. So Ann plumbed these actions as some-
thing fresh and new to her purposes. It would be nearly ten years before
ordinary gesture and movement tasks would be a part of the American mod-
ern dance vocabulary.
In the last section of the dance Ann slowly pulled herself to standing.
Here was where she used her facial features, eyes glaring, lips slightly parted
as if calling out. She was consciously trying to get away from the “mask
look,” the frozen features she disliked in other modern dancers, including
Martha Graham.
Saturday afternoon, when Graham, Rothschild, and Kenyan arrived, Ann
greeted them at the door, wearing the long, blue, high-necked rayon dress
with its flared skirt and the tall blue and white headdress and wide Israeli
metal bracelet that was her costume for The Prophetess. She quickly ush-
ered them through the house and down to the wooden benches overlook-
ing the dance deck, the woods, and the shimmering San Francisco Bay be-
yond. Ann then began to dance. As she had hoped, once she began to spin
she slipped into the role so completely it was almost like going into a trance.
As usually happened to her when she performed, Ann felt no nervousness,

110 WESTERN SPACES

only the deep and reassuring sense of refocusing her attention on the im-
mediate demands of the choreography.
Two weeks later, Ann learned she had been chosen to perform in the
ANTA festival. She was asked to bring The Prophetess and one other con-
trasting short solo. Rothschild was wealthy, but she was also financially care-
ful. Humphrey had already warned Ann that it was preferable if both her
dances were without sets, because, given the strict union rules at the ANTA
theater, all sets had to be made by union members. Any music would have
to be played live, but orchestrated for no more than a twenty-two-piece or-
chestra because that is what came with the rental of the theater.106
Ann arranged to arrive in New York a week before the May 7, 1955, open-
ing night of the festival. She asked Jenny Hunter Groat, who was studying
and performing with Ann at the Union Street studio, to take over her classes
for the two weeks she would be in New York. To save money she stayed
with Larry’s parents, Sam and Rose, in their apartment on East Seventy-
fourth Street. She spent the first week rehearsing daily by herself in a spa-
cious practice studio Graham had arranged for her to use. It was located in
the elegant three-story building at 316 East Sixty-third Street that Roth-
schild had recently purchased for Graham. The building, which had pre-
viously been a school for children, had three studios, a garden, two small
kitchens, and a dressing room and rest space.
Honored by the special treatment Graham accorded her, Ann was surprised
when Graham herself walked into the studio one day, watched for a few min-
utes, and then motioned for Ann to follow her. Graham led Ann to a cos-
tume room filled with boxes of all kinds of material and decorative ornaments
for costumes. Ann was thrilled. As she watched, Graham dug into a box and
pulled out a long length of glittering silver rope. She then began wrapping
the rope around Ann’s torso and across her shoulders in a design that simul-
taneously suggested military braid and the breastplate of a heroic goddess.
“It covered my whole body,” Ann said. “It was amazing. It took a drab and
ordinary dress and turned it into something elegant and meaningful. It made
such a diªerence.” Graham then disappeared as quickly as she had come.107
Ann also received welcome assistance from Lavinia Nielsen, one of her
teachers from the University of Wisconsin (with whom she had roomed)
and now a dancer in the José Limón Company. Nielsen’s husband, Lucas
Hoving, was also a dancer with Limón. Nielsen watched Ann rehearse her
second piece—The Lonely Ones, with its three witty character studies based
on characters in William Steig’s cartoons—and oªered suggestions about
the dance’s comic timing and dramatic shaping.

WESTERN SPACES 111

 Ann performed The Lonely Ones only once in New York, but The
Prophetess received three performances, alternating slots with works by the
other invited soloists—Paul Draper, Pauline Koner, Daniel Nagrin, Janet
Collins, and Iris Mabry. Ann was in serious company and she knew it. The
festival was in many respects a midstream retrospective of the major mas-
terpieces of Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, José Limón, and Anna
Sokolow, with performances of Graham’s Diversion of Angels, Seraphic Di-
alogue, Appalachian Spring, Night Journey, and Deaths and Entrances;
Humphrey’s Day on Earth; Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane and The Traitor; and
Sokolow’s Rooms. Ann attended every concert, watching from the wings on
the evenings she was performing.
Each morning after a concert she would sit with her mother-in-law over
a cup of coªee and discuss the works she had seen, and each day she real-
ized she was growing increasingly disillusioned. It had been eight years since
Ann had left New York. She was shocked to see how similar all the younger
choreographers’ works seemed to those of their mentors and how little room
there seemed to be for voices that challenged this domination.
Ann felt extremely out of place because there was so little traditional mod-
ern dance technique in her dances. She also felt odd because her device of
drawing from her own cultural heritage in The Prophetess seemed out of
place next to the grandly elegiac and broadly humanistic themes of many
of the other works. In addition, no one—not even the droll dance humorist
Charles Weidman—had presented anything as irreverently light as The
Lonely Ones.
Ann was harder on herself than the critics were. Reviewers in San Fran-
cisco had always enjoyed The Lonely Ones, praising the dance for neatly cap-
turing the bittersweet truth of Steig’s portraits. Even the usually reserved
New York Times critic John Martin had lauded The Lonely Ones. He had
written Ann a personal note when she presented the Steig suite in New York
in 1947, praising the “wonderful sense of the grotesque it demonstrated
without losing its relation to life.”108 Now Martin praised The Prophetess,
writing: “From the West Coast came Ann Halprin to give us a solo, The
Prophetess, which showed her to be a dancer of genuine authority who knows
how to make a dance as well as to dance it.”109
While the ANTA festival may have been a public success, Ann returned
home complaining bitterly to Larry that she was greatly depressed by what
she had seen. “I went away feeling that I never wanted to dance again,” she
remarked later.

112 WESTERN SPACES

 It seemed as if there was no connection between my life or what was real,
and the dances I’d seen. Even my own work seemed abstract and preachy.
The whole aura in the theater was so annoying in its self-centeredness;
there was no graciousness between people. I kept asking myself, “Why do
all the dancers in the Graham troupe look exactly like Martha? Why do
all the performers in this company look like Hanya Holm? Why are all
these dancers just like Doris Humphrey?” This isn’t for me. Where is their
individuality? Where are their diªerences? I felt as if I had gone into a
world I was no longer part of.110

Ann returned in a markedly diªerent state of mind than when she had
left. Not only was she profoundly disturbed by what she had seen, she was,
perhaps just as importantly, unsettled by what she hadn’t seen. It would be
ten years before she returned to New York with a new evening-long dance,
Parades and Changes, that would prompt rumors that the police were about
to issue a warrant for her arrest on charges of public indecency. Between
her departure in 1955, however, and her sensational return in 1965 lay a
decade of introspection, experimentation, and rejections.
Within a matter of weeks after her return to the West Coast, Ann sev-
ered her partnership with Lathrop, closing down all but the children’s classes
she taught at the studio. According to Hunter Groat, “Welland suªered
[from Graham’s selection of Ann over him]. The hurt was deep and I’m
sure he felt a sense of betrayal. It was probably a life disappointment for
him. They didn’t belong together after that, and Ann just started to oªer
classes at her studio on the deck.”111 A.A. Leath also remembered Lathrop’s
deep disappointment at being passed over by Graham. “It’s sad that Welland
didn’t make the grade,” Leath said. “His loyalty to Martha was there in his
own teaching in the school. I’m sure he was hurt that he wasn’t gifted in
the sense that he could be a Martha Graham dancer. Ann was being born
again. She was saying good-bye to all her training; she had all that ballet as
a girl; and then she had all that New York stuª. By 1954 she was ready for
something.”112
In a strangely prophetic coincidence, several years earlier, in 1951, the San
Francisco filmmaker and poet James Broughton had cast both Ann and
Welland in two of the four short film poems he made for Four in the After-
noon: A Quartet for Poems Moving, which grew out of Musical Chairs, his
book of whimsical poems. Each vignette, filmed in a diªerent cinematic
style, focused on a diªerent age and stage of life. Ann was featured in the

WESTERN SPACES 113

 third segment, “Princess Printemps,” about “a woman of 30,” according to
a note Broughton wrote.113 In this episode, done in the style of a turn-of-
the-century mime or variety show, Ann appears as a slightly loony maiden
tripping along with filigreed baroque dance footwork as she loops around
the plants and huge columns of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. Ann’s
whole body seems a comic platform for rising and crashing expectations as
she first pursues and then evades John Graham, who, dressed like a court
jester, chases her around the pillars in the manner of a silent comedian. Ann
hunches over and scampers away, rabbitlike, from Graham, who springs in
place, futilely pedaling his legs after her. The primary accompaniment for
“Princess Printemps” is Broughton reading his poem. His slightly singsong,
nasal delivery is actually as humorous as the text. And the wit of Ann’s por-
trayal is that she seems to be simultaneously capturing and satirizing the
comic sweetness of Broughton’s prose. She is a natural comedienne, her fea-
tures plastic and her timing crisp.
The scherzo tempo of “Princess Printemps” is followed by the lento move-
ment of “The Aging Balletomane,” a solo reverie danced by Welland La-
throp, which is the final poem in the film quartet. Film critics consider this
the finest section of the film because of its fusion of auditory and visual ac-
tion. As P. Adams Sitney put it, “This film is a crucial case of the fusion of
verse and film within the American avant-garde.”114 There is far less danc-
ing here than in Ann’s segment, with most of Lathrop’s movement being
restricted to rocking sadly in a rocking chair and occasionally lurching for-
ward into a post on the porch where he sits. Wearing a string tie and turn-
of-the-century black suit, Lathrop’s aging balletomane temperamentally
seems styled as a cross between the stern preacher and the quietly wise ma-
triarch from Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring, with a nod to designer
Isamu Noguchi’s rocking chair from the work’s spare set. Earnest and seri-
ously dramatic, without the irony that marks Ann’s performance, Lathrop’s
portrayal seems more poignantly autobiographical than either he or Brough-
ton intended. Lathrop is depicted as looking backward at a life in dance,
and to underline this Broughton reverses the projected image so that the
illusionistic ballerina Lathrop’s mind conjures arrives in a backward leap.
After Four in the Afternoon Lathrop never again worked with Broughton,
but Ann’s friendship with Broughton drew her into a vibrant new artistic
group, the Beats, with whom he was associated. Four in the Afternoon
marked the beginning of several delightful collaborations with Broughton.
When Ann left the Union Street studio, she invited a few of her long-
time students—Graham, Leath, and Hunter Groat—to begin working with

114 WESTERN SPACES

her on her dance deck as she searched for a new, more immediately mean-
ingful reason to make dances. “I was consciously making a break from mod-
ern dance,” she later said. On the heels of her ANTA experience, she was
on the threshold of discovering the relative isolation of the Bay Area from
New York dance circles an advantage. For the first time since she had moved
West, Ann was ready to heed what California historian Kevin Starr has called
“the region’s call to pleasure and to the enhancement of life.”115 The sim-
ple fact of being outdoors was leading her toward a new contentment with
silence, toward increased movement experimentation, and an enhanced
sense of self.

WESTERN SPACES 115

 FIVE

Instantaneous Experience, Lucy,

and Beat Culture
1955 – 1960

The magic of image-making is that the spectacularly thin layers—almost merely

layers of concepts—evoke in the observers of the image the whole spread of
human emotions. It is hard to believe that such powerful responses are coming
from such frail, delicate and inherently evanescent stimuli.
edwin h. land

one day in the early 1950s, Larry came home with a new camera he
had just purchased. Called the Polaroid Land Camera, it created instant
photographs, processing them inside the camera just seconds after the shut-
ter was clicked. This 1947 invention by the scientist Edwin Land revolu-
tionized perception and brought serious regard to swiftly composed or spon-
taneous images. Instant gratification could now be an art value. Art
photographers like Ansel Adams lauded the Polaroid for its capacity to “free
intuition,” allowing artists to take risks and experiment, as they could see
results immediately.1
Larry had always carried a notebook with him to record images in the
landscape, a moment in one of Ann’s dances, or just the postures of people
around him, yet this new camera oªered more than just an accelerated means
of documentation. It seemed instantaneously to increase and heighten one’s
power of perception. One got immediate feedback on how life might look
framed as art and how art could be snipped out of life. Lauded by Land as
“a new eye, a secret memory,” a device that “enhances the art of seeing,”
the instant camera revolutionized the image-making process.2
For Ann, a dance artist steeped in a quest for lightly mediated authen-
ticity, the possibility of instantaneous images oªered a provocative model

116
for live performance and a validation of her own interest in shaped im-
provisation. By the mid-1950s Ann was stretching toward an “instant” sen-
sibility in dance, searching, like the photographer with a Polaroid, for a way
to observe her work and her subject nearly simultaneously. Her dances were
about capturing the commonplace, quickly and with a minimum of alter-
ation, like an instant photograph.
Years later, what Ann remembered most about that first Polaroid cam-
era Larry brought home is that the photographs didn’t last.3 Over time early
Polaroids darkened into black rectangles and the moment they had cap-
tured receded back into memory. For the dancer, however, the aesthetic value
of the instant has always mattered more than the longevity of the afterim-
age. Within a few years, Ann was using the terms instant theater and im-
mediate dance to describe her improvisatory dance performances.
Like a new Polaroid owner scanning her surroundings for subjects for in-
stant photography, Ann began looking for new environments that could be
sets for her instant dance theater. Soon the environment became more than
a set; it served as a “score,” giving direction for a dance. Ann also began col-
laborating with non-dance artists, with poets, musicians, architects, and
painters, as well as a handful of dancers. One of the dancers, Jenny Hunter
Groat, recalled, “She surrounded herself with artists. Ann always wanted to
be avant-garde and in the lead.”4 At times ideas from other art forms in-
spired Ann to explore parallels in dance. Ann began doing with people what
she did with the environment—studying how these non-dancers moved,
looking at their contours, proclivities, and interests as potential sources for
dance. She noticed that non-dancers tended to approach movement func-
tionally, and this directed her attention to tasks as generators of movement.
“I was trying to get away from movement based on one dancer’s personal-
ity and what that personality felt was evocative or beautiful. I was trying to
open up the possibility that movement came from a more functional basis,”
Ann later remarked about her turn toward task performance.5

One of the non-dance artists Ann collaborated with was the filmmaker
and poet James Broughton. He had no experience in dance when, in 1951,
he made his first film of Ann, performing her “Princess Printemps” solo.
Broughton had first seen Ann’s dancing in early 1947, at a concert of The
Steig Pieces at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. “I was absolutely bowled
over by Ann,” he recalled. “I was entranced with this performer, this in-
credible clown . . . she was absolutely hilarious. It was deadpan comedy

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 117

 and this is such a rare thing in the dance world.” Broughton, a connois-
seur of comedy in his own poetry and films, quickly became close friends
with Ann and Larry, often stopping by the Union Street studio to visit.
“She never herself valued her comic gift as much as I think she should
have,” Broughton said. “But that’s because it was so easy and such a nat-
ural thing for her to do.”6
In those days, Broughton commented, “San Francisco was still a very small
place, so everybody in the arts knew everybody else and the same people
would go to everything, all the openings, the performances and the parties.”7
Influences easily ran across disciplines. As Broughton once observed, “I have
learned more about the writing of poetry from music than from literature.
And more about the making of films from dance than from cinema.”8
The tie to dance can be seen in Broughton’s best-known color film, The
Bed (1968), a twenty-minute romp in which a string of individuals play on
a double bed, set, like a miniature outdoor stage, in the midst of a rolling
meadow. Broughton’s friends, lovers, and fellow artists spill, one by one or
in pairs, across the bed, enacting brief, silent rites of repose or chaste pas-
sion. Emotional entanglements become physical intertwinings in this dance
of life. The stream begins with a pair of Ann’s nude dancers, John Graham
and Jani Novak, who embrace then teasingly flee from one another in slow
cascading runs like giant Picasso bathers dashing along the beach. Ann’s
frequent musical collaborator, Warner Jepson, provided the music for The
Bed, which has no words. Choreographically, the film resembles one of Ann’s
structured improvisations of the time, only here the bed is the environment
to which each performer must spontaneously respond.
In the last film Broughton made with Ann, The Golden Positions (1970),
the structure stems entirely from movement and dramatic possibilities of
three body positions: lying down, standing, and running. For her solo in
The Golden Positions, filmed in the Divisadero Street space she was then
using as a studio in San Francisco, Ann slips, slides, or crashes into a fall,
all with deadpan calm as she repeatedly tries, and fails, to remain standing.
In the final moments of the dance, she strips oª her shoes, shirt, and work-
man’s overalls. Then, crouching nude behind her shoes, neatly stretches her-
self out on the floor and disappears behind her shoes, a little mound of de-
feated flesh. Broughton said he had to persuade Ann to perform this comic
dance for the camera, but after her initial resistance she was “very pleased
to see herself being silly.”9
“Ann always wanted to do what nobody else was doing, and I think that
was our great sympathetic core,” Broughton recollected. His appreciation

118 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

for her talent as a comedienne is interesting because in dance, as in film,
comedy is dependent on two critical skills—timing and the capacity to give
the illusion that one is totally immersed in the present moment and obliv-
ious to the disaster around the corner. This quality of knowing when to
draw things out and when to deliver a physical punchline, as well as how
to be so consumed with the present instant that spectators are drawn in
with you, was critical to Ann’s contribution to experimental dance.

Ann seemed to follow intuitively in the footsteps of another curly-haired,

red-headed comedienne—Lucille Ball, who emerged as the most popular
public woman of the 1950s. Like Ball, Ann situated her performances in
the comic dilemmas of the distaª side. Although she generally stayed within
traditional gender roles in her dances of the 1950s and early 1960s, Ann and
her dancers (some of whom were gay) played at the edges of mainstream
heterosexual tensions between women’s struggle for autonomy and their
“caretaking” responsibilities to family and society.10 In at least five dances—
her “Princess Printemps” solo (1951), Rites of Women (1959), Trunk Dance
(1959), Mr. and Mrs. Mouse (1959), and Apartment 6 (1965)—Ann took an
ironic view of the wife’s expected domesticity. Through these dances, she
was moving toward defusing the contradictions between the values placed
on women’s work inside and outside the home.
While Ann’s dances didn’t repudiate the dominant social model of fe-
male domesticity, artistically they broke new ground. Women modern
dancers in the 1950s were a serious group, and, with the exception of Kather-
ine Litz’s gently humorous little dances, their work tended to reflect this.
Domestic tales were generally framed as grand mythic opuses, as in the works
of Martha Graham, or weighty social portraits, as in the dances of Doris
Humphrey. Ann’s family stories, in contrast, were scaled to daily life, rep-
resenting the real uncertainties of women’s place and women’s power.
Adopting an approach she would embrace for her entire career, Ann
grounded her art making in the everyday. She would use a piece of her daily
world as a score, recycling her oªstage life with Larry, Daria, and Rana. At
the same time, she developed a style of choreographic bricolage, drawing
on what she saw others around her doing as a means for her own inven-
tion. “It wasn’t so much that Anna was an innovator,” the visual designer
Jo Landor recalled aªectionately. “It’s [that] whatever was innovative Anna
would grab. She comes in at the crest of the wave and grabs it in her inim-
itable fashion and works it.”11

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 119

 As she tried to find a way to blend career and family, Ann must have been
aware of Lucille Ball’s “solution.” “I was aware of Lucy because she was so
very, very funny,” Ann has acknowledged. “Unconsciously I must have
identified with her strongly. I’ve always had a huge interest in people who
were funny.”12 From October 1951 to April 1960, Ball’s television program,
I Love Lucy, played with the story of the homebound American woman in
the postwar period. It showcased Ball’s apparent success at combining ca-
reer, marriage, and family by paralleling her “real life” with the “fiction” of
the television series.13 In much the same way Ann blurred her family life
with the mediated “reality” of her dances.
Like Lucille Ball, Ann cultivated the spillover between her private do-
mestic life oªstage and her public life as a performing artist. Both women
did this in part as a way of legitimizing the fact that they were mothers and
professional women. Being a “screwball” undercut the perceived unfemi-
ninity of the career woman. Ann, like Ball, seemed to define herself as a
wife and mother at heart at a time when mainstream thinking linked fem-
ininity to women’s roles in the home and women thus had to exercise their
power covertly.14 The public perception was that neither Ann nor Ball aban-
doned their kids at home when they worked; instead, they brought them
with them onto the dance deck or into the television studio and, most im-
portant, into the narratives of their art.
Ball’s television husband, Desi Arnaz, was also her real-life husband, and
when she became pregnant, her pregnancy and her new baby, Desi Jr., were
written into the show. Ball became the first openly pregnant woman to per-
form on television at a time when public representations of pregnancy were
considered improper.15 In January 1953 Ball gave birth, virtually simulta-
neously, in her real life and in her television life. Ann also worked well into
her pregnancy. Yet she never performed when pregnant with either child;
instead, she focused on her teaching. And, as Doris Humphrey had done,
she returned to performing within a few weeks of the births of her two
daughters, Daria and Rana.
The Halprin daughters would become frequent participants and per-
formers in Ann’s dances and workshops throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
While Ann made several dances in which Daria and Rana played them-
selves, she always disguised their relationship to her in the program, listing
them by diªerent names. Daria became Daria Lurie (from Larry’s mother’s
name) and Rana went by Ann’s maiden name as Rana Schuman.
Daria later remembered the lived daily experience of this intertwining of
art and life as often quite intense. She praised her mother as a “pre-femi-

120 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

nist,” noting how unusual it was at the time to be both “an innovative artist
and a woman at home.” “I don’t think she wanted to have to choose be-
tween her art and her life as a wife and mother,” Daria said, describing how
Ann’s dance associates would frequently overflow from the studio into the
home. “She felt the only way for her to do it was to bring her work home,”
Daria added. “And the whole atmosphere became permeated with this kind
of culture—which was much more challenging and disturbing to my fa-
ther, my sister, and me than she could understand. Our family life became
infused by the fact that her work was going on literally in the landscape of
our family. It wasn’t an intellectual inquiry, but a lived reality on a daily
basis.”16
Larry never performed with Ann outside of their joint workshops, but
his presence hovers noticeably over at least one of Ann’s dances from this
era, Apartment 6. In this work, Ann plays a frazzled housewife desperate to
please her indiªerent spouse by preparing the perfect pancake breakfast for
him as he sits immersed in reading the morning paper. The harder she tries
to make the perfect pancake for him, the further from the mark she goes
until she is maniacally tossing the failed pancakes out the window in a scene
that might come right out of I Love Lucy. But it wasn’t the pancakes that
irritated her own Larry. Rather, he was growing increasingly frustrated at
finding his Kentfield home filled with Ann’s dancers. Simone Forti, one of
Ann’s dancers at the time, reflected, “I think Anna liked having everybody
eating around her, and liked having all the kids, the students, really hang-
ing out. And I think Larry would have liked a little more privacy and a lit-
tle more time as a family.”17 Jo Landor recalled a time in 1963 when Larry
returned from a trip to find the living area overflowing with dancers eating
and talking noisily. He loudly told Ann that he was fed up with all these
people in his house and announced that he was leaving. “Ann went out and
slashed all the tires so he couldn’t go,” Landor recollected. “It was high
drama. I know it was di‹cult on Larry.”18 It was also di‹cult on the
children. Daria and Rana pleaded for a normal home life as well. Daria re-
counted that while Ann was deflating Larry’s tires, she and her sister “stood
in our pajamas crying. For us it was our family. It wasn’t a performance any-
more. We wanted the people down in the living room to leave. What we
wanted was our father, not the crazy workshop people dancing in the liv-
ing room. The two of us, Rana and I, stood at the top of the stairs in our
pajamas weeping.”19
For some young dancers in her workshops, Ann’s juggling of her life as
a wife and mother and her life as an artist was radically inspirational. Mere-

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 121

 dith Monk, who was twenty-two when she took a summer workshop with
Ann in 1965, recalled how Ann “impressed me most because she was striv-
ing to be so many things. To be true as a mother, artist, wife. There were
no other women then doing that.”20 Although she never read Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ann intuitively embraced its warn-
ings that frustration rather than fulfillment would be the lot of women who
tried to find their satisfactions and identity in suburban domesticity or tra-
ditional female jobs.21 Coming on the heels of the massive recruitment of
women into the workforce during World War II, the 1950s emphasis on the
woman’s role as homemaker was a paradoxical and confusing turnaround.
As historian Susan Hartmann notes, “World War II did not redefine gen-
der roles in American society so much as it temporarily legitimized women’s
nontraditional activities as a wartime necessity.”22
The social architects may have felt the redefining of women’s “place” was
temporary, but Ann, as well as many women who came of age during the
period of the war, did not. She found a way to step outside the boundaries
separating art from female domesticity. Using comedy as her tool, Ann
gained license to be both physical and outrageous as a performer without
appearing overly serious about the whole business of being an avant-garde
artist. Which is not to say she wasn’t serious about her art.

Ann has often been described as a quirky outsider and cultural provocateur
in the West. However, it seems more accurate to say she belonged to a group
of postwar American artists who consciously didn’t belong—to those who
rejected the idea of developing “a style,” undermining the belief that an
artist has a single voice or vision that gradually becomes more unified.
Ann was one of just three dancers, and the only female one, mentioned
in Steven Watson’s comprehensive sociogram in the catalogue for the 1996
Whitney exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965.”23
Her inclusion reveals much about the impact of Beat culture on post-
modern dance, especially when compared with the other two dancers Wat-
son cited: Merce Cunningham and James Waring.24 Ann’s dance embod-
ied the raw, funky, strangely improvisational ethos of Beat art far more
than the cool, disciplined and structured work of Cunningham or the
ballet-trained, if quirky, Waring did. On every front—geographic, aes-
thetic, political, and personal—the links between Ann and the Beats are
tangible and persuasive.
What Ann responded to in the Beats was their discourse of authentic-

122 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

ity. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, cofounder of the City Lights book-
store in San Francisco, wrote in the spring 1958 issue of the Chicago Review:
“The [Beat] poetry which has been making itself heard here of late is what
should be called street poetry. . . . It amounts to getting poetry back into
the street where it once was, out of the classroom, out of the speech de-
partment and in fact— oª the printed page.”25 The Beats’ aversion to con-
formity and emphasis on individual choice resonated with Ann’s work, even
though their heightened masculinity myths tended to devalue women.26
“What we were all after was to have our art be more reflective of real life
issues and to do this we all tried to break down the aesthetic barriers we
had inherited,” Ann remarked years later. “And since movement was my
medium, out of that came a new kind of realism.”27
It does not matter if Ann was highly visible in the North Beach Beat scene.
“We were part of that Beat culture,” Forti insisted. “But we were so busy
doing what we were doing that we weren’t much in touch with the others.”28
Although Ann did work with four recognized Beat artists—the filmmaker
and poet James Broughton, the poets Michael McClure and Richard
Brautigan, and the visual artist Bruce Conner—she wasn’t present at many
of the “main events.” She did not attend Allen Ginsberg’s landmark read-
ing of Howl on October 13, 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, the
West Coast event that began Beat poetry readings. She missed Lenny Bruce’s
scandalous stand-up comedy routines at the Hungry i. And she didn’t fre-
quent the City Lights bookstore or live the hardscrabble life of most Beat
artists. Still, her sensibility as an artist links her to Beat literature and the
Funk style in the visual arts.
Although their point of departure diªered, the Beat writers were, like Ann,
propelled by an interest in improvisation and in using the immediate body
as the medium and at times subject of their art. And the Beats took plea-
sure in enacting publicly what the cultural historian Richard Cándida Smith
has called “interior conflicts” over the limits of freedom—particularly in re-
lation to hedonism and chastity—something Ann would exuberantly do in
her dance works, especially in the 1960s.29
Almost all of the landmark Beat events seem to be remembered as one
kind of a performance or another. There were the readings themselves, the
cross-country rides, the all-night writing binges, and, in the case of the
comic Lenny Bruce’s three obscenity trials, his performances of the legal
responses to his performances. The firsthand accounts of some of the most
momentous of these events cloak them in metaphors of participatory the-
ater that sound at once like call-and-response jazz scores and Ann’s later

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 123

 participatory dance events. The most notable is, of course, the story of Gins-
berg’s first reading of Howl at the Six Gallery, where Jack Kerouac collected
donations from the audience to buy wine and everyone drank and listened
while Kerouac shouted “Go!” between the lines as Ginsberg read. One year
later, when Ginsberg read Howl again, his presentation reportedly had be-
come even more dramatic—he took oª his clothes and challenged a heck-
ler to do the same. As Michael McClure noted about the initial reading of
Howl, “It left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering but know-
ing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice
and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its sup-
porting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership
systems and power support bases.”30 (That this act of rebellion came from
someone who, like Ann, was a first-generation American born of Eastern
European Jews is of interest. Ginsberg once quipped that half the Beats
were Jewish and the other half were Catholic.)
Within these performances was what might be called the Beat body. It is
a body charged with risk and daring, a body that is also intensely immedi-
ate, spontaneous, personal, and nonvirtuosic. All these qualities permeate
Ann’s dances. She shows how the Beat aesthetic combining alienation and
total experience can be articulated, explored, “riªed on” through dance.31
Allen Ginsberg openly acknowledged the importance of an embodied
presence for the Beat poets. He observed that “whatever really great poetry
I wrote like ‘Howl’ or ‘Kaddish,’ I was actually able to chant and use my
whole body whereas in lesser poetry I just talk it.”32 Body and soul come
together in the work of several Beat writers, unifying “into a single con-
scious entity,” allowing hidden truths to slip out.33 Ginsberg once called
Howl his “coming out of the closet,” adding that it was “a public statement
of feelings and emotions and attitudes that I would not have wanted my
father or family to see.” For him, the Beat scene created “a social place for
the soul to exist manifested in this world,” allowing aesthetic forms to con-
tain what up until now had been private emotions.34 In a culture where
spontaneity was lauded, individual experience was coming to be looked to
as a better guide to reality than social conventions. And, as Ann was dis-
covering, severing personal insights from a stylistic ideology and predeter-
mined form left the artist with few old rules intact. By the mid-1960s she
would come to digest a lesson of Ginsberg’s public readings of Howl, namely
that what happens on the stage is less important than the emotional release
the action inspires in the spectators.
All this emphasis on personal freedom was, as Cándida Smith explains,

124 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

“a response to the insecurity caused by the war.” In his words, “Americans
believed they were free citizens in a democratic society, but the war showed
that free citizens had very little control over the forces that influenced their
lives.” Art oªered an arena for addressing the resulting postwar search for
personal freedom.35

Reflecting back on the Beat period, Ann commented, “San Francisco was
a small town then and all of the artists essentially knew each other. Those
of us who were the avant-garde sought each other out. In those days of the
fifties I was an isolated nut doing my own thing [as far as the dance world
was concerned], but with the Beat artists there was a constant interchange.
We were all looking for new ways of inventing compositional forms and
building continuity between words, sounds and movements.”36
As much as she flirted with alternative lifestyles, Ann never relinquished
the stability and comfort of her middle-class existence as fully as the Beats
did. Yet in the same way that the Beats derived a certain force and focus
from what they were reacting against, Ann rebelled most strongly against
the lifestyle of the studio, eventually replacing the regimen of indoor classes
and drill for formal performances with informal workshops outdoors in
nature with clothing-optional attire and communal improvisations as fuel
for art.
Like the early Beats in San Francisco, Ann began to assemble a small com-
munity of interesting dancers, designers, and musicians around her as part
of her initial eªorts to create an environment for modern dance in the city.
Her dance deck in the woods served much the same role as City Lights
bookstore. It eªectively institutionalized her and Larry’s bohemian existence
so that Ann’s life as an artist and homemaker were now contiguous.
The Halprin home and outdoor studio became a gathering point for a
number of artists from various disciplines, including actors, dancers, ar-
chitects, musicians, and writers. There they socialized, gave readings, saw
dance showings, and participated in workshops and events in the environ-
ment. “Ann had this incredible magnetism—physical, personal,” Hunter
Groat remembered. “She was able to go out and talk to other artists and
the studio became the center for all kinds of things.”37 Fellow artists in other
disciplines, including some Beats, like Conner, Brautigan, and Broughton,
were frequent guests at evening “salons” in the Halprin home. Like the Beats,
Ann made the geographical distance of the West from New York a way, and
eventually a mandate, to find her own voice.

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 125

 Essential to her newfound voice was Ann’s ability to be deeply immersed
in the present, something she learned from observing nature. “Spontane-
ity in nature interested me particularly,” Ann said. “It led me to be aware
and responsive to the movement and that is what led me to improvisation.”38
This lesson greatly impressed Simone Forti, who became one of Ann’s stu-
dents in the mid-1950s (when she was known by her married name, Simone
Morris). By reading the world of nature as a model for how art might be
structured, Ann began to extend her improvisatory discovery well beyond
H’Doubler’s methods. “One of the most important tools Ann gave me was
how to work from nature,” Forti recalled. “She taught the process of going
into the woods and observing something for a period of time, and then
coming back and somehow working from those impressions. We were not
judging what kind of movement we wanted. We were hoping for aware-
ness and the freedom to just use any movement quality. Stiªness, heavi-
ness, speed, fluidity—anything.”39
Anything in the surroundings became a potential source for construct-
ing a dance. As Forti explained, “You might look at how a plant sits still,
but your eye can follow so many edges on it. And then you notice how
your eye moves very diªerently along the snakeplant than it does on the
pot that it sits in. Your eye can still move along it, and you still have a so-
matic response when you look at the pot. So she led us to this awareness of
somatic sensations in response to perceptions outside so that the inside and
outside of each of us would be working together.”
Starting with anatomical explorations, like those from H’Doubler, Ann
might point out a limb or joint in an anatomy book or on her studio skele-
ton, and then ask her students to explore that area while moving the whole
body. She particularly wanted them to notice how gravity aªected their
movement. She eªectively extended H’Doubler’s trial-and-error process of
discovering the joints’ range of motion into attending to the laws of na-
ture, especially gravity, as guidelines for movement.
Already in May 1953, a few months before her dance deck was built, she
had tested her ideas about natural forces in her first outdoor public im-
provisation, People on a Slant. Performed near the Union Street studio, on
one of San Francisco’s almost vertical streets, Ann, A.A. Leath, and Jenny
Hunter Groat simply walked, struggling to keep their bodies “straight as a
board” against the fierce incline of the hill. Costumed in long overcoats,
they played with contrasts in force and direction as Leath strode uphill
against Hunter Groat and Ann, who inched sti›y downward. “I was try-

126 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

ing to break down patterned movement, to find actions uncontaminated
with dance,” Ann later explained. “I thought about it the way a painter
might do a lot of cartoons before starting a painting.”40
Ann was not yet ready, however, to make a clean break from tradition.
In spring 1953 she made Daughter of the Voice, a Jewish-themed dance about
a biblical heroine, like The Prophetess.41 In a section of film that still exists
of Daughter of the Voice, Ann, costumed in a black headscarf and full-length
jersey dress, huddles over eight-year-old Avril Weber, whom she comforts
and admonishes to fight the evil Haman (danced by Welland Lathrop), hov-
ering menacingly above them brandishing a long spear. The movement here
alternates between the emotive density of early modern dance and the more
pedestrian, everyday vocabulary that Ann had begun to investigate in pieces
like People on a Slant. Both the child and Ann dash forward and back in
little runs of indecision, their movements fluid and naturalistically shaped.
The scale of the emotion is not exaggerated and the theatricality of their
delivery is scaled back. “The runs were natural,” Ann said later, “ because
working with a child there is no way it could be dramaticized.”42
In the summer of 1954 Ann began teaching two-week summer workshops
on her dance deck, inviting a small group of dancers to work with her “im-
provising to find out what our bodies could do, not learning somebody else’s
pattern or technique.”43 John Graham, A.A. Leath, Jenny Hunter Groat,
and Simone Forti all participated in these early dance deck workshops. Forti
remembered being recruited by Leath after class one day at the Union Street
studio. “Look, you’re an improviser,” Leath told the surprised Forti. “Ann
is starting this dancers’ workshop in Marin; you’ve got to come . . . check
this out.”44 Built like a gymnast with a compact frame and strong, well-
developed upper body, Leath both taught and performed in Ann’s work-
shops. The dancers were all very fond of him and admired the inventive-
ness of his movements in dramatic situations, as well as his crazy wit on
and oª the stage. Indeed, it was Leath’s enthusiasm that had led many of
them to Ann’s deck. “One of the fascinating things about being out there
on the deck,” Leath recalled, “was that we were separated from everything
that was going on in New York. Much of what we did and how we did it
was due to being out in nature. We were only one step from wilderness, on
the dance deck. We had Mount Tamalpais’s main peak rising up before us.
Everything we did evolved out of what happened in improvisation.”45
Both Forti and Hunter Groat reported being exhilarated but also at times
frustrated by the experience on the dance deck. It seemed like the most open
and liberated approach to dance invention imaginable, yet some rules did

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 127

 emerge. Sometimes Ann “would give an assignment and I would find the
most direct and crudest, in the sense of raw, way to fulfill the assignment,”
Forti reflected. “Once in the Branch Dance I crawled across the deck, and
I remember Ann wanted me to keep some tension in my feet or formalize
my feet somehow and I said no, that I was just crawling. Ann would feel
that the movement should be somewhat refined or aestheticized.”46 But
Forti had a clear sense of why she wanted to deviate from Ann’s instruc-
tions, so after some discussion Ann accepted her version of the crawl. Hunter
Groat, however, found the competition from Ann’s intentions overwhelm-
ing. “The [deck] space was so inviting,” Hunter Groat remembered. “I
thought, ‘Just turn me loose!’ But Ann had the attitude that if you weren’t
doing what she was doing, it wasn’t good. So I told people, ‘Go,’ but don’t
believe all the promises.” Indeed, Hunter Groat’s observations have been
echoed by several of Ann’s associates over the years who recognize what can
be the genius of her eclecticism but also chafe at its pragmatism. “She had
an eclectic attitude. She used people up,” Hunter Groat said sadly. “By 1957
I had gotten so frustrated that I had to leave to form my own group and
do my own work.”47
In her classes and workshops, Ann assimilated influences from the people
and environments around her, at times, it seemed, unknowingly. This
method of working in response to what was going on around her was crit-
ical to her aesthetic. In the years ahead it would work greatly to her ad-
vantage, giving her work its topicality and tone of contemporaneity. Es-
sentially, however, Ann was just continuing to read the environment—not
only geographically but also socially, culturally, and politically. At first glance
this approach seemed totally free, but on closer inspection it was predicated
on a set of implicit understandings about the outer limits of possibility.
Ann was pragmatic—not everything was possible. Frictions would arise, as
they had with Hunter Groat, when a dancer’s hopes and Ann’s expectations
or sense of limits didn’t coincide.
Ann’s move from the traditional indoor dance studio on Union Street to
the expanse of her dance deck in the woods obviously enlarged the whole
frame around her experimentation. Now, day-long workshops on the dance
deck, often lasting until late into the night in the summer, replaced the strict
sixty-minute studio class. “I remember dancing till midnight,” Forti said.
She recalled overhearing Ann being interviewed by a newspaper reporter,
who asked what she did when it rained. “Well, the rain runs down between
the cracks of the deck,” Ann replied, as if it were obvious that they con-
tinued dancing.48

128 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

 Living with nature was very much part of the Halprin family style. In
the summer of 1954 Larry began the first of a decade of annual four-week
backpacking trips to the Sierras, first with Daria and later with Rana as well.
“My parents did stuª with us during our childhood that was quite impor-
tant, wonderful and valuable,” Daria pointed out. “My father took me up
to the high Sierras starting when I was six years old. I started on a pack
horse because I wasn’t old enough or strong enough to make the extraor-
dinary trek in.”49

Ann often sought out novel environments in order to witness the kinds of
improvisational dialogues dancers might initiate with a locale. She en-
couraged her teachers and students to look for unusual environments as
well. One weekend Norma Leistiko, a dancer with Ann, along with Leis-
tiko’s boyfriend, Jacques Overhoª, explored the construction site of a huge
United Airlines cargo hangar being built at the San Francisco Airport. (At
the time Leistiko was working as a receptionist for Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill, the architects for the hangar.) Ann had glimpsed this site from the
freeway and also been intrigued.
As Overhoª, a structural engineer and sculptor, walked around the de-
serted site, Leistiko started playfully hanging from the metal frames, im-
provising a little dance. Intrigued, Overhoª called a friend that evening,
the filmmaker William R. (Bill) Heick, who was a neighbor of the Hal-
prins, and invited Heick to film a dance improvisation at the hangar the
following weekend, provided Ann agreed. She did, asking Forti, Graham,
Hunter Groat, and Leath to join her and Leistiko. That weekend three cars,
whose inhabitants included Overhoª, Heick, Halprin, and the five dancers,
drove to the site. Heick, who was familiar with construction sites from doc-
umenting the Bechtel Corporation’s international projects, shot three hours
of film as he followed the dancers through the site. A couple of hours into
the improvisation, Heick recalled, a security guard arrived and ordered the
dancers to leave. One of the women dancers, however, had just stepped on
a rusty nail, so the guard was pressed into service speedily driving her to get
first aid. The rest of the dancers continued dancing and Heick kept film-
ing until the guard returned a half-hour later, when they were finally forced
to stop. A few days later, Overhoª borrowed Heick’s camera and persuaded
a friend who flew over architectural sites, photographing them from the
air, to make several passes over the hangar so Overhoª could get shots
zooming into and away from the hangar by air. Heick and Overhoª worked

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 129

 on and oª over the next four months editing the film into a tight seven-
minute short, an edgy improvisational dialogue between the dancers, the
filmmakers, and the steel skeleton. Heick, who had ties to San Francisco’s
Beat scene, helped lend Hangar its hip aesthetic.50
The film shows the dancers working quickly and quietly, mindful that
they are trespassing without permission in a dangerous construction zone.
They begin their improvisation on the rocky dirt field adjacent to the half-
built hangar. Crouching, reaching, gesturing both toward the hangar and,
in geometrical semiphoric arm movements, away from it, Ann and her five
dancers start to echo in their bodies and their actions the visual rhythms of
the three-story orange steel skeleton of the hangar. “Reading” the hangar
as if it were the “score” for their improvisation, they seem to be commu-
nicating with the hangar in full-body sign language.
The dancers charge toward the hangar, and the next image we see is of
them positioned inside the grids formed by the massive I-beams, the repet-
itive squares and rectangles of the hangar’s open gridwork of skeletal walls
and floors. In Ann’s own improvisation, there is perpetual interplay between
improvising with an eye toward the look of the movement and perform-
ing actual physical investigations such as testing just how far a dancer can
safely lean oª a beam, which may result later in performable movement.
The improvisation in Hangar is bounded by just a few preliminary
decisions—like the choice to have vertical movements predominate. And
yet the freedom given to the dancers to design their own actions doesn’t
guarantee that they’ll enjoy the performing experience. Decades later, when
Forti watched the film of Hangar, she remembered instantly how much she
had disliked doing the dance: “I hated being there. I was so uncomfortable
on those I-beams. I remember feeling it was dangerous. It was physically
uncomfortable and it wasn’t kinesthetically satisfying to me. It was very de-
sign oriented, in ways that didn’t especially interest me.”51 As far as anyone
recalls, Hangar was only screened once, in June of 1964 at the Playhouse in
San Francisco, at an evening of short films by Heick and David Myers.52
Forti’s memories of the discomfort of the work point to an interesting
paradox. In the film the dancers performing on the I-beams several stories
above ground seem coolly dispassionate and extremely controlled, display-
ing rigid geometric postures atop these perilous perches. Yet if Forti’s mem-
ory of her discomfort is accurate, then in its formal drama Hangar violates
Ann’s own credo that the dance should arise from the performers’ honest
interaction with their environment. Aside from the opening moments of
the film, where the dancers spill across the rocky field, advancing toward

130 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

the hangar as if it were a deity-like monolithic presence, the improvisation
Hangar showcases is relatively static, focusing on a series of slow postural
changes, pliés, and crouches that lead one back to noticing the anchored
stability of the hangar’s form.
More than any conscious dance reference, it is this aesthetic of cool con-
tainment in the face of peril, combined with spontaneous art making, that
suggests the link between Ann and the Beat musicians, writers, and visual
artists of this era. In 1957 the Beats and Beat “style” were in full swing in
San Francisco, so that even the women dancers’ black leotards and the men’s
tights might be perceived as part of a Beat uniform. Heick, with his pho-
tographer’s eye, found the contrast between these black leotards and the
brilliant orange structural beams particularly vivid.53 Rhythmically, Hangar
bristles with the late swing era rhythms and emotional energy of tenor sax-
ophonist Lester Young, which Allen Ginsberg described as pulsing through
his Howl.
Although a sparse sound score of wind instruments was later added to
the film of Hangar, it is cool jazz that seems to drive the dancers. Each dancer
presents a very private mien as they freeze their bodies in a huge “X” atop
a beam, some holding still while others crouch and change levels with an
air of understatement and detachment. The improvisation here is of the
sort jazz scholar Paul Berliner has called “in the moment” improvisation, a
jazz form based on heightened immediacy to what one feels at that instant.54
Hangar oªers a parallel “in the moment” dance improvisation.
Although they never returned to the hangar, Ann and her dancers con-
tinued to explore through dance a variety of unusual environmental sites,
from small caves on Mount Tamalpais to a steep embankment or a jumble
of huge rocks on the Halprin property. They would work at the chosen site
for an afternoon, improvising a relationship to each other, the environment,
and objects from nature. The purpose of these exercises, Forti said, was to
prompt each dancer to develop his or her own instrument without letting
particular steps or stylistic patterns get ingrained. That same intention car-
ried through to other exercises on the dance deck. As Forti recalled:

In the 1950s [Ann] was exploring what she felt were natural group pro-
cesses. She’d have us start walking in a circle, let’s say clockwise. And she’d
just tell us to keep going, and that we didn’t have to worry about staying
single file, that we could just continue. And she’d have us go for maybe
three hours nonstop. She’d sit there on the steps [above the dance deck]
and just be there. And we would accelerate. We’d get to running very fast,

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 131

 and then we’d get tired and slow down, and then we’d start to speed
up again. At the beginning she’d tell us not to think about taking any
initiative, not to get interesting. And then she’d just watch this unfold.
And I think we’d end up just collapsed on the floor.55

For Ann, even a simple movement task, like repetitive walking, could
become exciting to observe. There was no telling where it might lead if it
were allowed to unfold naturally, free from anxieties about making it look
interesting to an audience. Forti underlined that Ann’s approach “was ab-
solutely breakaway from the dominant modern dance approach of the time,
where you would learn certain movements and you would learn a technique
that would give you a certain style. It was radical in terms of what dance
could be. What movement could be dance and how was the dancer really
owning his or her exploration and discovery of movement? In that way I
think it was also political.”56

Ann’s insistence on this kind of independent thinking and the way Ann
used chance and spontaneity in these exercises, as well as in Hangar and
the fourteen other dances she created in this period, clearly align her with
the Beats. In 1951, for instance, Kerouac started to practice spontaneous writ-
ing as a way of sliding loosely into his prose. Similarly, Ann discovered au-
tomatic drawing in the early 1950s and spontaneously sketched visualiza-
tions as steady tools to lead children and adult dancers deeper into what
she once called “a concern with movement rather than how movement is
composed.”57
Rather than focusing on chaotic unrestraint, however, Ann was inter-
ested in seeing what would happen if a group of dancers and actors played
together with su‹cient skill and communication so that each could make
his or her own decisions, mindful of the others and selecting appropriate
constraints in the course of the work. For Ann, as for the Beats, such a loose
structure allowed one to state feelings and reactions directly rather than care-
fully mediating them through the constraints of deliberate form.
Hangar represents a liberating of dance, much as the Beats were already
freeing poetry and other art forms from traditional styles. While the Beat
poets declaimed on street corners and in coªeehouses or nightclubs, tak-
ing art out of the academies and museums, Ann took dance and presented
it, often unedited, in woods, vacant lots, and construction zones, outside
the theater and studio. She placed it in the midst of the disorder and dan-

132 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

ger of life. Ginsberg once stated that he was interested in using emotional
improvisation over rational reflection, in making poetry “a graph of the
mind.” “The body is where we must begin,” he insisted.58 Ann amplified
that, making dance a graph of the individual, in the world. Soon Ann would
begin including audiences in her improvisatory recipes for art making. In
her opening remarks before a wholly improvised performance she gave with
dancers and musicians on the dance deck in 1957, she said:

If you are ready and willing, it is possible that your mind can turn the
accidental into a meaningful event—when this happens, you have begun
to participate in our experiment. As the performers get under way various
facets of improvisation will take place between dancers and musicians.
By improvisation we mean literally making up music and dance com-
pletely spontaneously. Nothing that happens tonight has ever happened
before, nor are we concerned at this time with preservation of the finished
product.59

Like Ann, the Beat artists insisted on creating a somatic experience of

their art for audiences. Performance was more than an ancillary practice
for them; it was a model for their poetry. In contrast to academic poets, the
Beats claimed their work could only be fully apprehended in the perfor-
mance space, where the bodies of the spectators were as immediate as that
of the performer.60 They initiated a culture of orality focused more on a
process of remembrance than memorialization.
Ann, too, highlighted memory, charted through the kinesthetic system,
rather than memorialization, which in dance usually takes the form of a re-
peatable technique and repertory. In early 1958 she and A.A. Leath created
Duet, a ten-minute improvisation that presages the kind of task-oriented
work that would become a signature of the Judson Church dance experi-
mentalists in the early 1960s. During Duet Ann and Leath together held
a harmonica, and as one blew out, into the instrument, the other inhaled
its vibrating hum. Accompanied by the sound of their “harmonica-ized”
breathing, the two dancers tried to move with as much energy as they could
in the rest of their bodies while keeping their heads stuck together, cling-
ing to the harmonica. Ann, like her Beat counterparts, was aiming for a
presentation of the performing body as a unity of the physical and emo-
tional presence of the dancer.
More tellingly for dance, she was defining another road into movement,
a disarming “back door,” where the focus on an object and the task at hand

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 133

 of “working” it, replaced an overriding concern with choreography and the
“look” of the dance. Yet, although Ann did not really realize this at the time,
the emphasis on a task did not eliminate narrative or sexuality. As in much
of 1950s behavior, the erotic was present if not openly acknowledged.
Indeed, decades later Ann said if she were to retitle Duet she would call it
Kiss.
Around this time language and vocal sounds entered into Ann’s move-
ment investigations. John Graham remembered Ann responding to his own
interest in the spoken word and vocalizations, which originated in his train-
ing as an actor:

Ann had enthusiasm and a commitment to say “let’s try it.” She had
the ability to read whatever you did, feel it, read it and use it. When we
would do our improvisations, Ann left it wide open for me. I would make
sounds and say words and Simone [Forti] was willing to try anything.
We’d start talking as part of the movement. That’s how we started to use
voice. In the beginning Ann would go over to a corner, she’d watch what
was going on. She has a combination that’s very interesting. She has a
very strong nature, she has a strong sense of something she’s got to do
in this life. She’s also a little naive. It seemed to work quite well for her,
and us.61

In much the same spirit of experimentation, Ann began using costumes

unconventionally, as a way to direct the performers’ actions rather than hav-
ing them assume a specific character role or enact set steps. She scavenged
junk and antique shops for outdated clothing, artifacts of personality and
identity she and her dancers could layer on themselves. Without making
any modifications in what she found, Ann simply handed each dancer in
her piece Trunk Dance some used or vintage clothing. The dancers were
then asked to let the clothing inform the kind of movement choices they
made. For Simone Forti, who performed this dance with Ann and A.A.
Leath, the nonsensical and random manner in which movement and nar-
rative were combined gave the performance a comic and surreal thrust. In
yet another variation of her method of selecting an outside object or set-
ting to dictate the form of the dance, Ann did a solo improvisation based
on the actions of birds and insects overhead—she instructed herself not to
move until she saw a bird or insect fly by, and then the animal’s motion de-
termined the direction of her own actions.
Ann’s courting of random order in some ways paralleled Merce Cun-

134 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

ningham’s and John Cage’s experiments with chance procedures, but her
work had a diªerent resonance. Ann used as her starting point objects with
dramatic and emotional content. “My concern is form in nature, like the
structure of a plant. Not in its outer appearance, but in its internal growth
process. This form I speak of is a spontaneous naturalistic phenomenon—
not paralleling nature but in its manner of operation,” Ann said.62 When
Cage and Cunningham spoke of following nature in its “manner of oper-
ation,” however, they meant finding a more global and neutral relationship
of parts to the whole. For Ann, this phrase signified a more sentimental
subservience to the organic structure and order of life forms.
Having a man and a woman alternately blow into the same harmonica,
or giving an old train conductor’s cap and black leather jacket to a sturdily
built man, as she did with A.A. Leath in Trunk Dance, lends a certain dadaist
edge to the results because neither the actions nor the costumes connect to
any coherent narrative. “We didn’t push for comic eªects, but people
laughed,” Forti later said.63 She described how at one performance Leath,
in his black jacket and cap, made his entrance crawling backward until he
collided with the backdrop, when he rolled into a fetal position and
stopped. Graham burst on the stage next, skittering wildly across the space,
flinging his arms around and turning swiftly in diªerent directions as he
chattered nonsensically about trains, buttons, and sneezes. Then came Forti,
slowing pushing the trunk onto the stage. As soon as Forti positioned it in
the center of the stage, Ann dashed in, flung the trunk open, climbed into
it, and closed the lid. From there the dance progressed into a vaudeville-
like shtick with the dancers searching for Ann while she shouted back to
them from inside the trunk, “I’m here, I’m in here!” The audience laughed
with pleasure at being the only ones who saw the whole story as Ann and
her dancers kept not hearing and not seeing each other. “I wouldn’t say we
pushed for comic eªects,” Forti said. “But it was a form of comedy.”64
Although the outcome might seem planned, it was something that de-
veloped by chance, through just letting the dance emerge, in the moment
of improvisation. And just as one impulse might push the dancers toward
the comic, another might lead to a moment of great poignancy. As Forti
described it, in one very emotional scene Leath was balanced with his back
sti›y against the trunk and his feet in the air as he froze in a shoulder stand
while Ann sat on the trunk, her head covered by a veil. With subtle move-
ments Leath managed to rock slightly back and forth, while Ann began
moving slowly, maintaining close contact with the trunk and thus with
Leath. Eventually Ann lay down on the trunk and Leath assumed various

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 135

 positions, trying to see her face from diªerent angles like a desperate man
courting an indiªerent woman.
The kind of improvisatory storytelling that emerged in Trunk Dance
found an echo eleven years later, in 1970, in the performances of Grand
Union, a collective of New York choreographer-performers that included
two alumni of Ann’s summer workshops—Yvonne Rainer and Trisha
Brown. Forti claimed that as soon as she saw Grand Union she recognized
Ann’s work as the antecedent:

The way Grand Union was working with movement and narrative
was very much like Ann and A.A. and John and I had done. But Ann’s
improvisation didn’t come from concept as Robert Dunn’s workshop
assignments did. It came from impulse, kinesthetic awareness and
impulse—and then the idea of an outside eye. So that you are following
your impulses, but seeing how things are developing and doing some
editing as you go.65

Yet, for all the seeming freedom Ann gave her dancers to explore what
might happen, she did not abandon all control. All of the dancers who worked
with Ann during the mid- to late 1950s mention her need to be the leader
and arbiter of whatever dance theater material the group created.66 “Anybody
who was a leader and needed to be in control had no future with Ann,” Leath
commented. “I was never interested in being a leader or forming a produc-
tion group. I’m just a good little boy who goes along with what mother says.”67
Paradoxically, despite her controlling tendencies, Ann was unusually ac-
cepting of what might be called mistakes in a more rigid creative environ-
ment. Had Trunk Dance, for example, not been the product of committed
improvisation, Ann and her dancers might well have rejected certain move-
ments as too corny and literal. Yet because these movements just “hap-
pened,” through improvisation, they were believed to carry a special au-
thenticity. Ann didn’t seem to mind whether the results of her experiments
were prosaic, as in Trunk Dance, or radically unexpected, as in Duet. Her
focus was steadily on how to generate movement from a source beyond con-
scious and deliberate control and yet remain true to the physical logic of
the body. If one honored this, then whatever resulted was within the bounds
of acceptability for her. “Everything we did evolved out of what happened
in improvisation,” Leath emphasized.68 Improvisation was the technique.
As Forti described it, Ann might ask a group of dancers to simply walk
in a circular path as a group on the dance deck, being careful not to let any-

136 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

one stand out as an individual or consciously initiate a change. As Ann sat
silently watching from the sidelines, the dancers shifted imperceptibly from
walking to running and back, going from a slow walk to an easy jog and vice
versa or from a dawdling aimlessness into urgency and anxiousness. They
did this all in absolute silence, with only the language of their bodies as
cues, like a flock of migrating birds changing course. Through exercises like
this, Ann was inventing a way to work in dance rather than just inventing
dances. Forti explained that Ann found improvisation to be “sort of like
hitting a billiard ball and once you’ve hit it you have to let it go. Either she
was going to direct for a certain eªect, or she was going to get us impro-
vising and just accept what happened.”69 Most often she chose the latter.

Ann found a compatible model for shaping her open and conversational
approach among San Francisco poets in the late 1950s. She began collabo-
rating with Richard Brautigan, a young poet fifteen years her junior, known
for the laconic, some said self-indulgently coy, tone to his poems, which
scan like carefully constructed sentences more than lines of poetry.70 His
works have been described as focusing on “a certain restricted range of ex-
perience: low-key, private sensations and ephemeral, minor constituents of
the world.”71 Brautigan’s sensibility, sometimes called “aesthetic primitivism”
for deliberately ignoring traditional poetry, paralleled Ann’s search for a new
kind of dance, “not just to clear the ground [in modern dance] but to widen
it as well.”72 Ann was looking for “another layer to give [a new piece] some
spice and imagination. Brautigan’s poetry was so simple but combining it
with [this piece’s] movements gave it a twist that was engaging.”73
The piece in which Ann and Brautigan first linked their art was the 1959
dance Flowerburger, named for one of the three Brautigan poems that lace
through it. Ann subtitled Flowerburger a “Dance Dialogue for 3 People”
and pointed to “indeterminacy [as] the basic principle underlying this
dance.” As she explained in a program note: “I like working on this dance
this way because I like being surprised, amused or astonished by relation-
ships that I could never have pre-conceived.”74 Performed by Ann, Leath,
and Graham, Flowerburger called on the dancers to make choices as they
were performing in regard to sound and movement, as well as the associa-
tions between the two. Their movement choices were restricted to sitting,
standing, and falling down, while for sound used text drawn from Brauti-
gan’s three poems, which could be spoken either by each dancer individu-
ally, by a pair, or by all three at once.

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 137

 Reviews from several performances suggest just how provocative Flower-
burger was for the audience. It always began with the three dancers enter-
ing through the audience: Ann, dressed in an orange dress and pink jacket,
lugged in an old suitcase; Graham, in a peaked cap and loose overcoat, stag-
gered in like a noisy drunk; and Leath just stood up from where he had
been sitting unnoticed among the audience. Once in motion their activity
built until they all raced madly toward the stage, pushing and shouting,
climbing over empty chairs, sometimes even stepping on people’s feet. Once
onstage they dragged some chairs from the wings and proceeded to climb
on, over, and through these chairs while noisily knocking them around. In
the process their limbs became as entangled as the chairs until they were
jointly sharing coats and jackets. The audience at times responded by tak-
ing action. Some people left the theater, while others yelled and jeered at
the dancers, who retaliated by sinking into listless postures and staring back
at the audience.
How did the critics respond? Writing in Arts and Architecture, Peter Yates
found the work tedious in parts but concluded positively:

I was particularly impressed by the ability of Ann Halprin and her two
companions to perform, easily and oªhand, feats of physical and dra-
matic dexterity which gave theatrical weight to what they were doing.
‘Wait’ also in the punning sense, because they were able to set and hold
their pace, not forcing the action, to avoid trying for laughs, and quite
simply sit out a long burst of audience reaction—munching their apples
and banana.75

An alternative San Francisco journal, the Open City Press, praised Flower-
burger as “madcap enough to delight the students and gain their immediate
interest but also containing some profound and bitter observations, free-
associational recollections of a world outside the auditorium much madder
than the one within.”76 Ann seemed to resist this attempt to read social state-
ments into Flowerburger, and in a lengthy program essay for a 1960 perfor-
mance, she pointedly underlined the “in the moment” nature of this piece:

The dance that you will see on the program tonite will be seen for the
first time, and then can never be repeated in the same way. The dance is
happening on the spot as the dancers and musicians improvise their own
parts. In this departure the choreographer has constructed a framework
open to a series of unpredictable possibilities and chance relationships.77

138 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

 Ann took Brautigan’s objective narration and turned it into a kind of
kinesthetic realism, where happenings, with all their discontinuity and im-
probability, governed her aesthetic. It isn’t that the content is unimportant,
but rather that it is constructed in the heat of performance, where the body
speaks and the mind listens.

A diªerent kind of collaboration emerged in Mr. and Mrs. Mouse, which

premiered as part of the larger Rites of Women, in late 1959. It used the po-
etry of James Broughton as its narrative and the music of Terry Riley as its
sound score. Described as a “light little satire on the antics and tribulations
of mice . . . with a torch song quality,” the piece featured Ann as Mrs. Mouse
and Leath as Mr. Mouse.78 For her costume, Ann shopped the secondhand
stores, where she found a long-sleeved black velvet gown that she short-
ened to three inches above her knees. Most of the dance takes place on an
old (secondhand) Victorian settee, upon which Ann sits in a variety of odd
positions—sideways, upside down—as Leath scoots along the floor behind
her, occasionally tossing out a word from the Broughton poem that gave
the dance its name.
“I thought she was wonderful because she was so forthright,” Broughton
said later of Ann. “She was always on the edge of growing into something,
she never had fixed ideas and I always like that quality that any visions she
had, any dance idea, she always was exploring. She would call me up early
in the morning and say ‘I have another idea. Why don’t you come over and
we’ll try it?’”79
In 1960 Ann created three new dances, Still Point, Visions, and Birds of Amer-
ica, or Gardens Without Walls. Each work pushed in a diªerent direction—
one played with narrative abstraction and another abstracted the form of
the body itself. Improvisation was still a basic part of all the dancers’ tech-
nique, but now Ann was moving toward severing the link between cause
and eªect in her dances. Still Point and Visions, with a sound score by Terry
Riley and La Monte Young, were experiments in a series of solo movement
directions using objects and props and space in what Ann called “a deter-
ministic way.”80 In Visions, for example, one dancer was restricted to danc-
ing only alongside the railing of the dance deck, and all the dancers’ bod-
ies were curiously transformed by fantastical headdresses and big clumps
of wadded-up fabric stuªed into their leotards and tights.
Over a three-month period Ann pulled together the previous two years’
experiments in improvisation to present her first long work, the fifty-minute

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 139

 Birds of America, or Gardens Without Walls. She chose Young’s Trio for
Strings, a score that has become known as the first piece of musical mini-
malism,81 to accompany Birds, which was structured as a series of seven di-
rectives for five dancers (Ann, Leath, Graham, and her daughters, Daria
and Rana). A large chart Ann made listed the tasklike actions each section
was to encompass, which dancers were to perform them, and the encum-
bering props to be paired with these actions. In this chart Ann designated
the dancers by age and size. The youngest and smallest, eight-year-old Rana,
was assigned tasks like kicking and carrying beach balls on and oª the stage.
One part of the dance was later filmed. Characterized as “Child and Tall
Man, Lifting and Carrying,” this section features eleven-year-old Daria and
Graham, who at six and a half feet was the tallest of the dancers. In this sec-
tion of the dance, despite the prosaic functionality of Ann’s instructions—
“lie down, stand, sit, be lifted, roll, still”—the dancers’ interactions evoke
a palpably sensual mood. It is easy to read emotional surrender into the
swooning collapse of Daria as Graham stands over her and repeatedly
swishes her limp body on the floor, gently swinging her first by one arm
and then the other. He then cradles her balled-up form, and, standing
hunched over, his legs spread wide, he swings her as if she were his tiny pri-
mate oªspring. Again and again, Graham tugs the reclining Daria to
standing, pulling her arms as her head hangs limply backward and her body
crumples lifelessly toward him.
This posture of relaxation is so complete that it borders on erotic sub-
mission, an interpretation Ann at the time seemed unaware of, but one that
is impossible to escape when viewing the film of it today. Daria looks like
a large doll in Graham’s arms, and he manipulates her with a gentle but
persistent forcefulness. Remarkable in its single-minded investigation of
what a big and little person can do together, both on and oª balance, this
section of Birds is also memorable for its naïveté. There is no deliberate
eroticism here, only frank physical facts about performers’ sizes and the phys-
ical reality of the adjustments one body has to make to lift another.
In a 1962 interview with Yvonne Rainer, Ann recounted how, just before
the premiere of Birds of America, she made one last addition to the im-
provisatory tasks: she handed each dancer a ten-foot pole. “By chance I hap-
pened to become very aware of the space in the theater, the stage. I just
didn’t like it, it bothered me and I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I got
this flash: just before the performance, I put a bamboo pole in everybody’s
hands, including mine, and we had to do the dance we’d always done, hold-
ing these bamboo poles.”82 A series of still photographs of this performance

140 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

suggests that, in addition to amplifying the dancers’ presence in space, the
poles encouraged a surprisingly aggressive narrative, as the dancers make
spearlike gestures.83 This was a curious change to make at the last moment
because it did not simply tweak a design element of the dance, but it dis-
placed the dancers’ complacency in the scale of their bodies onstage. It was
a “what if ?” experimentation more typically found in the workshop rather
than the performance phase of a dance.
Ann’s openness to experimentation was apparent not only in her dance
inventions but also in her choice of music. The music for Birds of America
was composed by the twenty-five-year-old La Monte Young. Young, an alto
saxophonist since the age of seven, had recently graduated from the Uni-
versity of California at Los Angeles with a BA in music and had arrived in
1958 in the music department at the University of California at Berkeley to
begin a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. In the summer of 1959 Young had
traveled to the Darmstadt Festival for New Music in Germany to take the
composition seminar of Karlheinz Stockhausen. In addition to an immer-
sion in Stockhausen’s music, Young got his most thorough exposure to the
work of John Cage through lectures by Stockhausen and performances given
by David Tudor while in residence at the festival. He returned to Berkeley
inspired to continue exploring sustained and continuous frequencies as
modal music forms as well as chance procedures. He also began to corre-
spond with Cage and to perform Cage’s work at Berkeley, learning, to his
surprise, that “everybody there still considered him an out-and-out char-
latan. I had to really fight to get him on the program.”84
One person who didn’t consider Cage a charlatan was fellow musician
Terry Riley. Riley, a gifted pianist who started the MA program in music
at Berkeley in 1959, had known about Cage and his prepared piano since
he was a high school student. At Berkeley he was drawn to Young, whom
he considered “definitely the most radical of all the composers there,”85 and
the two would soon collaborate jointly with Ann.
In early January 1960 Cage wrote in the margin of a letter to Young:
“Hope you can get in touch with dancer Ann Halprin.” And on Febru-
ary 7, 1960, Young wrote back: “I did get in touch with Ann Halprin, at
your suggestion, and plan to meet her soon. I am told she does beautiful
dances.”86 As Young remembered it, “I played her some of my music, in-
cluding my Trio for Strings, which had been recently recorded for me by
Dennis Johnson for a performance called Avalanche No. 1 at UCLA. I don’t
exactly recall the details but she became interested in my work and my ideas
and invited me to become the Musical Director.” Within a couple of months

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 141

 Young was eagerly recommending Ann’s work to other artists: “If at all pos-
sible attend Ann’s concert at UCLA. She is probably the best American?
Dancer? (although Merce Cunningham seems more athletic). I have been
working with her for several months now and it has been a marvelous ex-
perience. . . . We improvise and Terry and I make sounds even better than
electronic sounds. Live sounds (no tapes, on the spot).”87 Young would later
recall this work with Ann as “central to his development in oªering such a
free avenue of sound experimentation.”
Ann in turn was excited by the new sound possibilities that Young and
Riley introduced. She always welcomed change, and the implications of in-
troducing her dancers, through Young, to Cage’s music would be consider-
able. Warner Jepson, the musician who had composed the score for one of
Ann’s earlier dances, Rites of Women, and who had been providing impro-
vised accompaniment for her workshops with another musician, Bill Spencer,
remembered arriving one day, expecting to play for the workshop as usual.
He was startled to find two new musicians—Young and Riley—there.

Everything was on the spur of the moment it seemed. We arrived and Riley
and Young are in position and they both have mirrors on the floor and
coªee cans, and they are scraping them on the . . . you know, the fingernail
down the blackboard? Well, it was worse. And that was their music. And
Ann was all excited. And she greeted us, “This is what we’re going to do
today!” I responded, “No, this is not what we’re going to do today.” She
just announces that they’re there in our place. She was just excited about
what she was doing, about what was happening. And she figured, well,
maybe we would like to see it to, you know, incorporate us.88

It would be some time before Jepson, who was also a photographer, would
work with Ann again.
Young would leave for New York in late 1960 and Riley for Europe in Feb-
ruary 1962, but until then, their musical aesthetic dominated the sound en-
vironment for Ann’s workshops and work. The sounds they provided “were
ancestors of the wild sounds—natural sounds abstract sounds—interesting
material juxtapositions such as metal on glass, metal on metal,” Young later
said. “Terry and I started making incredible sounds; they were very long and
very live, and we’d really go inside of them, because they filled up the entire
room of the studio.”89 The same climate of freedom and license to experi-
ment within the loose boundaries of the avant-garde that Ann was carving
out for her dancers extended to her musicians, Young and Riley.

142 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Left: Isadore and Ida Schuman, Chicago, 1910s.

Right: Ann Schuman, Lake Michigan Shore, 1920s.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Above: Ann Schuman in her bedroom/dance studio,

1930s. Winnetka, Illinois.
Below: Ann Schuman in publicity photograph for
the Hillel Dance Group, University of Wisconsin–
Madison, 1942. Photo: Danny Yanow.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Lawrence Halprin and Ann soon after they were married, 1940.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Portrait of Ann Schuman Halprin, Chicago, 1942. Photo: László Moholy-Nagy,

by permission of Hattula Moholy-Nagy.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Ann Halprin with Walter Gropius at a costume ball, Harvard University Graduate
School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1943.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Ann Halprin in The Lonely Ones, 1944. Photo: Lawrence Halprin.

 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Ann Halprin in The Prophetess, 1947. Photos: Imogen

Cunningham, © The Imogen Cunningham Trust.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Ann Halprin and Welland Lathrop in the 1831 Union Street studio, San Francisco,
1949. Photo: Philip Fein.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Ann Halprin, Welland Lathrop, and Avril Weber in Daughter of the Voice, Veterans’
Memorial Auditorium, San Francisco, 1953. Photo: Philip Fein.
Below: Jenny Hunter Groat, Ann Halprin, and A.A. Leath performing People on a
Slant, outside the 1831 Union Street studio, San Francisco, 1953.
Above opposite: A.A. Leath, Ann Halprin, and Simone Forti improvising with a branch
on the dance deck, Kentfield, California, 1954. Photo © Warner Jepson.
Below opposite: Merce Cunningham on the dance deck, Kentfield, California, 1957.
Photo: Lawrence Halprin.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Above: Ann Halprin and dancers performing Hangar, on an airplane hangar under
construction at the San Francisco airport, 1957. Photo: William Heick.
Above opposite: Ann Halprin with children of the Marin children’s dance co-op.
Photo: Ernest Braun.
Below opposite: Ann Halprin and Simone Forti in Trunk Dance, The Playhouse,
San Francisco, 1959.
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Above: 1960 Summer Workshop participants on the dance deck in

Kentfield, California: Shirley Ririe, June Ekman, Sunni Bloland,
Ann Halprin, Lisa Strauss, Paul Pera, Trisha Brown, Jerrie Glover,
Ruth Emerson, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, A.A. Leath, unknown,
Willis Ward, unknown, John Graham. Photo: Lawrence Halprin.
Below: John Graham and Rana Halprin in Birds of America, or Gar-
dens without Walls, International Avant-Garde Festival, Vancouver,
British Columbia, 1960. Photo: Chester Kessler.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

A.A. Leath and Ann Halprin in Apartment 6, The Playhouse, San Francisco, 1965.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Above: San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop performing the undressing and dressing
section from Parades and Changes, 1965.
Below: Multiracial group from the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop performing the
paper-tearing section of Parades and Changes, University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1968.
Photo © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos.
 “Working with Ann at that time was very influential for our work,” Ri-
ley remembered. “Because she was working in such a free form and intu-
itive way, without intellectual planning. It was amazing to see how things
could develop with just a few simple materials. I really liked swimming
around in that way.”90 While the specifics of Still Point and Visions (the first
two dances for which he and Young collaborated on the music) blur to-
gether in Riley’s memory, what remains clear is the risk he and Young took
in improvising on the spot. “I think there was a question if we’d gone too
far,” Riley recalled, recounting how he and Young arrived at UCLA’s
Schoenberg Hall the day of the concert and “just looked around for what
we could find in the way of improvised percussion instruments.” In Ann’s
studio they had become accustomed to picking up some of the many per-
cussion instruments she had lying around, reminiscent of the kinds of in-
struments she had seen in H’Doubler’s classroom twenty years earlier. For
the UCLA concert Riley and Young’s instruments of choice turned out to
be empty metal garbage cans and lids, which they relentlessly dragged and
tossed down the cement corridors and stairs bordering the stage and audi-
ence. Riley remembered that the eªect was extremely violent and threat-
ening and seriously distressing to some of the people present, although not
Ann. The sounds Young and Riley made were certainly the most radical
music that had ever been played in Schoenberg Hall. The audience was so
upset that they rioted, shouting out and making a ruckus. Young’s parents
left in tears.91 Afterward, there was some discussion between Ann and the
musicians, but she never censored what they did.92

In the spring of 1960, when Birds of America was having its premiere, three
young dancers on the East Coast were beginning to share ideas about im-
provisation. Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti (who had danced with Ann until
she left for New York in 1959), and Nancy Cronenwelt Meehan (who had
studied at the Halprin-Lathrop studio from 1953 to 1956 and was now a
dancer at the Graham School) had begun meeting once a week to impro-
vise and talk.93 In late 1959 Rainer had started taking classes at the Cun-
ningham studio and had met Forti soon after that through Meehan. Rainer
took Cunningham’s June 1960 intensive course, and then, persuaded by
Forti to take Ann’s summer workshop, she left for San Francisco in mid-
July, driving across the country with Forti and Forti’s husband, the artist
Robert Morris.
Fifteen dancers took Halprin’s workshop that summer: Rainer, Forti,

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 143

 Shirley Ririe, June Ekman, Sunni Bloland, Lisa Strauss, Paul Pera, Trisha
Brown, Jerrie Glover, Ruth Emerson, Willis Ward, A.A. Leath, John Gra-
ham, and two others whose names have been lost.94 Rainer was particu-
larly excited by La Monte Young’s afternoon sessions, when Ann became a
participant. His presence, she felt, “pushed the work in the direction of
Cage’s ideas: the aleatory, the task, sounds and actions outside of the tra-
ditional art nexus, the gap between art and life, what came to be known as
Fluxus ideas.”95 In fact, Halprin had already begun working at the bound-
aries of this art/life nexus, but Young’s infusion of Cage’s aesthetic seemed
to legitimize her own investigations and give her license to ground them
more fully in movement and theater. Young himself would influence the
coterie of conceptual artists that became known in 1963 as the Fluxus group
in New York, and he linked Ann into this as well, including her in the lit-
tle art books and postcards they mailed to one another throughout the 1960s.
In an afternoon lecture that summer on the dance deck, Young told Ann’s
students about his Composition 1960 #2 and Composition 1960 #5, two works
he had composed a few months earlier and which both, at least conceptu-
ally, involved as much movement as sound. Reading from prepared notes,
he presented their scores, each one scripting a series of simple tasks. The
first, Composition 1960 #2, involves constructing a fire in the performance
space. The instructions recommend using wood, but other materials are al-
lowed. The fire may be as large or small as the builder likes, although it
should not be connected to an object like a candle. The performance space
can be dark, without lighting other than the fire. After the fire is lit, the
builder is invited to sit gazing at it for the remainder of the performance—
as long as the audience’s view is not blocked. There is no time limit for this
composition.
The second score, Composition 1960 #5, is one of Young’s most famous
works from this period. In this composition the performer is instructed to
let go of one or more butterflies, allowing them to fly freely. (It is suggested
that any windows be opened.) Again, the composition has no time limit.
If there are no restrictions on time, the composition may last until the final
butterfly has made its way outside.96
In their attention to the environment and the inherent order and sequence
in nature, Young’s scores #2 and #5 are evocative of the choreographic
method Ann was using in her workshop, where she prompted the students
to attend to nature for compositional lessons. While Young called these two
compositions musical scores, they might just have easily been called dances,
given their emphasis on the perception of framed movement, be it of a fire

144 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

or a butterfly, in a specified locale, for a designated period of time—which
is just what dance involves. In both Ann’s dances and Young’s compositions
of this period, the goal is to fuse visual aesthetics with the semiotics of con-
temporary reality and the natural world. The result is an art of the world,
situated in the world, where the critical factor is the frame. Its boundaries
determine which slice of life is being held up specifically for our aesthetic
regard.
Young said his butterfly piece, which is dated June 8, 1960, was conceived
one afternoon on a special outing he made to Mount Tamalpais with the
Beat poet Diane Wakoski.97 It was important, Young later explained, that
“a person should listen to what he ordinarily just looks at, or look at things
he would ordinarily just hear.”98 His premise here of using nature as the
model for an aleatoric structure echoes Ann as much as Cage. The butterfly
piece also involves the performance of a task, but instead of attending to
the actions of taking the jar, opening it, and releasing the butterflies, Young
made the visual a synecdoche for the auditory—how could such a rush of
motion from the escaping butterflies possibly be silent?
“Our ideas all overlapped,” Ann reflected years later. “All of us were look-
ing for new ways to approach dance. Both Merce [Cunningham] and I were
looking how to break up cause and eªect. La Monte Young and Terry Ri-
ley [were so diligent about this that] they used to accompany us with their
backs to the dancers so they wouldn’t even be tempted to match their sounds
to the dancers’ actions.”99
That Ann led movement sessions in the morning and Young music ses-
sions in the afternoon does not seem to have dichotomized the art forms
so much as reinforced the cross-disciplinary possibilities of improvisatory
and chance procedures. At this time Young was extending his lessons in
chance procedure into his spoken texts, and that summer he delivered “Lec-
ture 1960,” a talk comprised of aphoristic anecdotes, rather like the Cage
text for Cunningham’s How to Kick, Run, Pass and Fall. His stringing to-
gether of several little vignettes seems to have been an important model for
Ann, whose subsequent works played similarly with short movement nar-
ratives.100 Young was also experimenting at this time with long, sustained
notes rather than traditional melody. As he later commented, “When the
sounds are very long, as many of those we made at Ann Halprin’s were, it
can be easier to get inside of them. I began to feel the parts and motions
of the sound more.”101
There seemed to be a constant give-and-take between Ann, Young, and
Riley, as Ann’s open experimentation with her dancers encouraged Young

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 145

 and Riley to push traditional boundaries in their musical accompaniment
and vice versa. Their sensibilities paired up well. While Young and Riley
were moving on a path that would lead in a few years to music minimal-
ism, Ann was unhinging dance from traditional narrative logic, not so much
in a quest for minimalism as for a stripped-down, functional realism. She
was trying to break free of a tight cause-and-eªect, predictable logic in her
dance gestures and situations, as well as in the sounds that accompanied
them. For his part, Young once described his Trio for Strings, which was
used with Ann’s Birds of America (a dance of simple tasklike manipulations
of one dancer to another, independent of plot and character), as “a series of
single sounds, each surrounded by silence and produced independently of
melody.”102 Riley commented, “We talked a lot about that [breaking free
from tight cause-and-eªect logic in the relation between movement and
music] after each performance. How to create a separate medium.”103
For Ann’s month-long August workshop, Young and Riley continued im-
provising as the dancers pursued their investigations of tasklike activity. Ri-
ley called what they were doing “going along with their spirit,” as he and
Young dragged metal objects along the plate glass windows of the indoor
studio (built a few years after the dance deck) to create friction sounds or
rolled steel ball bearings across the sound board of the little upright spinet
piano Ann kept in the studio. “She was a perfect collaborator for us,” Ri-
ley reminisced. “She was a little older than we were and she was very con-
nected with the avant-garde. I was very inexperienced when I started with
her, but it seemed we were all getting a lot.”104
It is indicative of the profoundly experimental quality of Ann’s collabo-
rations with artists of all media that Young served as a conduit for Cage’s
ideas into her workshop and she in turn gave Young and Riley a forum of
essentially absolute freedom and a room full of ready collaborators.105 It
was this quality, teamed with the rugged and remote beauty of the setting
of the dance deck, that figured prominently in the buzz that drew dancers
and artists to come study with Ann that summer.
What was the experience like for the dancers, like Rainer and Forti, who
drove three thousand miles to attend this workshop? Rainer “was surprised
to discover that in the morning sessions Ann led us through some floor ex-
ercises that resembled Graham technique,” but there was also time for in-
dividual exploration. As Rainer described it:

Ann also had us explore something that might be called structured

improvisation, assigning tasks for voice and body. I remember Trisha

146 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

 Brown flying around with a long-handled broom. I did an improvisation
using my voice to utter fragments of words while emptying the contents
of my bag, including a tampon and other personal items. (I remember
this because years later Trisha told me how shocked she was to see the
tampon.)106

The image of personal disclosure, of unpacking intimate aspects of one-

self, functions as a neat metaphor for the special permissiveness and quick
intimacy the summer work on the dance deck invited. It was not just the
deck’s seclusion, the warmth of the California summer air, or the immer-
sion into hedonistic languor that working in a leotard-clad body on this
platform in the woods invited. The workshop seems to have provided a
unique space in the summer of 1960 for experiencing dance as a deeply ed-
ucational and at the same time wildly radical enterprise. It was H’Doubler
Meets the Beats, with Ann at the apex of this triangle.
Rainer, Brown, and Robert Morris have each confided separately that
what surprised them the most was the discovery of how comparatively tra-
ditional Ann’s finished dances appeared after the richness of all this open
process. “Various things were tried out in the workshops in a fairly open,
non-judgmental way,” according to Morris, who, although not an o‹cial
workshop student, was around that summer with Forti. “The materials ex-
plored in those improvisations involving language, sound, objects and move-
ment seemed to be unearthing very fresh and surprising intersections be-
tween these things. But my recollection is that the concerts tended to hold
onto only remnants of these discoveries and to eliminate the rawness and
edge of uneasiness the workshops set in motion.”107
Brown, who met Rainer, Forti, and Morris for the first time that sum-
mer, had come to Ann’s workshop after two years of teaching dance at Reed
College in Portland, Oregon. A 1958 graduate from Mills College in Oak-
land, California, Brown had been cautioned by her Mills dance teachers,
Marian van Tuyl and Eleanor Lauer, to avoid two things during her years
there—ballet and Ann. “Ann Halprin was considered outside the realm of
modern dance for what she was doing,” Brown recollected. What drew her
to Ann that summer was her desperate search for some way to teach dance
to her Reed students. While still a student at Mills, she had seen a perfor-
mance with Ann, Leath, Graham, and Lisa Strauss that astounded her with
the wit and inventiveness of the improvisations and the structures that gen-
erated them. “I was working with a lot of untrained dancers [at Reed] and
these students didn’t fall into the categories of dance I had been taught at

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 147

 Mills,” she explained. “I needed to give them a dance experience without
having to rely on these kinds of techniques and I had begun to work in im-
provisation, so that’s why I went to Ann.”108
Although Ann would likely have bristled at being called a dance educa-
tor at this period of her life, that is in fact what she consistently excelled at
doing, and precisely what Brown enrolled in her workshop for. “It was a
most volatile experience,” Brown later said. “The actual experiences I kept
having I kept putting a lid on because I didn’t want anyone to know that I
thought they were all half-mad. . . . There were movement explorations, and
she told us to move! And they were extraordinary and we went for hours.
There was no end to it.” Brown found this extraordinariness was soon tem-
pered by her growing frustration at the inconclusiveness and apparent lack
of goals of the workshop exercises. “I didn’t have a sense that there was a
curriculum, or a structure or a sequence in the classes that [was] intending
to lead to something, some understanding of what we could do through
improvisation. Ann may have had a game plan, but I wasn’t informed of
it. If I said to one of my professors at Mills, ‘I don’t understand this point
of choreography,’ they had an answer for me, and I remember the answers.
But I don’t remember the answers from Ann.”
One device Ann used was to give each student “a job” as a way of prompt-
ing him or her to find movement. “Mine was with the broom and it was
to sweep the deck,” Brown recalled. “I swept the floor for hours and I went
totally out of my mind. I was obsessively involved with my job. I never re-
ally swept the floor. I guess I just took it as a dance structure, and action
structure, and I held it.” It was in the midst of this exercise that Rainer
chanced to look over and saw Brown fly up and oª the dance deck as she
held onto the broom handle and propelled herself forward.
“I wanted to make dances,” Brown said of her experience that summer.
“It bothered me that all this material was going into the ether.” Brown was
equally frustrated that there was no system for critical feedback or discus-
sion. “Ann persisted in communicating with us through letters at the end
of the day, and I recall writing and asking that we make dances! Her re-
sponse to me was that she didn’t feel like the group was ready to do that,
and so I felt thwarted. These improvisations were so rich and so wild and
went through so much material. I had a sense of being lost, of not know-
ing where any of this was going.”
Ironically, earlier that summer, in a prepared text delivered to an audi-
ence at a performance on the dance deck, Ann had oªered reassurance for
the lack of conventional signposts in her dances, implicitly acknowledging

148 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

the lack of customary structures in her work. It is a disclaimer that applies
equally to her pedagogy:

I hope that what I will say will prevent you from looking in vain for that
which will not happen. Usually in a dance program the audience views
a product. By that, I mean a dance or demonstration which has been
worked over and fixed into a static form. This program has a new form.
The form is not a static product but is a form to be found in the process.
This focus demands a diªerent way of viewing dance.109

In part Ann was practicing an aesthetic of erasure, a partial peeling back

so that the messiness of making the dance was as much in view as the finished
work. Fueled by an abundance of raw material from the dance deck, her
approach as a creative artist was to find rather than impose structure to
eclipse some of her authority as decision-maker. Like many of the narra-
tives of divesting authority that surround readings of social relations of this
early 1960s period, an ambiguously defined notion of liberation shadows
Ann’s actions. A studio filled with fifteen dancers freely inventing move-
ment may have been enormously stimulating for a choreographer observ-
ing it, but for the student on a four-week mission to learn how to make
dances, it might well have felt as if he or she were a hungry person forag-
ing for food someone else would eat.
Ann’s interest did not lie in developing a cohesive onstage presence
through the technical or stylistic uniformity of traditional modern dance.
She wanted to create the conditions for each dancer to find his or her own
presence, not by “making up movements,” but by responding to an ex-
ternal natural order. She was looking for something “new.” As she wrote
in January 1961 to the critic Jack Anderson, who was preparing an article
about her:

I would like all my dances to be a complete surprise each time I do one.

If I can say to myself as a dance begins to take hold, “How extraordinary, I
never would have thought of that,” then I am truly interested in proceeding
with that dance. I would hope that the audience would enjoy with me the
sharing of this surprise in a spirit of inquiry, involvement and delight.110

This invocation of surprise as a choreographic goal raises questions of what

the consequences of surprise are both in the general spirit of the decade
and as a primary objective for art. A choreographer who focuses on sur-

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 149

 prising herself has no assurance the audience will find the points of sur-
prise still intact once the work has been rehearsed to the point of a public
performance. Ann hinted at a response to this in a lecture demonstration
she gave in February 1961 at the University of British Columbia in Van-
couver. She explained that she was looking for a kind of friendship with
the audience when she danced. “It’s too bad [that] this doesn’t always hap-
pen,” she noted. “Perhaps we fail to play skillfully, or the audience fails to
listen skillfully.”111 Ann herself, it should be added, had a marked charisma
onstage, which stemmed from her cannily intuitive and intensely energetic
and ambitious presence—and this was something that was not directly
transferable or teachable. Instead of making dances like hers, dancers ac-
quired the tools for mapping out experiments that would lead to their own.
Ann could exist comfortably in the improvisational present without
knowing where it was going, or at least not worrying about it until she got
closer to a performance date. This may have come from her early experi-
ence with H’Doubler, where actions like testing the range of motion of a
specific joint, or slowly and deliberately crawling, could be the focus of hours
of work in the studio. Ann modified this somewhat by using functional,
everyday tasks, bled of their context, as the improvisational prompts for
the workshop dancers. These tasks served as ideas for how the dancers might
generate movement material. Eªectively, Ann made her dances in reverse:
she began with tasks instead of choreography.
For Rainer, the most salient lesson of that summer was “finding ways of
generating movement outside of the body.”

That summer workshop was where I was first exposed to movement in

relation to objects. Sometimes it was something you held in your hand,
or devised little psychodrama or task-like activity around. I remember
exploring moving through space while carrying some object. Ann preferred
tree branches; I was later to use industrial objects, like gears. [Ann] was
certainly an inspiration and energizing force. I knew even then, however,
that the nature-and-dance combo was not for me, a bias that the women’s
movement of a decade later would only confirm.112

One dance Rainer created that summer was a piece for screen door
(sound), flashlight (light), and dancer (motion). She also adapted at least
one of Ann’s signature images of nature-inspired dance, improvising with
branches. To Rainer, Ann seemed “very present and dynamic and initiat-
ing” as she conducted discussions and introduced ideas. Rainer pinpointed

150 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

Ann’s contribution, indicating, “She didn’t represent a style of dancing; she
was interested in exploration. She is a great educator, that is undeniable.”
As Rainer remembered it, “Her workshop situation was one where anything
could be explored.”113
Rainer didn’t see Ann’s work in performance until several years later, when
Parades and Changes premiered in Stockholm in 1965. “When I actually did
see a performance I was surprised at the theatricality of the work and I re-
alized that the way she worked was always a preparation for finding mate-
rial that could be transformed into a more theatrical kind of genre,” Rainer
later observed.114 In the work Rainer herself would begin doing in Robert
Dunn’s workshop and at the Judson Church in 1961, she would make use
of the pre-performance stage she encountered in Ann’s workshop. She be-
gan taking the exercises involving the unadorned execution of movement
tasks as finished performance material. Rainer’s signature dance work from
1966, The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I (later called Trio A), celebrates the cool
functional minimalism of those dance deck tasks, deliberately stripped of
accents, attacks, and pandering to the audience. Viewers simply observe
Rainer doing the functional work of dance actions. “I think the physical
experience of the action being executed was more important than the look
of it,” Rainer said of Ann’s workshop—a statement that illuminates with
equal clarity Trio A.115
Like Brown and Rainer, Forti felt that at the end of the workshop she
needed to take the content she had found there through improvisation and
give it a form. “I think that improvisation was really beginning to pain me,”
Forti later noted. “I can remember saying that my inner ear could no longer
take those limitless seas. There just seemed to be all this turmoil and turn-
ing of image upon image.”116 “The intensity of steady improvisation was
so great,” she said, “I felt like I was overdosing on staying in the state of
mind that came up with so many images. The images just seemed to be
writhing around. There were times when I’d wake myself up at night be-
cause I’d be dancing, I’d be improvising and pounding my arm on the
floor.”117
Forti credited Ann with teaching her “how to achieve a state of recep-
tivity in which the stream of consciousness could spill out unhampered.”118
This climate of freedom was in some ways deceptive, for when a bound-
ary was breached Ann recognized it and called a halt. Ann would sit up on
the steps overlooking the dance deck and watch an improvisation, calling
out to Forti to stop initiating interesting things. She wanted to see how a
moving group would behave and Forti’s intentional shaping was interrupting

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 151

 the natural flow.119 Indeed, several workshop participants remembered Forti
and Ann arguing repeatedly that summer.
Although Forti had her criticisms, she indicated that what made Ann ex-
ceptional as a teacher was her ability to create assignments that stimulated
dancers to learn from their own movement explorations and “to really trust
the body, its intelligence and how it wants to move.”120 Ann, however, would
qualify this, commenting, “I didn’t really have anything to teach that wasn’t
already there, and it was really up to them to get it.”121
Ann loosened a great deal of creativity in that 1960 summer workshop
for Rainer, Brown, Forti, and others, but the critical next step, how to dis-
till the flood of ideas “going into the ether” into choreography and per-
formances, would happen elsewhere. At the conclusion of Ann’s summer
workshop, Rainer, Morris, and Forti drove back to New York and Brown
headed east as well. Rainer and Brown would reconnect several weeks later
when both became part of the inaugural class of five in Robert Dunn’s new
choreography course beginning at the Merce Cunningham studio, and Forti
and Morris would soon become participants in performances there as well
as at Judson Church.122
Dunn, who was not a dancer or choreographer but rather an accompa-
nist with a knowledge of contemporary dance, had deliberately set his class
up as a liberating antidote to the composition classes given by Louis Horst,
Martha Graham’s music director, who believed in strict adherence to pre-
classic and modern musical forms.123 Dunn also shaped his class as a cor-
rective to what, as a student, he had felt as the “lag in productivity” in John
Cage’s 1956–60 class at the New School for Social Research, “Composition
of Experimental Music.” In contrast to Ann’s workshop, Dunn’s class point-
edly focused on the production of dances. His weekly assignments stressed
the structures one might use in constructing a dance, and there was a reg-
ular deadline of presenting it at the following class. A typical assignment
might deal with abstract time constraints—for instance, to “make a five-
minute dance in half an hour”—while the subject matter was usually of
much less concern to Dunn. This flipping of priorities from Ann’s work-
shop appealed especially to all of the dancers who had taken her summer
workshop. “Bob Dunn asked us to be very specific about our parameters
and to invent new ones,” Forti said appreciatively. “Dunn’s [workshops]
seemed more academic in form,” Morris agreed.124
Yet Ann’s influence was still present in these classes. “Ann gave me my
first permissions to use my body and imagination,” Rainer explained. “And
because she was into so many diªerent kinds of things, the workshop pro-

152 INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS

vided a quite varied and expansive palette from which to start shaping and
channeling my own future directions. . . . I would use my voice in my first
solo using a chance procedure from Cage’s ‘Fontana Mix,’ made in Dunn’s
class, but in many ways beholden to having attended Ann’s workshop.”125
Even those in Dunn’s workshop who had never met Ann recognized her
impact on the Dunn classwork. “Simone [Forti] brought certain ideas from
Ann Halprin into a situation of extreme discipline,” Marni Mahaªay, one
of the dancers in Dunn’s inaugural class, noted. “The eªect of those very
simple elements was thrilling. I was so moved by the simplicity and strength
of it: the comfortable, clean, expansive run, the quietness of the stepping.”126
Within two years Dunn’s workshop would evolve into the Judson Dance
Theatre, a series of concerts oªered between July 1962 and the summer of
1964 at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, showcasing
many of the dances composed for Dunn’s choreography class. In her book
on the Judson group, Sally Banes oªers this impression of some of the in-
dividual choreographic styles: “Yvonne Rainer’s dialectical work, mixing or-
dinary or grotesque movement with traditional dance technique, pushing
the body’s operations and coordination to the limits, and testing extremes
of freedom and control in the choreographic process; Robert Morris’s task
dances, using objects to focus the attention of both performer and audi-
ence . . . [and] Trisha Brown’s improvisations and flyaway movements.”127
For all three, these movement discoveries had been awakened in that sum-
mer of working with Ann. Her 1960 summer workshop created the edu-
cational context for these dancers to find themselves, the content of their
dances, and to reach toward a new definition of the performing body that
was highly individualistic, attentive, responsive, and resilient. The body in
this model has its own intelligence, and the self emerges as each dancer phys-
ically negotiates her or his relationship to objects, other dancers, and the en-
cumbrances of the assigned tasks. As in contact improvisation, which would
develop a decade later out of work done by Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith,
Lisa Nelson, and other members of the Judson dance circles, one learned
why to move, rather than absorbing a set vocabulary of actions.128
In Ann’s workshops the instantaneous image became a new starting point
for dance. Dunn’s class led these sensitized bodies to find structure, limits,
and form.

INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEATS 153

 SIX

Urban Rituals
196 1– 1967

I am interested in ceremonies of the present. What is ceremonious and curious

and commonplace will be legendary.
diane arbus, 1962

People call me a sick comic, but it’s society that’s sick, and I’m the doctor.
lenny bruce, 1962

in january 1961, with the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy,

America celebrated an end to the cold war mentality of the 1950s and a new
era of exhilaration and confidence began. Ann was in step with this shift,
pushing ahead on the new path she was defining for American dance. Her
critique of dance convention focused on the reframing of dance perfor-
mance, grounding in the ordinary the images it created, and, most signifi-
cantly, the content it put forward. She did not want to train dancers to en-
act a script where their bodies functioned as instruments of someone else’s
grandly scaled expression. In Ann’s theater the desired subject of the dance
was emerging as the peculiar moment-to-moment lived reality of each
dancer her- or himself. In the early 1960s this emphasis on the self was not
yet the therapeutic cliché it would become; rather, it was a radical and dan-
gerous creative enterprise.
The man who would become Ann’s mentor during this decade, the Ger-
man-born psychotherapist Fritz Perls, made his first visit to California in
1959, staying for several months with a family in Northern California while
he consulted at Mendocino State Hospital. When his funding ran out in
late 1960, Perls left for Los Angeles.1 Perls would not be lured back to what
would become his permanent California home, the Esalen Institute in Big

154
Sur, until late 1963, at which point his path would cross with Ann’s for the
first time. In the interim they each worked in their separate disciplines, pur-
suing work that would eventually converge. Perls was developing his Gestalt
therapy by focusing on reading feelings through bodies and their move-
ments. Ann was progressing in an inverse direction, mining her own and
her dancers’ feelings as a means of generating images and shaping move-
ment toward a new realism in dance theater. Both Perls and Ann operated
at the intersection of the creative process with its psychic costs and physi-
cal manifestations. Their explorations would prove to be deeply sincere and
ultimately more intuitive than those of analytical researchers of the human
landscape.

Immediately after the conclusion of the 1960 summer workshop, Ann, A.A.
Leath, John Graham, and Lynne Palmer began rehearsals for Ann’s first
evening-length dance made up entirely of task performance. For years Ann
had been preoccupied with the movement qualities created when a person
just did a routine task, but now she edged toward an interest in the task it-
self. She and her dancers experimented with how to sequence a series of
disconnected physical tasks while layering them in the performance space
to create an inherent theatricality. The result was a dance theater piece that
emerged initially as The Four-Legged Stool in the spring of 1961 and then,
after a poor reception and a year of reworking, reappeared as The Five-Legged
Stool in the spring of 1962, opening at the Playhouse repertory theater in
the North Beach area of San Francisco. Designed as a sensory experience
without deliberate meaning or continuity, the content was whatever the
audience saw.
On opening night, Ann and Leath began the show by each standing in
frozen postures on the audience side of the footlights as people slowly filtered
into their seats. For the next twenty minutes, until the formal start of the
show, Ann and Leath kept shifting their positions imperceptibly so that
one had the sense that they had moved without ever seeing when it had
happened. As their movements brought them into sight of each other, their
features gradually broadened into silent expressions of recognition.
Leath, wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a safari hat and with a long
spyglass hung around his neck, was positioned in one of the boxes. Ann,
dressed in the thrift shop finery of a beaded 1920s flapper dress, stood on
the apron of the stage at the opposite side of the house. Her red hair was
fashioned into a towering mass, back-combed into an absurd exaggeration

URBAN RITUALS 155

 of the fashionable bouªant hairstyle of the time. “In those days people were
ratting their hair and doing these tall things,” Palmer recollected. “Ann and
I had extreme hairdos. We had a hairdresser friend make our hair go as high
as possible. When the light would go through it—it was really beautiful to
look at, and also funny.”2 This costuming extreme introduced an Albee-
like element of social farce to the performance.
The buildup of this little drama between Ann and Leath faded out with-
out ever resolving, and other solo events began to unfold on the stage. For
instance, Graham kept passing swiftly by, repeatedly lunging across a dark-
ened space hung with strips of shiny black oilcloth. A dozen feet above the
stage, in a small suspended balcony framed with an oval opening cut in oil-
cloth, Palmer sat at a dressing table eating grapes and combing the thick
hair of a waist-length black wig she had pinned to her head. Occasionally,
gazing through a hand-held mirror, she slowly surveyed the scene below.
Meanwhile, on the floor below, a bicycle wheel spun across the stage; then,
seconds later, Leath, now pant-less and with the tails of his white dress
shirt trailing, dashed after the wheel. No sooner did he catch it and throw
it oª than he repeated this surreal sequence of chasing/catching/throwing,
chasing/catching/throwing, again and again. Later, Ann, having exchanged
her flapper costume for a flesh leotard draped with a floor-length, embroid-
ered and fringed, red Victorian shawl, very rigidly and slowly descended
a tall staircase on the side of the stage, only to ascend backward as soon
as she reached the ground. This action too was repeated to a point past
boredom until, because of its extreme monotony, it once again became
interesting.
The two-act ninety-minute work was filled with more than a dozen vi-
gnettes like these. Composer Morton Subotnick’s score added what Stan-
ley Eichelbaum in the San Francisco Examiner described as “a bedlam of
taped and live noises—jet engines, yelping dogs, crashing piano chords and
ambient voices.”3 One of the most written-about actions involved Ann sys-
tematically gathering one hundred empty wine bottles from the wings and
then, as she stood on a four-legged stool, stealthily handing them up, one
by one, to a disembodied hand that reached down from the rafters. Palmer
remembers Ann resembling a praying mantis as she stretched her torso, legs,
and arms as long as possible to gather the bottles and then stretching long
again as she handed them upward. The most climactic moment in the dance
came when Leath, who had been lying in a recessed area at the back of the
stage, suddenly did a full-bodied fish dive to standing and lunged at Ann

156 URBAN RITUALS

as she stood atop the stool. He clutched her thigh and bellowed in a word-
less wail as Ann responded with a similar guttural cry, somewhere between
pain and passion, full of both eªort and impotency.
In the final moments of the dance, all the labor of Ann’s bottle passing
was poignantly reversed as a giant cloud of white feathers noiselessly wafted
down onto the stage just where she had so tirelessly cleared the bottles. Arts
critic Alfred Frankenstein declared, “The final episode of the piece, wherein,
to the sound of silence, feathers drop from the ceiling to the floor of the
stage, is worth the price of admission in itself. Each one of those feathers
had a personality all its own. This, I suspect, we should not see if our sen-
sibilities had not been sharpened by watching the rest of The Five-Legged
Stool.”4
Ann’s use of repetition and parallelism tied into the Theater of the Ab-
surd dramatists’ eªorts to communicate the fallibility of communication.
There was nothing clearly narrative or specific in any of the actions in Stool,
yet they seemed clearly to be about the desperation and agony of commu-
nication and partnerships and the impossibility, at times, of having both.
Later, when Ann saw Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) for the first
time, she immediately understood The Five-Legged Stool lived in the same
existential territory.5 (Curiously, Ann reported that she knew nothing of
the legendary Godot production her studio neighbor, the San Francisco Ac-
tors Workshop, under the direction of Herbert Blau, had staged in No-
vember 1957 at San Quentin Prison, just across the freeway from her home
in Marin.)
Even though the dancers’ actions seem disconnected, without a clear nar-
rative, one might describe The Five-Legged Stool as presenting a domestic
ritual of alienation and absurdity in keeping with the political and social cli-
mate of America in 1962. On October 13, 1962, a scant six months after Ann’s
piece premiered, Edward Albee’s abrasively realistic and absurdist nuclear-
age drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? opened on Broadway. Albee’s play
and Ann’s dance both live in a once-sacred landscape where the American
dream of family, happiness, and meaning is imploding. Through similar the-
atrical devices of repetition, parallelism, farce, wit, failed communication,
violence, and shattered relationships, both works evoke the hollowness of
lives without purpose, lives with traditions so bled of meaning they have be-
come vacant rituals that numbly reproduce the urban condition.
Altogether, The Five-Legged Stool signaled a radical break in the customary
use of ritual in modern dance. Instead of invoking ritual as a spectacle of

URBAN RITUALS 157

 decorative and highly theatrical entertainment, as Martha Graham, Ruth
St. Denis, and Ted Shawn had done, Ann wanted to use ritualized tasks to
initiate a perceptual awakening to the mundane for both the performers
and the audience. Ann was theatricalizing task, linking it back to prepara-
tion for the stage in the same spirit that she had contemporized H’Doubler’s
1920s exercises into the avant-garde task performance of the 1960s. While
others from the 1960 summer workshop pushed task into an avant-garde
dialogue with minimalist music and visual art. Ann’s use of task might be
better compared to Larry’s exploration of rituals of human behavior
through his urban designs in public spaces. As Ann has explained, “Dances
that change and transform our lives can be called rituals in the way I am
using this word. A way to create ritual is to invest the objects of our daily
lives with new significance. Ritual and ceremony can happen anywhere at
any time.”6 With this definition Ann was claiming the capacity for con-
temporary Western life to create its own rituals.
Ann’s working definition of ritual both embraces and contradicts tradi-
tional anthropological definitions; at the same time it locates her dance
events as being diªerent from simply a theater performance. The anthro-
pologist Roy A. Rappaport demarcates five attributes of ritual, and three
of these are found in Ann’s work: (1) “Ritual is performance. If there is no
performance there is no ritual”; (2) “In ritual performance transmitters are
always among the most important receivers of their own messages”; and (3)
“In ritual the transmitter, receiver and message become fused in the par-
ticipant.”7 Eªectively Ann was beginning to move personal experiences
across the boundary of contemporary performance. Instead of just aesthetic
enjoyment, she had begun to manipulate not just objects and actions but
also space, time, and spectatorship ritualistically.
Ann defines ritual in a nested relationship to sensory life. In Ann’s words:
“The symbol of people’s myth is their own body. How people experience
their body is their story. That story is their myth and how they perform it
is their ritual. Everybody has a personal ritual.”8 This belief in writing the
experience of the body through performance expands on Ann’s lifelong es-
sentialist belief in the body as a fount of deep knowledge that can be nudged
into expression and made available, through dance.
The Five-Legged Stool presents a movement account of how rituals are
rooted in our bodily experience of even the most mundane parts of daily
life. As the performers engage in quotidian tasks, stripped of purposeful
meaning, the audience members are invited to construct a meaning, shap-
ing their own mini-myths. By prompting audiences to participate in this

158 URBAN RITUALS

intensification of the prosaic, Ann hoped to nurture new perceptual skills.
She wanted to take both audiences and performers to that “strange liminal
space in all of us,” identified by the Scottish-born anthropologist Victor
Turner, where “life discloses itself at a depth inaccessible to observation,
reflection and theory.”9 Ann’s Five-Legged Stool aimed, initially awkwardly,
at this sensorial territory where ritual heightens our consciousness of what
is normally inaccessible to observation and reason.
Ann also used ritualistic actions in The Five-Legged Stool to rewrite the
cold war hierarchy of the senses. The kinesthetic rather than the analytical
is posited as being truth bearing, like the visual, and the ambiguity of re-
lationships is celebrated rather than hidden or feared. There is a hint of
irony as well as defiance in staging this message in San Francisco, a city that
just two years earlier had been the site of a demonstration against the House
Un-American Activities Committee, which was holding hearings to inves-
tigate disloyalty and subversion in the Bay Area. On Friday, May 13, 1960,
later dubbed “Black Friday,” two hundred anti-HUAC protesters gathered
in front of City Hall, only to be beaten by the police and sprayed with fire
hoses. The nosiest demonstrators were flung one by one down the steps
and then flushed onto the street by the torrents of water.10 For the police,
one might imagine that this was a metaphoric cleansing and casting out of
sinners (although it is unlikely the police would have phrased it this way).
For the radicals, the injured and soaked protesters became martyrs. When
the Michigan student activist Tom Hayden hitchhiked to California a few
weeks later, inspired by reading Jack Kerouac’s Beat narrative On the Road
(1957), he came to the Bay Area in particular to see the site of this con-
frontation, the “stage” of this coercive performance.11
Actions would not just prove louder and more persuasive than words at
this moment in American social history, but also be deemed by many to
be more trustworthy. These Bay Area activists’ belief in physical engage-
ment over rhetoric paralleled Ann’s own bypassing dialogue in favor of a
more immediate, sensory conversion of her audiences in The Five-Legged
Stool. “This theater event is meant to appeal directly to the senses and pri-
marily the kinesthetic sense,” Ann wrote of her intentions with the initial
1961 version of Stool. “Anything stirring up the mind would only serve to
build up walls of pre-conceived ideas, of habits of perception. The point
of reference here is in the tensions of muscles, nerves and the total human
responsive intelligence.” In keeping with this belief, Ann did not want pro-
grams to be distributed to the audience “unless the program can be treated
as an independent, poetic event of its own.” As she explained further:

URBAN RITUALS 159

 The customary program with academic verbalization explaining the drama
would serve only as a distraction. . . . Ideally the role of the audience is
that of a group member of the composition. They are given the freedom
to discover and select out of a series of possible combinations of relation-
ships. A single center of focus is never imposed on them. They are partici-
pants in the very act of composition. The elements of indeterminacy uti-
lized in the composition make this possible, the non-fixed spaces, and the
open implications and associations. Choice is a freedom built into the com-
position for the benefit of the spectator. This involvement is the audience
role.12

This is a remarkable declaration of Ann’s application of chance as a per-

ceptual method and of her dance theater as a ritual practice. It aligns with
similar emerging sentiments in the visual arts and in Merce Cunningham’s
and John Cage’s experimental dance and music work in New York.
When Cunningham had visited the Halprins at their home four years
earlier (see chapter 4), he had remarked on how her dance deck might aªect
the dancer’s performing consciousness. “Ordinarily,” he explained, “the
dancer deals with a fixed space set by outside convention, the dimension a
box with a view from one side. But here on the dance deck there is a to-
tally diªerent situation. Aside from the obvious openness in the architec-
tural arrangement there is another freedom for the dancer. There is no ne-
cessity to face front, to limit the focus to one side.”13 Rebellion against
modernist hierarchy had led Cunningham to his use of the stage as a flex-
ible frame where the dance within it held no specific front or back and view-
ing it from any angle was an aesthetic choice. Yet here was Ann arriving at
the same discovery of the openness of the performing arena with the Cali-
fornia environment as her teacher.
For The Five-Legged Stool Ann took what she had learned in her outside
space into the formal environment of the theater and probed that spatial
setting as if it were an architectural playground. The Five-Legged Stool opens
with an incursion into the viewer’s space and time, as actions, sounds, and
events unfold at curious paces and in odd places within the theater. Ann
deliberately tried to get her performers to use the whole space of the the-
ater, from the balcony to the aisles to the lobby. Lynne Palmer remembered
that throughout the performance John Graham repeatedly strolled from
the lobby to the stage, walking straight through the audience while carry-
ing a portable radio tuned to a local station with the volume all the way
up. “John’s role was all about entering and exiting through the audience,”

160 URBAN RITUALS

Palmer recalled. “It felt almost like he was a deliveryman.”14 At another
point Palmer and Graham ran through the audience with flashlights. Later
they stood in the aisles and screamed. At one point a chorus of people Ann
scattered throughout the theater began singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our
God,” and the audience spontaneously joined in the hymn. Ann was using
a broad range of devices to bluntly bridge the divide between performer
and spectator.
In The Five-Legged Stool Ann essentially took the theoretical work of John
Dewey and Margaret H’Doubler to its theatrical conclusion. If the aims of
education and art are to help us become more human and whole by reflect-
ing on experiences and using this reflection to illuminate life, how might
this process be enhanced by dance, with its capacity to allow an interpen-
etrating of the physical and the mental? Dewey was known to abhor du-
alisms, and in this piece Ann functioned as a distant disciple, invoking rit-
ual to triumph over the dualisms of perception and representation, of
creation and reception. It was here that her work met its greatest challenge.
Ann discovered that just designating the whole theater a performing site
was not su‹cient to give the audience tools for real engagement. She had
built her myths and rituals collectively with the performers, recognizing im-
plicitly that group collaborative performances can themselves be a species
of rhetoric. They involve debate, deliberation, and compromise, and in the
process they create the illusion of cultural uniformity and consensus. But
she had not yet thought to prepare the audience similarly. Several weeks of
rehearsals could achieve this for the performers, but what about the viewer
who arrives at the theater without such preparation? She, after all, refused
to distribute programs.

Writing in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, the same week
that The Five-Legged Stool opened, Larry Halprin endeavored to set up an
informed reception for Ann’s dance theater piece, which had been trounced
by the critics and public the previous year in its first incarnation, The Four-
Legged Stool. He discussed the reconstituted piece, with the additional work
symbolized by the fifth leg in the title, as inaugurating a new relationship
between an art event and its audience—a relationship both ancient and in-
novative. Ann was taking her art back toward ritual as a social model and
at the same time propelling it forward by deploying ritual as a contempo-
rary aesthetic strategy. Her goal was to reengage the gestural vocabulary of
everyday life as art and to cast the spectator as a more active participant.

URBAN RITUALS 161

 This last point had been the site of the most serious miscalculation of
The Four-Legged Stool. When Larry cited the work’s capacity to take art back
to its “ritualistic beginnings,” when “art was only a sharpened expression
of life,”15 he overlooked that in ancient times there was a knowledgeable
audience receptive to the communal experience being oªered and com-
fortable with the role prepared for them. This critical element was lacking
for Ann’s work. Instead, the public reacted to Ann’s initial version with hos-
tility and anger. People jeered, walked out, and, at couple of performances,
hurled verbal insults and objects at the performers onstage. Concerned that
this might happen again, Ann coached her dancers:

If this theater piece is performed for the general public it is important

for the performers to be aware that many members of the audience will
be uncomfortable and confused. They are apt to manifest this state by
making audible irrelevant remarks, by giggling nervously or leaving the
theater. This cannot be avoided and the entire cast must develop the skill
to maintain concentration and continue giving as strong a performance
as possible.16

Ann believed that it was the absence of the traditional performance an-
chors of gestural narrative and logic that distressed the audience. “We were
just scrambling, that’s all, just scrambling things up,” Ann said. “Sometimes
in rehearsal we’d try to scramble things up so that we’d do everything back-
wards and we’d start at the end instead of the beginning. We were trying
to break this habit of cause-and-eªect predictability, which is in a way what
collages did. And the first part of this dance was really, visually, just like a
collage.”17
In his article Larry pointed out how the work was grounded in every-
day life and our basic humanity: “She is making theater out of physical
images in ordinary life, of simple occurrences and the most deeply rooted
relationships between people. . . . She wants most, I think, to create an
environment—a landscape, if you will, within which both audience and
performers are part of the cast and the events are common to them both.”
His reference to Ann’s dance as aiming for a kind of landscape involving
both audience and performers reveals a connection to his own evolving ar-
chitectural vision, in which he saw the natural world as the ideal model for
art. Art, in turn, he defined as “only a sharpened expression of life.”18
In 1962 Larry was beginning work as the landscape architect for the con-
version of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square from a nineteenth-century

162 URBAN RITUALS

chocolate factory into a development of terraced plazas, fountains, court-
yards, shops, and restaurants. Integrated into this plan was his desire to
“choreograph” people’s movement through ramped and winding staircases,
past fountains, and onto tiered platforms and balconies that oªered views
of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz Island, and Aquatic Park. At its completion,
six years later, Ghirardelli Square would be lauded as one of Larry’s “finest
examples of creating space as theater.”19 The Playhouse theater, where Ann
created and performed The Four-Legged Stool, was a few blocks away in the
same San Francisco neighborhood.
At the same time Larry was embarking on designs for the Sea Ranch de-
velopment on the Mendocino Coast of Northern California. As the land-
scape architect for this project, his challenge was how to preserve the char-
acter of the land if a relatively dense development was built on it. He
suggested clustering condominium units and individual houses in a way
that oªered views and privacy while providing maximum open space as com-
mon area for the entire community. This design solution had social as well
as aesthetic and theatrical resonance. Like his wife and the playwright Ed-
ward Albee, Larry was commenting through his medium on the postwar
state of American domestic life and oªering an alternative arrangement,
where the individual could engage with nature and a community of like-
minded neighbors. For Larry, “community” included the environmental
as well as personal relationships, and he marked his ideas about social re-
design on the landscape and its edifices. It was a solution Gropius would
have applauded.
Larry’s interest in community came through in his San Francisco Chron-
icle essay on The Five-Legged Stool. He championed Ann’s art for its imme-
diacy and capacity to resurrect theater as a communal event of “supreme im-
portance” in people’s lives, “to speak to people in a language which they can
understand through all their senses.”20 Almost all of the dozen or so attri-
butes of his wife’s art that Larry enumerated are qualities associated with this
notion of art as “a sharpened expression of life,” as a slice of ordinary expe-
rience, framed, intensified, and set out for aesthetic regard—ritual as art.
By invoking ritual, Ann enhanced the desire Susan Sontag once identified
as a characteristic of modernity—that people like to feel they can antici-
pate their own experience.21 Avant-garde ritual packs the dual satisfaction
of being new as art and yet comfortably familiar as an experience because
of its patterns of repetition. Like spectatorship in the visual arts, Ann’s the-
ater set up a relationship where the audience did not lose consciousness of
self, where visual meanings dominated over linear narratives, and where the

URBAN RITUALS 163

 capacity to anticipate experience was made vital. Yet there is an irony here,
for it seems that the more like life avant-garde art becomes, the smaller its
audience. True realism rarely equates with accessibility.
In The Five-Legged Stool, then, little truths about one’s body, about one’s
daily actions and interactions, one’s social rubbing up against others, be-
came the building blocks of Ann’s urban ritual. In the same way that Richard
Schechner would later speak of “performance consciousness” as a transfor-
mation of being or consciousness that activates alternatives,22 Ann added
the term “ritual consciousness” to her conception of “body consciousness”
to denote the conceptual shift that accompanied her regard of behaviors as
ritualistic. She would come to define ritual consciousness as “a way of shift-
ing awareness from an automatic, habitual way of living your life to one of
active awareness and to using dance with [a] purpose.”23 Increasingly, Ann
would identify this as healing, and over the years the scale of this healing
would grow from private emotional ceremonies, to public ceremonies such
as Citydance (1976–77) in response to the murder of San Francisco’s mayor
George Moscone, to the massively scaled Circle the Earth for groups of
people confronting life-threatening illnesses, and finally to international rit-
uals advocating world peace. “Ritual and ceremony can happen anywhere
at any time,” Ann later wrote in her manual for people with cancer. “Cre-
ating dances that change and transform our lives can be called rituals in the
way I am using this word.”24

In the audience for The Five-Legged Stool was the man widely considered
the leading Italian composer of his generation, Luciano Berio. Berio, who
was guest-teaching at Mills College in Oakland, had first met Ann on a
visit a few years earlier, when Doris Dennison had taken him to see a per-
formance of Ann’s children’s dance co-op. Berio had been ecstatic about
the children’s performance and had also liked a piece he saw Ann perform,
but a plan to collaborate did not materialize.25 After seeing The Five-Legged
Stool, however, Berio was again captivated, praising it as the “most inter-
esting and alive approach to the theater today.”26 Berio himself was com-
posing in a parallel style of aural collage—suturing spoken and sung text
with live and recorded, natural and synthetic sounds, run through tape ma-
chines and live performers. He soon contacted Ann and invited her to pro-
vide the dance portion of an experimental opera score that he was writing
for an April 18 premiere at the 1963 Venice International Festival of Con-
temporary Music. Early on, as he explained in an interview in July 1962,

164 URBAN RITUALS

he envisioned the plot as “an endless journey,” providing a loose-enough
frame to encompass anything Ann and he might produce in this collabo-
ration and yet still lending it an air of intentionality and cohesion:

[This work] will not be an opera or a ballet, but an improvised stream-

of-consciousness procession of actions and sounds . . . a continuous poly-
phony of almost independent developments in action, situations, words
and sounds. There will be no story but rather an indefatigable assemblage
of situations suggesting diªerent levels of meaning. The most obvious and
general meaning will be one of continuous search, of an endless journey,
of a very meaningful exodus; but the purpose, cause and scope of this
exodus will be left an open question in the minds of the public.

Berio added that he hoped the audience would react to this work where
“there is not a story but rather an indefatigable assemblage of situations. . . .
The most obvious and general meaning will be that one of a continuous
search,” of an endless journey with the audience being “put in the condi-
tion of being unable to decide whether Ann Halprin and her Group are
dancers, actors, mimes, acrobats, or singers.”27
Over the next ten months Berio and Ann exchanged numerous letters
as they proceeded with the long-distance planning of this work, titled Es-
posizione (“Exposition”). Beginning in January 1963, Berio, who was in Mi-
lan, began trying to secure several days of rehearsal for Ann and her dancers
in Teatro la Fenice, the Venice opera house, prior to the work’s opening. In
a letter to Ann, he outlined a simultaneous double opening for the work,
with performers in the grand Renaissance square in front of Teatro la Fenice
as well as on the stage of the ornate horseshoe auditorium indoors. “I will
use musically 2 boy sopranos from Milano’s Duomo Choir, 1 clarinet (Mor-
ton Subotnick) and 2 trombones. They will walk toward the orchestra pit
(where something else has already begun) through marble staircase and au-
dience, inviting with captivating and endearing charm the latecomers to
our terrible Esposizione.”28
For the Chronicle’s critic Alfred Frankenstein, Berio’s inclusion of Ann
was “the biggest thing that has happened, internationally speaking, to a local
theater group since the tours of the San Francisco Ballet and the Actors’
Workshop,” and he urged the community to help with funds to make her
participation possible. In various editorials and articles Frankenstein and
Kenneth Rexroth stressed the honor this invitation conferred upon the city,
as well as the shame when it was revealed that the city was not helping this

URBAN RITUALS 165

 particular artist. A longtime supporter of Ann’s work, Frankenstein was
likely the author of an unsigned editorial that appeared in the Chronicle
calling on city o‹cials to rise to this important opportunity to “demon-
strate to the world something of the cultural vigor of San Francisco” and
proudly support Ann as the only American dance or theater artist invited
to the festival.29 Her work might be challenging for locals and her audi-
ences at home small, but—the editorial contended—this was a unique San
Francisco art product, and if the European avant-garde found it interest-
ing, then the city should proudly claim it. They didn’t.
On the opposite coast, a debate about Ann’s influence was also unfold-
ing. In August 1962 The Floating Bear, a New York literary and performance
newsletter edited by the poets Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones, contained
a column by Di Prima commenting on the Judson Memorial Church dance
concert of July 6. Yvonne Rainer had premiered her Ordinary Dance, a work
Di Prima praised as one “that will probably become a classic.” As Di Prima
described it, this dance, which was accompanied by Rainer’s recitation of
a poetic autobiography that included every address where she had lived in
San Francisco, Berkeley, Chicago, and New York, involved “naming streets
of her past, moving in her inimitable manner, pausing and twitching, lyric
and wooden, a system of dante’s hell in dance, personal as any hell, but ter-
rifyingly clear to the observer.”30 Parts of Ordinary Dance call to mind the
ordinary actions of Ann’s task assignments, as well as Ann’s verbal experi-
ments with the blunt use of language and prosaic autobiographical details
as the impetus for movement narratives, all of which Rainer would have
encountered in the summer workshop. In speaking about Ordinary Dance,
Rainer said she created the dance “mainly thru dealing with fragments of
observed behavior in diªerent kinds of people—a ballerina demonstrating
classical movements, a woman hallucinating on the subway.”31 It is tempt-
ing to read this, as well as her pairing of what the dance scholar and histo-
rian Sally Banes describes as “unrelated, unthematic phrases, some with rep-
etition,” with the live spoken words of the performer talking about her own
life, as an urban adaptation of Ann’s injunctions to her students to anato-
mize nature and themselves for direction in their dance making.32
One person who recognized Ann behind this work was the poet Diane
Wakoski. After reading Di Prima’s column, Wakoski wrote to the editor:

Being a West coaster (from California) I am aware that Miss Rainer’s

methods of dance composition, while delightful and engaging in the
way that she uses them, are not original with her. The idea she uses for

166 URBAN RITUALS

 constructing dances through an improvisatory and associative manner,
using her own voice as an instrument, is a technique which was developed
in the Ann Halprin Dance Company (San Francisco, California) and
which was really most extensively used and elaborated on by a dancer
named Simone [Forti] Morris.
Now do not get me wrong. I approve of Yvonne Rainer’s dancing—
very much. Like it. Admire it. But like any good Californian hate to see
credit given where it is not due/and of course feel wretched when it is not
given to those who deserve it.33

Wakoski was closer to the source than her letter admitted. During the early
1960s, when La Monte Young was teaching for Ann, Wakoski was close to
him, and she saw Ann’s work firsthand.34
James Waring also joined in the debate over the provenance of Rainer’s
improvisatory methods. Without mentioning that he too had studied im-
provisation with Ann in San Francisco, he set out to correct what he called
the mistakes and misconclusions of Wakoski’s letter. “The idea of con-
structing dances, or any other art form, by means of an improvisatory and
associative manner is not something begun by either Ann Halprin or Si-
mone Morris,” he stated, insisting that, in fact, Ann could only have drawn
her inspiration from “[Isadora] Duncan, [Harald] Kreutzberg, [Mary] Wig-
man and [Ruth] St. Denis.” And he concluded, “As for Simone Morris, she
is not a dancer at all. She has studied little in the usual dance techniques,
nor has she wanted to.”35
Even in these small inner circles of dance experimentation, the trail of
Ann’s contribution was di‹cult to pin down. Certainly Simone Forti (Mor-
ris) was an early disciple/colleague and a source of bringing Ann’s approach
to creating movement to New York. But, as described earlier, unlike many
important artists in modern dance, Ann seemed to be someone with whom
it was possible to study for a short time and still take away a new perspec-
tive on how bodies make choices based on connections between daily rou-
tines and spontaneous motions. She was teaching people how to throw away
externally based power in performance and replace it with a new belief in
the abundant kinetic impulses of monitoring oneself. Remy Charlip, who
danced with Merce Cunningham’s company in its early years and who knew
both Ann’s and Cunningham’s work well, saw Ann’s influence as very sig-
nificant for the Judson artists: “Although the first work the students of
Robert Dunn presented at Judson Church was influenced by John Cage, it
seemed to me that Ann’s work was just as influential. Yvonne, Simone, and

URBAN RITUALS 167

 Trisha [Brown] had studied with Ann, and David Gordon was a student
of that wonderful, quirky choreographer James Waring, who had also stud-
ied with Ann.”36

In late November 1962 Ann oªered the first of a series of in-progress open
rehearsals, at which she both solicited funds from individual donors for Es-
posizione and sampled audience reactions. William Roth donated one thou-
sand dollars plus the use of a large loft in San Francisco for the dancers to
rehearse in; he also paid for a professional fundraiser for the group. Ann
insisted on purchasing two cargo nets, shipping one to Italy months in ad-
vance of the performance as she continued to rehearse on the second one.
She also shipped a massive eucalyptus tree trunk to be used with a cargo
net in addition to Charles Ross’s sculptural set, only realizing later that the
freight charges far exceeded the cost of purchasing several cut trees in Italy.
With its three thousand seats, Teatro la Fenice would be the biggest public
venue, and the first foreign stage, in which she and her company had per-
formed. She insisted on having a three-week rehearsal period in La Fenice
prior to the opera’s single performance.
Ann’s dance making was not about a distinctive movement or choreo-
graphic style, but about creating an event out of the dancers’ response to a
specific environment and real situations. To do this in the intensely formal
and highly theatrical space of the 225-year-old La Fenice meant tossing away
the conventions of theatrical transformation and illusionism.37 Instead, Ann
saw this remarkable space as a frame for the unremarkable, for the deliber-
ate functionality of realism (one critic labeled it “super naturalism”). Early
on she described the performers as “a family” and the stage in La Fenice as
“someone’s fireplace in a large room.” In her mind she was rescaling the
theater as a domestic space and neutralizing its grandeur and associations
with class, privilege, and high art. Fourteen-year-old Melinda West, one of
the dancers, recalled how, during the days of rehearsal prior to opening,
the Italian theater crew became increasingly worried about what these wild
Americans might do, climbing over the opera house’s tiers of gold-leafed
boxes and glittering chandeliers, so they started removing the pieces of crys-
tal from the chandeliers lest the dancers smash them.38
By 1962 this kind of raw engagement with the environment had become
one of Ann’s regular methods for making art, an approach from which there
was no easy retreat or halfway point. She was treating the theatrical space
of the stage much as the artist Robert Rauschenberg had treated painting’s

168 URBAN RITUALS

“space” several years earlier, when he shocked the visual arts world with Bed
(1955), mounting a pillow, sheets, and a quilt in a frame and splashing paint
on top. Here was a work that, like Ann’s Esposizione, redefined the space of
art making, in this instance by breaking the confinement of painting to a
canvas on the wall and extending its surface not only into the surrounding
space but also into ordinary life.
The talented but very disparate group of performers Ann had gathered
would have looked foolish trying to do conventional modern dance or steps
in unison, confined to the traditional space of the proscenium stage. They
were primed to answer the questions Ann was asking in Esposizione, such
as “How does the body react when going downhill? Uphill? What happens
when it is carrying many objects and doing this?”39 Her dancers were
charged with navigating, voyaging across and through, the spaces of La
Fenice, with its baroque exterior, ornate lobby, and five tiers of boxes. Eªec-
tively she was anatomizing one of the most basic tasks of the performing
artist—how to get into and out of the theater.
In exploring this task, Ann allowed the choreography of the piece to keep
evolving. Berio’s letters to her shifted from warm support to growing anx-
iety as she continued to make changes and “explore the process” into the
final weeks before the performance. Finally, he wrote to her in exasperation
and desperation: “Please, please, please Ann stay in the scheme we estab-
lished and work on that: don’t change it anymore. There is still everything
to do or polish within that scheme. I am working like mad to write music
for you according to our decisions: I am not making chewing gum. Ann,
dear Ann, you are my love and my despair!”40
The La Fenice program opened with John Graham and Rana perform-
ing the duet from Birds of America, followed by the premiere of Ann’s solo
Visage, in which Ann lay on the stage covered with a painted canvas by Jo
Landor and rolled about under the stiª material as Berio’s wife, Cathy
Berberian, sang his score of vocalized cries and gurgling. As with Esposizione,
Ann was concerned how to make an intimately scaled work play in a large
theater. In a note to Berio she revealed just how mindful she was of ma-
nipulating scale so her smallness becomes a conscious theatrical choice. “I
think of Beckett’s play with the lady buried in the mound, ‘Happy Days,’
and for three hours all you see is her from her waist up, then in the second
act from her head up. . . . I plan to confer with Herb Blau, Actors’ Work-
shop Director, and find out how I stand on this.”41
During the intermission, in full view of the audience, a crew of twenty
workmen in blue overalls unloaded the huge eucalyptus tree from a barge

URBAN RITUALS 169

 docked at the rear of the theater at the old gondola entrance. As the audi-
ence watched, the tree and one end of the cargo net were anchored to the
flies over the stage and the other end of the net was stretched out onto the
apron of the stage on the other side of the proscenium arch. Intuitively,
perhaps, Ann exaggerated the ragged roughness of her presence in the opera
house by restricting the choreography to the blunt actions of transporting
the detritus of modern life. The first of what Ann called the ninety-minute
dance’s three “episodes” or “acts” begins with the dancers emerging from
the orchestra pit like an enormous pile of “moving, breathing, plowing
shapes.” As she described it, “We are all six of us pressed together as one
and we each carry large sacks, boxes, umbrellas and so much litter that none
of it is separable but together it makes a monstrous, ridiculous, sculpture.”42
The second act starts after a blackout. As the lights come up, several figures
are seen moving up the net. The dancers drag large bundles of rags, ham-
pers of tennis balls, rolled-up newspapers, and old tires into the theater,
across the audience and stage, and up the massive cargo net. “I am think-
ing about the vertical feeling in the space and the formality of it that we
want to change,” Ann explained.43 “The rhythm is one of going and go-
ing and going,” she told Berio. “There are times when Rana is carried, or
Daria slides and falls, or John swings out into space on a single strand of
rope and is revolving upside down between heaven and earth. At the end
the figures hang like fruit oª a tree, just hang and drop onto the floor be-
neath the net and the net becomes a house. The figures draw together and
regroup again into a mound . . . like a quiet, still, enormous rock. We again
are lost as individuals and only become a breathing shape.”44 This “episode”
contains images of beauty as well as risk. At one particularly breathtaking
moment Daria suddenly drops, as if falling from the top of the net, only
to roll swiftly down its length and catch herself before spilling onto the floor.
The realism of the performance is heightened by the way the dancers’ cos-
tumes of thrift store chic rip and shred as they climb, crawl, and lug them-
selves up, across, and over the cargo net. “We look like we’ve been through
a monumental experience, and we have,” Ann noted at one point. Later,
in a diaristic entry about the performance, she wrote, “It is fascinating,
though not altogether surprising, that many people are sure our opera con-
cerns the struggles of refugees from war-torn Nazi Germany.”45
The final act is performed in darkness. The figures in the mound move
out into a wide horizontal line, and they each hold a flashlight as they walk
quietly away, occasionally illuminating another dancer “like passing cars
on the highway” as they recede up the aisles and out into the plaza and the

170 URBAN RITUALS

night. Rather than defining a style or making a statement through dance,
Ann was allowing her dance to become its own statement. In the narrative-
driven context of an opera house this might be seen as a grave act of kines-
thetic disobedience.
The twenty-five-foot-high cargo net did much to dwarf the Italian the-
ater’s enormous stage and counter the formality of its space with Ann’s coun-
tercultural California style. How did Ann arrive at this image? At one of
her open rehearsal showings in California, Ann told the audience that the
idea came to her while driving along San Francisco’s waterfront and seeing
“a huge cargo net on a ship and men moving packages up it.”46 The cargo
net also suggests the influence of Larry’s architectural eye, especially as Ann
described it to Berio as “a mountain, a landscape, a house, a desert,” whose
repeating squares reiterate the structure of the plaza and the rectangular
boxes and balconies inside the opera house.47
Critical reaction to Esposizione was mixed and divided on whether Ann’s
or Berio’s contributions were the more distressing. One admirer was the
Stockholm critic Jan Bark, who thought Berio’s music—performed by a
full orchestra and choir, with a special Latin text that Graham spoke while
dancing—disappeared next to Ann’s dance. “Ann Halprin teaches us some-
thing about the paradoxical congruence between the ugly and the beauti-
ful,” Bark wrote, assuming Ann exercised a conscious aesthetic control over
the impression her work generated. “She does not try to deny the miser-
able things of our existence, but she gives a higher light to ugly things. . . .
The public, after this stormy introduction, felt as if they had been stripped.
They had been raped in the nastiest way, and they had let it happen. . . .
Esposizione could not have got a better reception. Ann had succeeded in
activating the public. . . . She had prevented apathy and condescension.”48
Bark’s tongue-in-cheek comment about the “better reception” was in keep-
ing with Ann’s own belief that anger and outrage are part of a continuum
of engaged responses from an audience. Irritation and annoyance as aes-
thetic responses never bothered Ann; indeed, they fell within her personal
objective for the performance, that of activating the viewers’ senses rather
than forcing on them a ready-made experience and response. This was Ann
the artist/educator making the theater a classroom for not just her dancers
but audiences as well.
After the performances in Venice, Ann’s company traveled to Rome,
where they performed The Five-Legged Stool, as well as Graham and Rana’s
duet from Birds of America and Ann’s solo Visage, at the Teatro Eliseo. The
response she recalled most often from the Rome performance came not from

URBAN RITUALS 171

 a critic but an ordinary man in the audience. He became so incensed at the
section of the performance where Ann systematically carries one hundred
empty wine bottles out onto the stage, one by one, that as she entered with
the sixtieth bottle, he charged onto the stage and, facing his fellow audi-
ence members, shouted in Italian, “For this, Columbus had to discover
America?” before storming out of the theater.49
On May 10 and 11, 1963, Ann and her group performed in the Yugosla-
vian capital of Zagreb, where they had been invited by the Muzicki Biennale
Zagreb, a new music festival. There audiences and critics were so perplexed
by the two works they presented, The Five-Legged Stool and Visage, that the
festival director, Josip Stojanovic, asked Ann and the dancers to remain a few
days for a hastily assembled press conference “because we have never had such
a controversy over the merits or demerits of any performing group.”50 This
meeting was televised throughout Yugoslavia, with a simultaneous radio
broadcast throughout Europe. After considerable debate, the one hundred
fifty critics and drama and music teachers at the press conference resolved
that either Ann’s work was the greatest artistic achievement in years or the
performers were groping among art forms they didn’t understand. Ann was
delighted with the controversy: “Whether we were liked or disliked, booed,
cheered, misunderstood or understood, we were never taken lightly. . . . In
every case, there was a thirst for information, a thirst for insight into what
we were after, that somehow made every reaction an acceptable one.”51
Vera Maletic, a young Yugoslavian choreographer who was fluent in En-
glish, was recruited to help Ann and the company in Zagreb. The experi-
ence changed her life. “I was stirred up by The Five-Legged Stool,” she said
years later. “It was so new. It was like when you meet a new paradigm, it
upsets your sense of the norm. The use of the everyday movement wasn’t
like anything known to our dance theater audience before.”52 Two years
later, Maletic, who later became a professor in dance at Ohio State Uni-
versity, came to New York to study at Juilliard, and she made a pilgrimage
west to visit Ann at her home in Marin County to thank her.
Back in California, without the glamour of being a foreign artist, Ann
found little had changed in regard to her local reception. For several months
the San Francisco Opera considered presenting the American premiere of
Berio’s opera with Ann’s choreography as part of their 1964 spring season.
But in December 1963, when Ann called James Schwabacher at the opera
about a scheduled meeting to listen to Berio’s tape, she learned that the opera
had decided not to go ahead with the project because of the expense and
concerns about the work’s marketability and controversy. “How discour-

172 URBAN RITUALS

aging to come home to this,” Ann lamented to her dancers, informing them
of the rejection.53 Ann continued, however, to use the cargo net as a climb-
ing structure on the hillside adjacent to her dance deck, frequently invit-
ing students in workshops to explore it as a vertical stage.
About this time Ann decided that, in addition to her dance deck, she
wanted a presence back in the city of San Francisco again. This time she
would be in the center of the youthful activism of the 1960s— on the edge
of Haight-Ashbury. In the fall of 1963, she accepted an invitation from the
musician Ramon Sender, cofounder with Morton Subotnick of the San
Francisco Tape Music Center, a loose coalition of Bay Area new music com-
posers, to join this group in the spacious three-story Victorian building
Sender had just rented at 321 Divisadero Street in San Francisco. (The public
radio station KPFA also shared this space.) Sender had been interested in
Ann’s work since his arrival in San Francisco in 1960, and two of her dancers,
John Graham and Lynne Palmer, often improvised on the concert series ti-
tled “Sonics” that Sender, Subotnick, and Pauline Oliveros produced at the
San Francisco Conservatory during 1961–62. “I was very enthused about
Ann’s work,” Sender recollected, also noting that the building’s main stu-
dio could seat seventy-five, which was just right for the center’s experimental
music concerts as well as Ann’s dance events.54 Later, in 1967, when the
Tape Music Center moved to Mills College in Oakland and KPFA con-
solidated its operation in Berkeley, Ann took over the lease and her com-
pany, the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, stretched out to occupy the
entire building. (The name of her company was Ann’s translation of the
German Bauhaus [ “workhouse”], because for her it denoted both a com-
munal relationship and an emphasis on process.)
Ann’s next local public performance was on May 4, 1964, when she pre-
sented Yellow Cab, an odd surrealist solo developed out of Visage from the
European tour the previous fall—set to a signature score of babbling, sighs,
coughs, and brief fragments of conventional melody written by Luciano
Berio.55 The piece flummoxed the local critics who covered it. “Miss Hal-
prin was the solo performer, although it was not easy to find her under the
mobile mess of paint-stained fabric that first covered her and under the sub-
human, drippy dressing of her ogre-like make-up and costume,” wrote
Alexander Fried in the San Francisco Examiner. “When the ogre put on sun-
glasses, brushed its teeth and lit a cigarette, the expressive value of the per-
formance caved in.” Berio’s sound collage using the human voice paralleled
the physical collages of human actions and relations Ann was exploring.
As Fried described it, the score involved “agonizedly frustrated stammer-

URBAN RITUALS 173

 ings over guttural syllables that gradually emerged into freer sounds in-
cluding laughter, sobs and chatter in an unknown language.”56
This would be the final time Ann performed a Berio score and the only
occasion on which she paired his serious modernist music with her zany
comedic side. Berio had originally intended Ann to perform this score,
which featured his wife in a challenging display of vocalism, in Venice, but
he did not like Ann’s solo or its premise of oªering a movement visualiza-
tion of the persona of the voice. He suggested she simply roll around under
a tarp—an idea that did not appeal to Ann. The piece, which never was
performed in Venice, became such a point of contention between Ann and
Berio that Morton Subotnick stepped in as an intermediary to negotiate
its only performance, at the Tape Music Center. Ann had a tendency to tip
unwittingly into parody when she pushed past the limits of invention with
certain material, so after the extended collaboration with Berio on Espo-
sizione, Yellow Cab may have served simply as a brief, perhaps unconsciously
motivated, moment of comic relief. In envisioning the kind of creature who
might inhabit Berio’s disembodied vocalizations, she and Landor teasingly
yoked the most experimental music and dance together in the most tradi-
tional model of musical interpretation.

In early 1964 Ann was introduced to Fritz Perls through Paul Baum, who
had studied at the Halprin-Lathrop School starting in 1948 and later taught
children’s classes for Ann in Marin County. Baum, who was now completing
his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, was meet-
ing informally with a group of therapists in Berkeley who were pioneering
an approach to psychology as personal growth for everyday people. There
Baum had met Perls during one of the German psychotherapist’s visits to
the Bay Area. Baum told Ann that Perls was someone she ought to get to
know.
Ann was discovering that the more she used structured improvisation to
free herself and her students from habits of moving, the more her students
would occasionally, and unpredictably, erupt emotionally, crying and be-
coming distraught in a way that perplexed her and left her feeling help-
less.57 Yet she persisted in trying to make dances whose raison d’être was to
follow one’s physical impulses, not one’s thoughts. When Yvonne Rainer
commented on Ann’s use of task as simply a way to get at “the movement
or the kinesthetic thing that the task brought about,” Ann acknowledged
this but also explained that she was moving toward selecting tasks so com-

174 URBAN RITUALS

pelling that just executing them would occupy the performer’s full physi-
cal and emotional attention.58
Intuitively, Ann was pursuing a Zen-like approach, sensing that nature
was the best model for human behavior and that people, if freed from ar-
bitrary external rules and conventions, can more easily achieve a harmo-
nious integration of themselves with the world. Perls’s work, which stemmed
from a fascination with Zen, also aimed at directing people to live totally
in the here-and-now.59 In his later years, Perls jokingly referred to himself
as “Zen Jewish,” because of the fusion of his German Jewish cultural her-
itage with this adopted philosophy of harmony and acceptance.60
Ann would discover both a model and a mentor in the sixty-nine-year-
old, short, rotund, bearded, balding, chain-smoking, drug-taking, sex-
chasing psychotherapist. After starting out as a classically trained European
psychoanalyst, Perls had spent the next thirty years radically challenging
the assumptions of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. In 1964 Perls’s
approach—focusing attention on the present moment as a means of cur-
ing people of their preoccupations and encouraging the free display of emo-
tions and desires—was both radical and supremely simple. Two funda-
mental tenets of his brand of Gestalt therapy—that it was not therapy and
that it was nonanalytic—secured its appeal to Ann.
Ann never forgot her first meeting with Perls. Baum had arranged for
Ann and three of her dancers, A.A. Leath, John Graham, and Norma Leis-
tiko, to attend a group therapy session Perls was leading at the home of the
Berkeley therapist John Rinne. Ann arrived in a combative mood. She was
still deeply stung by the San Francisco Opera’s peremptory rejection of Es-
posizione and already weary at the prospect of trying to fund-raise for an-
other European tour. In her words:

I remember the day I came. I was really hurt. Because I felt I knew what
we were doing and I couldn’t understand why the critics didn’t and why
we weren’t getting more support. I was feeling pretty upset and brazen
and sort of furious with the world. We were all waiting for Fritz to come
and I was sitting next to this man who was wearing a black suit, white
shirt and a tie and black shiny shoes and black silk stockings. And he was
sitting sort of upright in his chair.
Something about the look of that man sitting there like that, wearing
those kind of clothes, just freaked me. All my resentments about not
being understood just triggered me oª. So I stood up in front of this man
( John Enright, whom I have since learned to love and appreciate), and I
started to rip my clothes oª. I was just staring him in the eyes as I pulled

URBAN RITUALS 175

 this oª and that oª until I stood in front of him stark naked. I stood
there very brazenly and then I sat down and crossed my legs. Humph! 61

Ann hadn’t noticed that Perls had arrived at the start of her spontaneous
undressing, and he watched her improvisation unfold from the doorway as
he stood smoking a cigarette. As Ann flung oª her final piece of clothing,
Enright began to sob, tears pouring down his face. This made Ann even
angrier. She had expected him to at least shout at her to stop but never to
react with such passivity. Then Perls entered the room, gave the group a
slow, relaxed look of appraisal, and finally, looking over at Ann, he said,
“Nu? [Yiddish for “Well?”] So why have you got your legs crossed?”
Ann felt belittled and at the same time charged with admiration. In a
single sentence Perls had identified her aesthetic goal, her personal inhibi-
tions, and the inconsistency in her performance. If this was an impromptu
dance of full disclosure, then why was she hiding her crotch? “All I could
think was oh, my God, he’s just totally busted me. It was terrific!” Ann later
said. “I was inspired, he was just so right on!” That evening began a six-
year friendship between the therapist and the dancer, one in which the con-
gruence between the task of psychotherapy and the capacity of art to re-
make the maker became manifest. Perls had understood immediately what
Ann had been trying to do, and he told her bluntly how she had failed. It
was the cruelest, and most useful, piece of criticism she could have received
at that moment.
“Anybody who can see the connection between movement and another
dimension of what’s really going on, who you really are—that’s part of art,”
she later commented. “I wasn’t thinking of that as therapy. I was thinking
of it as theater. You’ve got to be totally open and honest and true to be a
performer.”62 Perls believed that one had to cultivate a similar pleasure and
openness to the immediate present to be awake as a person. His “Gestalt
prayer,” which in turn became the mantra of the human potential move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s, was a do-your-own-thing endorsement set
to loosely metered rhyme:

I do my thing, and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations.
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.63

176 URBAN RITUALS

 Several years before Susan Sontag wrote her famous essay “Against In-
terpretation,” Perls was championing Gestalt therapy as a noninterpretive
approach to experience. Ann too was looking to define a space where in-
dividuals could experiment with how to perform their immediate present
and be in the here-and-now, but in a theatrical rather than a therapeutic
context. Ann’s stage and Perls’s therapy o‹ce were joined by their interests
in not only cultivating an awareness of the immediate present but also in
consistently denying a mind/body split.
Ann’s sharp criticism of previous modern dance centered on her sense
that it operated by opposing creativity and human nature. It presumed that
rules were necessary to produce art and the present always needed to be
masked. As she explained, “Martha Graham was always interpreting. The
modern dancers were not really dealing with real issues. They were always
on the outside, portraying, not being. Well, this was diªerent. This was be-
ing. And I didn’t have any models.”64
Long before he met Ann, as an adolescent in Berlin, Perls had been fas-
cinated by the theater, serving as an extra at the Royal Theater in a crowd
scene or chorus. While still an adolescent, Perls began studying with the
director Max Reinhardt, who was known as brilliant but a harsh discipli-
narian. Reinhardt demanded a new realism, free of the heavy melodrama
then in vogue. In particular, Reinhardt wanted his actors to project their
emotions on a more realistic scale using more convincing physical demon-
strations and vocal inflections or tones to accompany reactions like pain or
laughter. In Reinhardt’s theater elaborate sets were discarded in favor of
more realistic settings that allowed the drama to focus on the tension be-
tween the characters and the audience. Perls’s biographer Martin Shepard
attributes the therapist’s awareness of the importance of body language
and his ability to read psychological truths on bodies to this early ap-
prenticeship with Reinhardt.65 In New York in the late 1950s Perls had been
introduced to Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the founders and directors
of the Living Theater, who advocated blunt honesty between actors and
the audience. Perls soon began attending rehearsals and performances and
socializing with the actors. “He had something in mind that was half-way
between the kind of performances we were doing and therapeutic sessions,”
Beck recalled.66
Within a short time Ann and her dancers were working with Perls when-
ever he was in town. He led encounter sessions in which they probed their
performing relationships. Ann recalled how in one early session Perls
“busted” everyone—moving through the group and identifying each per-

URBAN RITUALS 177

 son’s emotional weakness through a physical trait. He told Ann that she
had a dishonestly stiª upper lip and Leath that he had furtive eyes, read-
ing these as physical signs of the emotional landscape underneath. Again,
Ann found herself feeling both resentful of and impressed by Perls’s com-
ments, which followed his Gestalt mandate of “paying attention to the ob-
vious and to the utmost surface.”67
Ann also had individual sessions with Perls in the six years before his death
in March 1970. During these sessions Ann explored a dream she had had
in one of the early group sessions with her dancers:

We were, again, in a circle. A.A. was there, John was there, Norma was
there. And he [Perls] looked at me and said, “Now, let’s work on some-
thing.” And I was very frustrated and I said, “God, Fritz, I don’t know, I
don’t have anything.” And he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Oh, I’m
pulling my hair.” “Where are you pulling your hair from?” “Top of my
head.” And he said, “Get down on the floor with me.” And he put his legs
down in a kneeling position and he said, “Start pushing your head through
my legs.” And I had to start pushing my head through his legs, and as I
struggled through, he said, “Now what’s happening?” And I said, “Noth-
ing. Everything is black. I’m in a void.” And he said, “Good! Now stay
there.” And he said, “Just wait, just stay there and wait. Some picture will
come.”68

The picture did come, and it was of Ann’s childhood home when she was
five years old. For the next four hours of a marathon session, Perls coached
Ann through entering the house and beginning a tour of the rooms start-
ing with the library, where she took the Bible oª the shelf and began read-
ing Genesis. The next time they met, Ann went into the second room, and
each subsequent time she explored a diªerent room. “It was just so creative!”
Ann later said. “And he’d have me move the dream. So I wasn’t just talking
about it. I would move it.”

The last dream I had, I said, “Oh Fritz, all the rooms are just . . . all the
walls in the room are just melting away, and it’s just turning into one big
room!” And he said, “Where in your body are those walls?” And I said,
“Right here.” So he had me just make a sound, just like an outburst of
sound, to break through the diaphragm. And as the walls opened up . . .
I just made this . . . it wasn’t like I was shouting, it was just making a
bursting sound of an opening. And then I said, “Oh, there’s a door lead-
ing out into the woods. I have to go out into the natural world now. And

178 URBAN RITUALS

 you know what, Fritz? I have to do this alone. So I have to say goodbye to
you now.”

Perls’s relationship to Ann in these guided recall sessions is like that of a stage
director coaching a performer on where to take a particular character he or
she is developing—but the “character” in development here is Ann’s “true”
self and the script is written on her bodily postures, her actions, her presence.
In 1968 Perls permitted a camera crew to film several of his Gestalt ther-
apy sessions at the Esalen Institute, a retreat near Big Sur on the Califor-
nia coast, where he lived and conducted workshops from 1964 until his death
in 1970.69 These remarkable unedited documents provide one of the few
visual records of what actually went on in his Gestalt therapy encounters.
They oªer proof of just how intensely theatrical and shaped with an eye
toward an audience these sessions were. In one segment titled “Birth of the
Composer,” Perls sits in a chair at the front of a room, barefoot and smok-
ing cigarettes, as he and the nineteen other workshop participants silently
watch a woman rotate through three roles in one of her dreams: she play-
acts talking on the phone to her complaining mother, being a waitress who
is conducting a dismal-sounding orchestra, and then snickering as a criti-
cal member of the audience. In a voiceover Perls explains that he is letting
her play every part in her dream because he considers each part a facet of
a split-up personality, the disintegrated self she is seeking to integrate. The
metaphor of her playlet is obvious—the orchestra that she is struggling to
make harmonious and melodic, the conductor she wants to be eªective,
and the audience whom she wants to appreciate all these eªorts are each a
part of the self she needs to accept and unite to become “authentic” in the
Gestalt sense. “A person who has this ability to become something else is a
really good actor,” Perls concludes, using the word actor with approval.70
What is most significant about the sequence is just how public and per-
formed this identity testing is. The whole sequence is entertaining—like
amateur stand-up comedy, with moments of tearful despair. The others in
the room laugh heartily and often at the woman’s statements. As Perls di-
rects the woman, telling her when to switch chairs (signifying a diªerent
character) or when to extend or repeat a hypothetical interaction, his focus
seems curiously trained on aªecting the woman’s performance. At times he
prompts her to repeat sections that ring false until some kind of emotional
bedrock is reached. Implicitly it seems that if it’s fresh and deeply personal,
it’s also aªecting theater.

URBAN RITUALS 179

 Ann saw working with Perls as research for her dance, but she turned to
the Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson “for dream analysis and to under-
stand visualization from the Jungian point of view.”71 In Ann’s words: “For
me [Perls] was what Stanislavsky probably was for a lot of actors.” Her com-
parison underlines Perls’s identity as a director, as the person who shapes
physical actions so the primed emotions can surge up like a spring to fill
them. Paul Baum saw Ann as “trying to visit that place therapy usually has
access to and pull it back as art.”72 If so, then Perls was visiting the place
called art and pulling it back as therapy.
Trisha Brown, who had returned to guest-teach at Mills College for the
1964–65 academic year while her husband pursued a master’s degree in dance
therapy in the Bay Area, attended some of Ann’s weekend classes with her
husband during this period. She was surprised to see how diªerent the work
had become since her summer workshop with Ann four years earlier. “She
had changed completely,” Brown recollected. “She’d become involved in
catharsis, expression. There were these early dance therapy people there and
she was completely involved with that. It was not my idea of a dance class.”73
Brown happened to attend one of Ann’s weekend events that was led
by Eugene Sagan, a psychotherapist trained at the University of Chicago
who had been working with Perls since 1960 and who had taken Ann’s
dance workshops. A.A. Leath believed Sagan, a diagnosed manic-depressive,
sought out dance because he thought it might help his illness.74 Brown and
others were distressed with Sagan’s aggressive encounter style as he pushed
a distraught Holocaust survivor to painful limits in playing out her expe-
rience. “He kept going, pressing, going, pressing. I just recall feeling too
young and inadequate to witness or participate in this. It was big stuª,”
Brown commented.75
Soon Sagan, a specialist in cognitive behavior techniques, became a reg-
ular at the rehearsals and summer workshops of the San Francisco Dancers’
Workshop, and he began subtly, and then overtly, exerting control over the
individual participants and their work. “He was crazy,” Ann later admit-
ted. “Things got violent and physically dangerous.”76 She recalled one time
when Sagan pushed Graham so hard to work at the edge of physical rage
that he swung at Ann’s face, nearly breaking her nose. Sagan, who was in-
stitutionalized several times for his own mental illness and was banned from
Perls’s psychotherapy circles at Esalen, eventually jumped oª the Golden
Gate Bridge to his death in 1974. Several people who were present at Sagan-
led events at the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop described him as phys-
ically and emotionally abusive, a Svengali-like character who induced

180 URBAN RITUALS

people to open themselves emotionally and then manipulated them to do as
he bid. Carla Blank, who was a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College
when she attended Ann’s 1964 and 1965 summer workshops, remembered
being relieved that she wasn’t in the group Ann sent to work individually
with Sagan one afternoon.77 This was the dark underside of the early years
of the personal growth movement in California, when practitioners some-
times did more harm than good as they experimented with aggressive ap-
proaches to individual therapy.
Ann’s workshops, however, were not solely focused on therapy. In the sum-
mer of 1965, Meredith Monk, a 1964 graduate from Sarah Lawrence, spent
a week on a Greyhound bus from New York to San Francisco in order to
study with Ann. Monk, who had already premiered Break (1964), her own
environmental work in an urban setting, had heard about Ann’s workshop
firsthand from two other dancers a‹liated with Sarah Lawrence: Carla Blank
and Jani Novak, a dance major there who was dancing with Ann. Like Rainer
and Brown before her, Monk found the descriptions of Ann’s improvisa-
tional work, outdoors in the California sunshine, an alluring antidote to
the more formal, indoor East Coast dance training. “I felt I needed to get
away in nature. All that working outside and not being in a studio was won-
derful. It made me think a lot about artistic identity,” Monk recalled, al-
though she acknowledged that an implicit, and at times elitist, California
body-beautiful ethos underlay much of the nude work on the deck. “I loved
some of the warm-ups and the physical exercises were very beautiful,” Monk
added, explaining that she felt intuitively that Ann’s work related to her
own explorations with transformational and mythic images in city envi-
ronments. “She was working from the bone and there was a lot of release,
alignment, and slowing down. She was doing something very ahead of its
time.”78 In Monk’s assessment: “She really looked at the set of habits of
dance and tried to open them up to what it was to be a human being who
moved. The beauty of the way she worked was that it was encouragement
to find your own way.”79 Monk recalled Ann asking the workshop students
to play with tearing rolls of butcher paper (from a section of a new piece
Ann was working on, Parades and Changes) and to work on climbing the
cargo net from Esposizione. “I thought her scoring was brilliant, how she took
one concept and stuck with it,” Monk reflected. “There was a plasticity in
the way she worked with tactile objects like paper and the net. Big forms
with movement and texture.” To the twenty-two-year-old Monk, Ann
seemed to be able to do it all—exist as a serious artist, a wife, and a mother:
“There were very few women doing that then.”80

URBAN RITUALS 181

 Soon after moving into the two large studios on the second floor of 321 Di-
visadero Street, Ann began work on her next major European commission,
a full-evening work for the Stockholm Contemporary Music Festival. This
dance, scheduled to premiere September 5, 6, and 7, 1965, would become
the signature statement of her task performance choreography and her last
work in this mode before she turned fully toward the emotional territory
of Gestalt therapy in Apartment 6. Parades and Changes is a valedictory to
her initial movement-based approach to dance and the point of departure
for her emerging interest in challenging the dancers’ and the audience’s pas-
sive spectatorship as a means to instigate change.
Early in the process of creating Parades and Changes, Ann explained to
the audience at an informal showing how the entire ninety minutes were
based on three simple attitudes: (1) the dance form evolves from the very
processes—the tasks set by Ann—that form it; (2) the objects in the per-
formance are as real as the actions; and (3) time is compressed, so instead
of depth one gets an accelerated view of everyday life.81 There is a Perls-
meets-Ann quality to each premise. Instead of a task serving as a means of
discovering kinesthetic logic, it now serves as a physical Rorschach for the
body, so physical confrontation with external and environmental limits
prompts the dance. At the same time Ann, like Perls, exerts a subtle con-
trol over everyone’s “free” actions. Her identity is etched in quiet clarity
over all their physical choices and responses.
The dance, as its title implies, is a parade of changes in which the task
of theater becomes the creation, rather than the depiction, of a life situa-
tion. This attitude would stay with Ann her entire career, and only very
rarely, even in workshop situations, would she oªer analytic or interpretive
criticism of a dance. She was abandoning a purely formalist approach to
task in favor of a more Gestalt relationship—investing each action and re-
sponse to an object on stage with an intense sense of the present. Accord-
ing to Ann, Perls used to tell the dancers, “I don’t want you to rehearse. I
don’t want you to think about this. Whatever we do, we do what’s present
right now. No rehearsing, no planning, no trying to figure out, no analy-
sis. Just deal and express what’s there right now.”82
By the spring of 1965 the Dancers’ Workshop was ready to give two pre-
view showings of Parades and Changes, in Fresno and in San Francisco. The
centerpiece, which would become the most legendary part of Parades and
Changes, was a seven-minute section in which the full cast serenely un-
dressed, dressed, and undressed while coolly locking eyes with someone in

182 URBAN RITUALS

the audience. Although this section derived directly from that spontaneous
striptease she had done the first day of Perls’s workshop, Ann now revisited
removing one’s clothes as a statement of art rather than of anger. It had be-
come a post-Gestalt strip, where taking oª meant inviting in, uncovering
meant peeling back to the skin of the emotions. Reflecting on her initial
experience with Perls, Ann explained:

Yes, that was the beginning of Parades and Changes. That was the begin-
ning of dressing and undressing, because what I learned from that was that
my attitude was just totally oª. There is a way of removing your clothes
and appearing totally vulnerable— open and vulnerable—without this
attitude. I needed to learn how to be an extension of nature, and not
impose this self-righteous attitude. I had been so self-righteous, standing
in front of this man and judging him and saying, “You think you’re free?
Look at Me!” So that’s what inspired me to make Parades and Changes.83

The original cast of Parades and Changes consisted of only three adults
(Ann, A.A. Leath, and John Graham), as well as six adolescents (Ann’s two
daughters, seventeen-year-old Daria and fourteen-year-old Rana; college-
age Jani Novak; eighteen-year-old Kim Hahn; and two veterans from Ann’s
children’s dance co-op, fourteen-year-old Paul Goldsmith and sixteen-year-
old Larri Goldsmith, who came along mostly to help unload props but also
performed some).84 Morton Subotnick created the music score, Patric
Hickey the lighting, Jo Landor the costumes and staging, and sculptor
Charles Ross fashioned the scenic environment out of backstage objects,
including a tall scaªold used to change lights.
Everyone who was in the September 1965 premiere of Parades and
Changes remembers a diªerent dance and no one can say with certainty,
least of all Ann, what opening night or the subsequent two evenings actu-
ally looked like. The reasons for this are many—not the least of which is
structural. Ann was ritualizing spontaneity, and this often made for a
stronger memory of motivations than stage pictures. “There was no chance
in Parades and Changes,” Subotnick recalled. “Everything was done by
choice, but there was a freedom in choice. We did everything independently
first, working on diªerent attitudes of space. Then we’d look at ways of
putting each section together. It was a real collaboration.”85
Each element of the dance—lighting, sound score, props, and choreog-
raphy—was divided into six discrete units that could be combined in various
orders or relationships. The choreographic sections were (1) stomping (which

URBAN RITUALS 183

 the dancers did wearing oversized unisex clothes and heavy men’s shoes);
(2) unrolling sheets of plastic down the aisles, exploring them with flash-
lights, and then dragging them up onstage to drape over a scaªold and play
as an instrument; (3) talking in the audience; (4) dressing up from rows of
props laid out for each dancer in a line on the floor; (5) a slow ritual of un-
dressing and dressing repeated three times, each with a diªerent focus, until
the dancers took oª their clothes a fourth time, when, instead of getting
dressed again, they walked over to begin (6) the paper-tearing section, where
the functional action of tearing created the dancers’ movements.
For the three Stockholm performances, Ann stood backstage twenty min-
utes before each performance and shu›ed index cards containing the names
of the dance’s sections. At the same time the lighting designer and the mu-
sician (in this case, Folke Rabe, a Swedish musician who had been study-
ing with Subotnick and took his place for the Stockholm performances)
shu›ed their own six cards. These cards were then posted. The corre-
spondences between the music and the dance, as well as the lighting, were
thus changed every evening so that one night the undressing and dressing
section might be paired with the part of Subotnick’s score that called for a
radio to be turned on to whatever was playing and the next night it was to-
tally diªerent. Subotnick had initiated this concept of “scoring” all facets
of the event, borrowing a method of musical scoring he had pioneered a
few years earlier at the Tape Music Center.
What one watched was not so much the individual performer but the
process of watching theater being made in response to a changing stage en-
vironment. The actual look of Parades and Changes from moment to mo-
ment during those September evenings is all but impossible to reconstruct.
However, it’s real raison d’être was to set up certain structures to allow for
spontaneously vital, what Ann called “unarmored,” moments. Each of the
six sections was designed as a set of instructions containing parameters rather
than the specifics of stage behavior. “We weren’t using our emotions,” Gra-
ham recalled. “Instead, we were looking at them.”86
In the undressing section the dancers were instructed to undress in a
smooth, slow, uninflected manner, stacking their clothes neatly in front of
them as they disrobed. They stood in a line facing the audience, maintaining
eye contact with a member of the audience as they began to remove their
clothes. “We wanted there to be an extraordinarily smooth rhythm through-
out the line,” Landor recalled, “so that your eye was constantly going to
objects, seeing the bodies as interesting shapes rather than only men and
women.”87 Hahn, however, noted that on opening night at least one man

184 URBAN RITUALS

persisted in seeing it the other way—he sat squarely in the front row flour-
ishing a pair of binoculars.88 Still, Ann believed that in this sequence the
nude body was not an object of display or desire, but rather that the task
of unedited undressing substituted for Perls’s “hot seat,” as a psychological
peeling away. “It was a ceremony of trust,” Ann explained. “It was as if each
one of us were saying, ‘Here I am, look at me and see who I am. Trust me.’”89
Earlier, during her 1965 summer workshop, Ann had experimented with
various styles and paths of undressing. Carla Blank remembered an evening
when Ann divided the dancers into two groups and asked one to travel
around the circumference of the room on a small ledge three or four feet
oª the ground. The other group, which Blank performed with, walked par-
allel lines on an imaginary grid on the floor of the studio, with instructions
to change lanes only at the beginning or end of each imaginary parallel line.
As they traveled they could pick up or discard objects or clothing that was
within their reach. In the process, Blank said, they went through moments
of nudity. “It was the first time I was performing nude in public, and I sud-
denly realized I was inches away from Robert Morris, who had come to
watch the dance.”90
Throughout Parades and Changes the dancers’ actions in each section were
the consequences of making onstage choices within the limits defined by
oªstage parameters. It was like a democracy with a good government or
post-Gestalt therapy living. Ann also gave some thought to how to script
the audience into the dance. In the opening sequence, the dancers entered
through the aisles of the theater carrying huge bouquets of lighted flash-
lights through the darkened house, and in the final moments of the dance
the dancers returned with the flashlights, passing them to people on the
aisles who in turn passed them to others, until the entire theater was filled
with hundreds of traveling points of light. The edge of stridency and indif-
ference to the audience that seemed to anger the Italian spectators of The
Five-Legged Stool is softened in Parades and Changes, where there is a more
elaborated relationship between audience, performer, and the essential ma-
terial of dance—movement.
In Parades and Changes Ann and her collaborators tried to strike a bal-
ance between radicalism and popular entertainment using movement to
construct social and emotional associations. Perls’s Gestalt processes col-
ored much of this work. At the same time Parades and Changes was a dance
about formally framing task performance and the functional exchanges of
people and objects on stage as the actual material of performance. The dance
assembled several of Ann’s key devices for “getting real” and making art out

URBAN RITUALS 185

 of this stripped-down approach to theater. “Being an artist for me is allow-
ing yourself to be open to unexpected outcomes, about removing the armor
from your movement and yourself,” Ann explained. “And I find that very
connected to life. Otherwise it’s as if you are trying to control what’s un-
controllable. Process is the center of dance, but not the whole performance.”91
Before opening night, Ann and her collaborators had engaged in intense
debates as they struggled with how to produce aesthetically an alternative
social space. How could they best use the unique features of this Swedish
theater as a design element in the performance? And how might they man-
age transitions between the six randomly ordered sections of the dance?
Their discussions often turned into heated shouting matches as Ann, Ross,
Landor, Hickey, Rabe, and occasionally a dancer or two addressed the form
of the work and how it might best identify and display the plurality of ex-
perience that was at its root. Hahn, who left to start college at Oberlin im-
mediately after the three Stockholm performances, remembers these dis-
cussions becoming so acrimonious at times that Graham or Larry would
suddenly announce he was taking the “kids” out for lunch or a walk, in or-
der to get them away. When he wasn’t helping cool things oª, Larry spent
days walking around neighboring Swedish towns, strongly influenced by
the economy of the Scandinavian transportation systems and the designs
of the city parks (he also took a trip to see the Tivoli Gardens in Copen-
hagen at this time).92
Well before arriving in Sweden, Ann had peppered Rabe with questions
about technical and rehearsal needs, and he relayed her concerns to the the-
ater staª. One major worry she voiced involved the Swedish laws regard-
ing performing nude. Rabe responded casually, at the end of a long letter,
“They told me that there are no laws in Sweden forbidding it. I told Bengt
about your idea about naked bodies in the [transparent sheets of ] plastic
and he thought it would be great. He said that it is also perfectly all right
with uncovered nudes on the stage. It is not necessary with any ‘hiding an-
gles’ and it makes no diªerence with sexes.” He concluded with magic words
for Ann: “You can do absolutely anything you like.”93
When Parades and Changes opened in Stockholm, it was part of a festi-
val that, under the direction of Carl Albert Anderson, was aggressively em-
bracing the new. This eighteen-day blitz of music, dance, theater, opera,
vocal recitals, and film showings throughout the capital city also featured
performances of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, Dario Fo’s Isabella, and Yvonne
Rainer and Robert Morris’s Tape Music, as well as more traditional fare.
Rainer, who had not seen Ann’s work for five years, was surprised at how

186 URBAN RITUALS

theatrical it had become and how divergent from her own use of Ann’s task
material. “I realized,” Rainer later commented, “that the way she worked
in these exploratory modes was always a preparation for finding material
that could be transformed into a more theatrical kind of genre, and I guess
what was revelatory to me was the task itself.”94
The Swedes seemed primed to observe Ann with open minds. Rabe had
been interviewed about Ann in Stockholm’s major daily newspaper, and he
perceptively described Ann’s aesthetic goals in the festival program notes:
“In the compositions of the Dancers’ Workshop there is no pathetic protest
nor deep-philosophical symbolism (except what everybody himself desires
to explore or invent). Instead it is a question of vegetative (‘growing’) hu-
man constructivism; an attempt to present direct sensations and feelings and
the possibilities of expression of everyday objects and situations.”95 In his
contribution to the program notes for the festival, Bengt Hager, the curator
of the Stockholm Dance Museum, equated Ann’s work with Happenings,
but with a diªerence. Noting that she “aims high in her art,” he quoted an-
other Swedish critic, Jan Bark, who said of Ann, “She desires not only to go
beyond the limits of her spectators’ reactions, but she seeks a new level of
experience, a new instrument with which to observe everyday life.”96 In Swe-
den the implication was that life was the subject rather than a veiled critique
of society. “The fact that Ann and her dancers use improvisation doesn’t mean
they can do whatever they like,” the Swedish critic Ryman wrote. “You have
the same freedom when you cross the street. It can take 10 or 20 steps to
cross it, but you can’t just throw yourself up on a car that is passing.”97
A television crew filmed segments of Parades and Changes for broadcast
in Sweden, bringing images of Ann’s work to a larger public (this is also
the only film document of the original dance). Ann herself was more pleased
when her work aªected the common viewer than the sophisticated theater-
goer. One of her favorite fan letters came from Sven Kyberg, a Swedish
farmer who saw the television broadcast produced by Arne Arnbom. Arn-
bom had insisted that the nude scene could not be cut from the program
and that if anything had to be changed for television, the whole show would
be canceled. “The dance impressed me very deeply,” Kyberg wrote the tele-
vision station. “At first I was very skeptical, because a lot of modern art
seems to me to be much too egocentric and without humanity or humil-
ity. But in the taking oª of clothes and the rolling out of paper . . . I saw
the naked human animal slowly and unafraid and shy and clean, just like
one of my own newborn cattle or lambs, approaching, going near and near,
something unknown . . . I felt cleansed and washed and shaken.”98

URBAN RITUALS 187

 It was an eªect that would resonate for Swedish dance and theater for a
significant time. Hager called it “one of the most remarkable events in con-
temporary American art.”99 Madeline Kats, the dance critic of the largest
Scandinavian daily, Expressen, claimed, “Ann Halprin’s performance is 90
concentrated minutes of pure theater.” 100 Even the leading dissenting voice,
that of Bengt Jahnsson, the drama critic of the liberal Dagens Nyheter, saw
clearly what Ann was doing; his objection was primarily that she should be
doing something else. “I found the undressing scenes to be indiªerent and
impotent, lacking all eroticism,” he wrote, describing how they belonged
inside the frame of task, not eroticism.101

Along with Parades and Changes Ann prepared another evening-long work,
Apartment 6, for her European tour, as well as a revival of The Five-Legged
Stool. Apartment 6 opened on March 19, 1965, at the Playhouse in San Fran-
cisco. This tight little domestic drama was performed by Ann, Graham,
and Leath while sculptor Charles Ross simultaneously constructed a sculp-
ture on stage and Patric Hickey worked the lights. Created in a single month
of intense daily rehearsals in the Playhouse, Apartment 6 was a physical
drama about the Gestalt-driven social interactions between people, using
their bodies as their most articulate medium. One critic called it “absolute
reality for two hours. Heightened reality, actually.”102
The participants in Apartment 6 disrupted and bent expectations about
choreographic and dramatic structure in an eªort to open up new possi-
bilities of theatrical realism and meaning. Largely improvised and played
on a set that looked like a real apartment, the choreographic intention in
Apartment 6 was multilayered, presenting a live theater of the moment where
Ann, Graham, and Leath endeavored to “perform” their oªstage identities
onstage. Their actions were spontaneous, within the set Jo Landor and they
had devised, and their instructions to themselves were to explore rather than
suppress their true feelings. “The subject of Apartment 6 is ourselves,” Ann
explained in an advance article for the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. “All
the while the play will be real. That is, there will be no play.”103 The prose
style may have sounded like Samuel Beckett, but the dramatic eªect was
pure Gestalt. Instead of paring back emotions and interactions to their bare
essence, Ann’s theater of the moment was earthy, chaotic, unpredictable,
and lush with sentiments expressed with simple immediacy. It was a high-
wire act with a net. Ideas, situations, and movement interactions splashed
across the stage with no more time for development or shaping than the

188 URBAN RITUALS

episode actually took in real life. It was reality drama, long before the genre
was coined by television, at a time when Americans were still cautious and
edgy about any kind of unmediated intimate disclosure.
What made this dance, according to Ann, was the fullness of the bodily
responses the three performers brought to their exchanges. Ann recalled a
vivid moment in a rehearsal, just before opening, “when Graham was seated
at the kitchen table, peeling a potato. Leath was reading a newspaper. Gra-
ham asked Leath, tensely, ‘Please get me the salt.’” Leath’s response was fe-
rocious. He dashed across the room, searching everywhere and flinging
things into the air and onto the floor as he rummaged like an animal for
the salt. He even knocked Graham out of his chair, although Graham calmly
continued peeling his potato. Then, as if it had only been an instant, Leath
was back in his chair, reading the paper and commenting evenly, “I don’t
know where it is.”104
Apartment 6 was as close as Ann would come to staging a pure Gestalt
session onstage. “We wanted to simply have two hours on stage . . . in which
you as a performer and you as a person were completely the same thing,”
Ann later said.105 Perls actually watched rehearsals and oªered suggestions,
but Ann and her collaborators shaped the starting premises and theatrical
parameters of the piece. They began by identifying and then exaggerating
just slightly each of their natural proclivities in interpersonal situations. Gra-
ham had as his prime action the manipulation of household objects—lamps,
a radio, chairs, a typewriter, and food. He recalled of one performance, “I
had A.A. lying out on the table. I don’t know how I got him there, but there
he was. I put an orange on his chest and I cut through the orange [here he
grimaced in anger] as though I was cutting through A.A.”106 Leath con-
centrated on externalizing his feelings, and Ann, apparently with an ironic
nod, focused on compulsive tasks. As if on a continual Gestalt “hot seat,”
they spent the evening on the wobbly edge between real and “restored” be-
havior, the term Richard Schechner has coined to describe a piece of be-
havior that is independent of the causal system that created it (in this case,
the causal system has been displaced).107
The work was performed three times a week for a month, and each
evening the performers invested their interactions with the gravity and lev-
ity of a real exchange. “We’ll listen to the radio, read the newspaper, eat,
talk. We may shout or argue, cajole or tease or just sit quietly,” Ann wrote
in a program note. “The reality of being. The reality of feeling. The real-
ity of imagining. To play the reality of whatever is happening. Because we
are people, something will develop between us. Because we are artists by

URBAN RITUALS 189

 training and instinct, something will get built.”108 Leath later indicated that
this reality-based approach originated in a 1953 summer workshop in im-
provisation taught by Francesca Boas at the Halprin-Lathrop studio. “That
workshop,” he claimed, “was what led the then non-existent Dancers’ Work-
shop onto the road of developing the skill not only of structured improvs,
but also free improvs. From these improvs came out dance concerts and
theater events both in a theater building and outside in the public world.”109
Most nights the three dancers tangled in a domestic tragicomedy. They
listened to whatever was playing on the radio, they talked, and they argued.
The gender roles were deeply traditional, more so even than Ann lived in
her home life. As the two men relaxed, Ann worked in a fully outfitted
kitchen, complete with a real window that opened onto the street. She ac-
tually cooked onstage, frenziedly struggling to make the perfect pancake
for her demanding partner—the lanky Graham, who was known oªstage
for his love of food. If she failed, she hastily flung her ruined pancakes out
the window, literally onto the street. If the pancake looked promising, she
ran it over to Graham on an outstretched spatula while it was still sizzling
hot. If the pancake met his approval, Ann would “balance [it] on the spatula
and do a dance with John clapping, singing, and getting the audience en-
thusiastic so the whole theater would be joining in the responsive clapping
and stomping as the pancake would be marched over to the table. . . . A
few times John responded with such overwhelming love and aªection that
we both cried. By now, the audience was hard put to tell what was real and
what was being played. We surely had never set any demarcations in these
terms.”110 Each night Graham responded diªerently, sometimes display-
ing irritation. On one occasion, as the Chronicle’s critic noted with amuse-
ment, Graham carefully fixed Ann’s perfect pancake to a dartboard on the
wall.111
While all this was going on, Ross, in an action that echoed Robert
Rauschenberg’s building of an assemblage during the premiere of Merce
Cunningham’s Story in 1963, steadily constructed a sculpture from news-
paper and tissue paper. Working persistently and quietly in a deep alcove
at the back of the stage, he built a diªerent huge animal each night, con-
sidering the work complete just at the moment the dancers stopped. Every-
thing about this piece was done in real time. Even its title had a real-time
function—it came from the made-up room number they gave whenever
they ordered food delivered during a rehearsal. (The room they were using
in the theater had no number, so one day someone taped a handwritten

190 URBAN RITUALS

sign with the number 6 to the door and henceforth they asked for orders
to be delivered to “Apartment 6.”)
For Ann, Apartment 6 existed precipitously between dance and psy-
chodrama. “Relationship exploration” was what Ann called it. Although in
real life she rarely drank, she had a gin and tonic placed on her little table
onstage at every performance, so she could take the edge oª her feelings of
vulnerability.112 In keeping with the process of realism of Apartment 6, she
didn’t drink before going onstage; instead, her onstage persona sipped the
drink, and the audience watched her become a little tipsy.
Ann admittedly found it exhausting to invent herself afresh for each per-
formance, and she counted on Landor to bring in new props and set pieces
as a way of revivifying the environment to which she and the other performers
were responding. But there were also constants. The set always included a
real bed, where Ann, Graham, and Leath appeared together in the last of the
three acts. Ann usually lay in bed caressing Graham as she stared past him
across the room at Leath and said repeatedly, “I love you, I love you.”113 As
Ann explained in her program notes, the subject of Apartment 6 “is ourselves.”
She underlined its realness—“except that we are in a theatre and are limited
by space and time and the need to organize irrationality.”114 The play then
encompassed diªerent levels of reality—doing, feeling, and imagining.
Apartment 6, with its demanding nightly improvisations focused on the
dancers’ relationships, took a toll on the group. The European tour that fall
added the tensions of traveling as a group, plus there was always the issue
of tight finances. Soon after the Dancers’ Workshop returned to San Fran-
cisco from Europe in early October, Graham and Leath announced to Ann
that they wanted to do more psychodramatic dance with the therapist Eu-
gene Sagan as their director. While Ann enjoyed performing in this exposed
style for the San Francisco engagement, as well as on the European tour,
where Apartment 6 alternated with Parades and Changes, she knew that she
did not want to pursue this direction exclusively. Ann spoke with Perls re-
garding her worries over Sagan’s aggressive use of therapy in workshops with
dancers, and Perls advised her to tell Sagan to keep away. It was too late to
salvage her company, however. Graham, Leath, and Novak all left Ann to
work with Sagan and his wife Juanita at the Institute for Creative and Artis-
tic Development they opened in nearby El Cerrito. Ann was devastated at
the departure of Graham and Leath, and it would be years before they spoke
again. Concerned that Sagan might use Leath’s and Graham’s keys to 321
Divisadero to gain access to her studios, she had the locks changed.

URBAN RITUALS 191

 Ann spent the next year rebuilding her company, drawing on a new group
of dancers a generation younger than she and Graham and Leath. In early
spring 1967 she received a call from the director of the theater at Hunter
College, part of the City University of New York, asking if she could bring
Parades and Changes for a weekend of performances there, after the mod-
ern dancer Sybil Shearer canceled an engagement in the college’s performing
arts series. Ann accepted and quickly began reshaping Parades and Changes
to reflect a new cast. She visited New York several weeks before the open-
ing and had dinner with Jack Anderson, whom she had known when he
was dance critic for the Oakland Tribune, and dance writer George Dorris.
Ann, in a jovial mood, imitated her father’s Yiddish pronouncements of
horror at viewing the kind of contemporary work she was now doing. She
imagined him walking out muttering, during the middle of the perfor-
mance: “I pay for my daughter to have dancing lessons and everything, and
what does she do? Shit!”115 Anderson and Dorris responded by oªering to
host a party for Ann to celebrate the New York debut of her company.
The Parades and Changes that debuted on the Hunter College stage on
April 21, 1967, was very diªerent from the Stockholm performance. Only
the undressing and dressing and paper-tearing sections remained similar.
Ann was very conscious that she was now more than twice the age of her
dancers, so she developed new material to reflect what she called a “multi-
generational” company. “The dance became very symbolic of what I was
appreciating of these young hippies,” she said of the organizing theme of
her changes. This time Parades and Changes began with the undressing task,
performed by a group Ann called her “flower children”—Daria, Karen
Auberg, Kathy Peterson, Nancy Peterson, Michael Katz, Morris Kelley,
Joseph Schlicter, and the young dancer Peter Weiss—most of whom she
had recruited from San Francisco State University, where she had presented
at in-progress showing of the work in 1965.116
Instead of undressing with the dancers, Ann created a separate section
for herself in which, dressed in a clown costume and accompanied by a man
playing a harmonica, she performed a mock soft-shoe in front of a live goat
and then carried the animal up the ladder of a scaªold to a platform at the
top. “I wanted to capture their spirit of being so contrary to everything,”
she explained.117 It was there, as the scaªold was slowly wheeled across the
stage, that Ann performed her undressing as a solo, bathing herself from a
bowl of water in an image she intended to stand for a return to the natu-
ral and a shedding of the material encumbrances of life. The goat watched.

192 URBAN RITUALS

 “The work was beautiful,” Dorris reflected decades later. “It had a pu-
rity that still stands out in the memory. The kids were so beautiful that
watching them undress, dress, undress and just stand there had no pruri-
ence but only an awed astonishment. The same, of course, for Ann at the
end.”118 Anderson also recalled this “nude scene” as stunning: “It’s sculp-
tural, and it has great textures of movement and it is implicitly tactile, great
appeal to the senses.”119
Long before opening night a buzz began in the New York dance circles
about the nudity in Parades and Changes. It was rumored that the New York
Police Department was ready to arrest Ann and stop the performance for
lewdness if the dancers took their clothes oª. “A warrant was indeed issued
then for Ann’s arrest,” Dorris later indicated. “If I remember the story cor-
rectly, knowing that nudity would be involved, the two main daily critics,
Clive Barnes on The [New York] Times and Walter Terry on The Herald-
Tribune, went into collusion, ensuring that their reviews would not appear
until the following Monday, when the company would be on its way.”120
Reportedly, during the undressing section, one audience member was over-
heard saying, “They’re not going to . . . oh—they are. My God, they did
it!” At the conclusion of the performance the audience gave the dancers a
standing ovation, presumably as much for the boldness of the gesture as its
aesthetic merits.
Overall, reactions to the performance were strong and divided. Guests
jammed into the promised post-production party hosted by Dorris and An-
derson.121 But Clive Barnes, who lived in the same building and had been
invited, did not appear (earlier he had explained that he would go to the
party if he liked the performance). His review, headlined “Dance: The Ul-
timate in Bare Stages,” was not exactly favorable. He zeroed in on the nu-
dity, the only sections of the dance he detailed. “They undress. I mean they
remove every last stitch of clothing, and boys and girls together are as rip-
roaring naked as berries,” he wrote. But then his dismissive sarcasm gave
way to surprise as he described the paper-tearing sequence that followed:
“Fantastic shapes evolve, paper sculptures mingling fascinatingly with nude
bodies. The result is not only beautiful but somehow liberating as well. It
is all so unexpected and uncoy: and the sight of these very attractive kids
all aggressively bare and blissfully unconcerned about it, churning their way
through great mounds of brown paper was enormously eªective.”122
At Hunter College Norman Singer, the director of the concert bureau,
received a phone call from the college president warning him to be pre-
pared for a communication from the chair of the Board of Higher Edu-

URBAN RITUALS 193

 cation over the uproar about Parades and Changes. Ann, on the other hand,
received a telegram from the New York gallery director Lee Nordness thank-
ing her for “one of the most exciting nights in the history of New York
dance theater” and inviting her and Jo Landor to Sunday brunch with the
ballet choreographer Antony Tudor, who had also seen the performance
and was eager to meet Ann.123 (Ann, preoccupied with leaving New York
as quickly as possible lest she be arrested, had to decline.) The theater di-
rectors Richard Schechner and Joseph Chaikin, who both saw Parades and
Changes at Hunter College, were significantly aªected by the work. Schech-
ner, who would found the Performance Group the following year, would
invite Ann to work with his theater group.
Theater director Jacques Levy was also in the audience for Ann’s perfor-
mance, as was Remy Charlip. Several months after the concert, Levy con-
tacted Charlip and asked him if he would audition dancers and then choreo-
graph some nude dances for an oª-Broadway production of ten brief plays
the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan was stringing together and calling
Oh! Calcutta! Charlip decided that it was not enough to ask prospective
actors simply to drop their clothes; instead, he wanted them to pretend they
were preparing to go into a warm pond while composing a letter in their
minds telling someone they had just had a book manuscript accepted. Char-
lip, who clearly had understood the nature of the nudity in Ann’s dance,
said this audition was one of the most moving theatrical experiences he ever
had—“it was very real.”124 Levy, however, had a diªerent kind of nudity
in mind and Charlip turned down the project. Instead, it was the chore-
ography of Margo Sappington, who also performed in the original cast, that
was on display when the show opened in New York on June 17, 1969. Oh!
Calcutta! began with the cast peeling oª their terrycloth bathrobes to re-
veal their nudity with a show-business salesmanship that was the antithe-
sis of Ann’s staging of undressing.
Much of what Ann originally said she intended the undressing in Pa-
rades and Changes to stand for endured over the years. At a 1997 perfor-
mance of this section that Ann staged when she received the Samuel H.
Scripps American Dance Festival Award in Durham, North Carolina, the
chaste simplicity of this gesture of disclosure, which she has resolutely re-
fused to call a striptease, remained poetic and aªecting. In 2004 the undress-
ing and paper-tearing sections would be the hit of her debut in France at
the Centre Pompidou.
Already in 1967, however, Ann was shifting into what would be the new
dynamic of her interaction with her dancers, who would now always be

194 URBAN RITUALS

considerably younger than she. She was beginning to function as what the
critic Marcia Siegel labeled “a permissive mama” with a bunch of “big, bois-
terous kids.”125 For her daughter Daria, however, there was an awkward
disingenuousness in this dynamic, especially in relation to how Ann parsed
the life/art divide in her work and in her family life. “She made art a safe
place to experiment and life very dangerous,” Daria noted with painful irony.
Daria recalled that while she was preparing to perform in the Stockholm
premiere of Parades and Changes, she disclosed to her mother that she and
her childhood sweetheart, the son of the Halprins’ closest family friends,
were lovers and Ann “became hysterical.” In Daria’s recollection: “It was
one of the most disturbing explosions between us. Here my mother had
me performing and workshopping and dancing naked at a time when I was
just moving into adolescence. That seems to me a delicate time to use a
teenager in that way. There were times when it was very provocative and
on-the-edge and uncomfortable.”126
Incidents like this reveal how for Ann blurring the divide between the
real and the mediated onstage was very diªerent from eliminating all bound-
aries between living one’s life and making art. Yet it was this illusion that
gave her work in the 1960s both its immediacy and its allure. While Daria
intimates a certain hypocrisy in this stance, in fact the work’s containment
as art and its enactment in the context of a stage—real or metaphoric—
were crucial to putting this idea forward as a cultural statement. Remy Char-
lip and other dance and performance artists who came after her would speak
of the prosaic, functional actions of daily life, in daily life, as art—but Ann’s
demarcation of these activities between life and art was a critical interme-
diary step.

Back in San Francisco, Ann tried taking her dance into larger popular ven-
ues. Early in October 1967 she accepted an invitation from the Straight The-
ater, a rock ballroom on Haight Street, just around the corner from her Di-
visadero Street studio. The Straight Theater asked Ann to help bridge from
the passive audiences to the rock music and light shows by introducing a
community rock dance. Ann and members of her Dancers’ Workshop were
supposed to help spontaneously transform each Friday and Saturday night
concert into “a festive gathering, a joyous celebration,” according to a press
release that carefully describes her role in the process: “The focus of this
mutual creation will be the members of the audience. Ann Halprin will act
as a catalyst, not as an authoritarian or exhibitionistic teacher. She will help

URBAN RITUALS 195

 all those present create together from their immediate personal needs and
desires a sensuous, heightened awareness.”127 Ann intended to do with the
rock music crowd what she did with dancers in her studio a few blocks away.
But the planned series fizzled after the first weekend. Despite the disclaimers
in the press release that Ann’s guidance would be oªered rather than im-
posed, there was still an implication that Ann, who was billed on a poster
for the first night as a “kinetic catalyst,” would structure the event’s un-
folding in keeping with her own aesthetic. Apparently, what looked radical
and spontaneous for dance felt like imposed structure to concert-goers who
just wanted to groove on their own.
Soon afterward, at the invitation of Bill Graham, Ann performed with
her dancers at his Fillmore Auditorium, where she directed the loose gyra-
tions of the crowd as people moved to the beat of the Charlatans, the Con-
gress of Wonders, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead. Using her dancers
as catalysts, Ann staged an entrance over the top balcony so that her dancers
literally descended on the dance floor. Illuminated by a pulsating light show,
they balanced on one another’s shoulders and oªered more varied exam-
ples of spontaneous physical partnering to the delighted crowd. “I liked
working with these large groups of people,” Ann later said. “I’d have the
men hold women on their shoulders and we’d work toward configurations
that formed a sense of community because everyone seemed so isolated and
into themselves.”128 Ironically, Ann seemed not to have noticed that these
rock palaces were in many respects consciously shaped as sites for solipsis-
tic retreat into oneself. With their dark interiors, cloudscape light shows,
and music so highly amplified that all one could do was listen, drop acid,
and trip, the Straight Theater and Fillmore were sites for an introverted con-
templation antithetical to the engaged group experiences Ann delivered.
Parades and Changes continued to exercise a strong attraction for the per-
forming and visual arts world. In 1970 Peter Selz, director of the new $4.8
million art museum at the University of California, Berkeley, asked Ann to
perform an excerpt of Parades and Changes as part of the grand opening of
the modernist concrete museum. Selz however, was anxious about the nu-
dity and tried to convince Ann to put the dancers in leotards. She refused.
He then suggested dimming the lights. Ann replied that, like the leotards,
it would only make the dance look like something that should be hidden.
Finally, Ann told Selz if he got into any trouble for the performance, he could
simply say Ann had ignored his orders not to perform nude. That resolved
the discussion. Ann gathered a new multiracial group of young dancers and
taught them just the two nude sections of the dance, the undressing/dress-

196 URBAN RITUALS

ing and paper-tearing parts, which they performed, along with a new, brief,
improvisatory piece, to great acclaim at the museum’s opening.
A filmed fragment of the event shows the dancers in ordinary street clothes
of the era— one woman wears a miniskirt and boots while the men wear
tight bell-bottoms and leather vests. Because the audience is several floors
above, the dancers lock eyes with each other as they undress. The miniskirted
woman stretches out on the ground to tug oª her panties, making the un-
dressing horizontal since the audience unfolds above her so vertically. The
ritual of undressing and dressing here suggests itself as a postmodern cita-
tion to the opening of George Balanchine’s Serenade (1934), where the body
is seen transforming from a prosaic working body into a performing body
and back again.
The pairing of performance and social analysis in Parades and Changes
echoed that in the work of another Bay Area Jewish artist-activist at this
time, the comic Lenny Bruce. Much as Ann used frank nudity, Bruce built
his comic monologues at the Hungry i nightclub in San Francisco and the
Café au Go Go in New York’s Greenwich Village by speaking the un-
speakable on the forbidden subject of sex and bodily pleasures.129 Credited
with turning stand-up comedy into social commentary, he championed an
edgy humor filled with scatological words and ethnic slurs. Bruce, like Ann,
worked through exploratory improvisation, feeling his way into an audi-
ence’s confidence as he presented himself as a subversively hip satirist. In
equal measure brilliant and shocking, Bruce oªered humorously autobio-
graphical rhythmic riªs on the boundaries between his onstage and oªstage
identities.
At the 1964 New York trial that resulted in his obscenity conviction, the
license inspector Herbert G. Ruhe, who had been sent by the Manhattan
district attorney to covertly see Bruce’s act, recounted in a monotone what
Bruce had said. Bruce, who was in the courtroom, was heard saying in a
stage whisper: “This guy’s bombing and I’m going to jail for it.”130 Bruce’s
career was marked by drug arrests and charges of obscene performances in
Chicago and Los Angeles in addition to San Francisco and New York. He
was arrested several times for lewdness and obscenity because of his open
discussion of sex and the body, racism, and religion in his comedy routines.
To a far greater degree than Ann, Bruce found himself a cultural lightning
rod for his performative anecdotes that blended the sublime and the earthy
and in so doing questioned the norms of behavior. Both artists used and
enjoyed San Francisco’s increasing visibility as a center for transgressive so-
cial expression.

URBAN RITUALS 197

 After he was arrested in mid-performance for obscenity on October 4,
1961, at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, Bruce began basing his stand-
up routines on verbatim readings from the transcripts in his legal battle (he
was ultimately acquitted of this charge in March 1962).131 In August 1965
(one year before his death from a morphine overdose), and at the same time
Ann was finalizing Parades and Changes for its Stockholm premiere, Bruce
engaged a film crew to document one of his performances at a San Fran-
cisco nightclub as evidence for his continuing legal appeals of his obscen-
ity convictions. The result is both a re-creation and an actual presentation
of the very text, sounds, and actions for which he had been convicted of
obscenity and against which he was now defending himself to the audi-
ence. In the film, as Bruce reads from his trial transcripts, he defines a lim-
inal space for uttering the unspeakable in the guise of “performing” it. In
the final minutes of the film he opens a door at the rear of the stage and
calls out to passersby on the street, asking them about his innocence or guilt.
Three years earlier Ann had concluded The Five-Legged Stool, in a the-
ater a couple of miles away, by similarly opening the backstage door and
letting the chill night air oª San Francisco Bay blow through the audience.132
In opening the stage door, Ann and Bruce both mark the instant in Amer-
ican culture when the permeability of the stage wall and the door between
art and the world around were linked in a struggle over standards of be-
havior and cultural expression.
Three thousand miles away, on the East Coast, the photographer Diane
Arbus was working toward the same ends through the medium of pho-
tography. In her 1962 application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foun-
dation for a fellowship, Arbus described her goal as a photographer as be-
ing a documentarian of “ceremonies of the present.” She wrote, “What is
ceremonious, and curious and commonplace will be legendary,” explain-
ing that she was endeavoring “further elucidation and description of these
rites,” the rites of daily suburban life. Arbus received her fellowship and in
the process, with her stark photographs of the freakish in the everyday,
joined this same valorization of the ordinary that Bruce was delimiting in
comedy and Halprin in dance. Halprin, Arbus, and Bruce never met, but
from their separate corners and disparate media, they each worked to illu-
minate, define, and frame for our contemplation parts of early 1960s Amer-
ican culture that many would have preferred remain invisible.

198 URBAN RITUALS

 SEVEN

From Spectator to Participant

1967– 1968

I think the Ten Myths were my first really intentional pieces about audiences.
What happened is that people had begun responding so violently to my work,
throwing things at us and getting up and stomping out. This was so surprising
to us, particularly me, because it wasn’t my intention. It wasn’t like the Living
Theater, where they wanted to provoke an audience. I didn’t want to. So that’s
when I became aware of the power an audience had.
ann halprin

on april 5, 1967, the Gray Line Bus Company initiated its two-hour “Hip-
pie Hop” tour of the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. Five days
a week, the large commercial buses lumbered past the Dancers’ Workshop
studio on Divisadero Street, taking gawking tourists with cameras on what
was touted in the brochure as “the only foreign tour within the continen-
tal limits of the United States.” Passengers were given a “Glossary of Hip-
pie Terms,” and on the first day a TV crew joined the riders.1
The sarcastic framing of daily life in this San Francisco neighborhood as
a “foreign” practice not only imposed the role of tourist-spectators of an-
other lifestyle on the bus riders, but it also reconstituted the daily actions
of the denizens of Haight-Ashbury as ritualistic, quasi-religious perform-
ances. The intimation was that the youths outside the bus windows were
practitioners of behaviors and beliefs so far apart from the acceptable bound-
aries of American culture, so novel, that it was worth journeying to stare
at them as one might view the Golden Gate Bridge or Alcatraz Island. This
irony was not lost on the denizens of the Haight, who on one occasion com-
mandeered the bus and announced to all the passengers, “You’re all free!”
Quickly, however, the mood began to change. By mid-April 1967, some
Haight-Ashbury residents walked alongside the bus holding mirrors to

199
 reflect back to the tourists their own faces.2 The spectator-performer di-
vide no longer seems clear; as this action suggests, the act of spectating could
be a performance in itself, and of oneself.
There are strong parallels between this performance device and the the-
ory of reader-response that emerged in the literary world in the late 1960s.
Reader-response theory, like the politics of this period, reflected an attempt
to shift power from a central authority to a more egalitarian model. As in
Ann’s participatory theater, this approach to making meaning from words
frames the reader herself as playing the crucial role in making sense of a
text.3 This approach echoed the new validity being given to personal and
intuitive knowledge, self-knowledge, of precisely the kind that Fritz Perls’s
Gestalt therapy was trying to build.
The opening speech of the Hippie Hop tour guide parodied some of the
more prevalent shortcut methods to getting this knowledge of self by refer-
ring sarcastically to drugs, meditation, and making music. At the same time
it reinforced the expectation of glimpsing aberrant practices by detailing be-
haviors that included illegal drug use, social protest, discussions about the
need for social change, and improvisatory expression in the performing arts.
The following is an excerpt from the opening remarks the Hippie Hop tour
guide would recite as his bus began its trip into “The Haight,” the place
where the concept of a trip was redefined into travel inward, the nonphys-
ical tourism of one’s emotional and psychological landscape.

We are now entering the largest Hippie colony in the world and the very
heart and fountainhead of the Hippie subculture. We are passing through
the “Bearded Curtain” and will journey down Haight Street, the very nerve
center of the city within a city. . . . Marijuana, of course, is a household
staple here, enjoyed by the natives to stimulate their senses. . . . Among
the favorite pastimes of the Hippies, besides taking drugs, and parading
and demonstrating: seminars and group discussions about what’s wrong
with the status quo; malingering; plus the ever-present preoccupation with
the soul, reality, and self-expression, such as strumming guitars, piping
flutes, and banging bongos.4

By reading this description as a catalogue of unacceptable behaviors, a

sharp view of what was acceptable emerges—that is, not questioning soci-
ety, not thinking and talking about social change in small groups, and not
daring to create spontaneous music on instruments. This cold war conser-
vatism was what both Ann and the hippies were reacting against. From their

200 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

perspective, it was the mainstream world that needed a fresh vision and a
relaxing of limits to become more democratically American. The guide’s
description of “passing through the ‘Bearded Curtain’” suggests entering a
performance space, as beaded curtains were frequently used as fanciful room
dividers in the counterculture; it is also a punning reference to the Beat-
niks, who were known for their beards. Although the term hippie, first used
by journalist Michael Fallon in a September 6, 1965, story in the San Fran-
cisco Examiner, had come into more frequent use by the establishment press
by 1967, it was still easy to confuse these two groups of social outcasts.5 The
Beats and the hippies were, of course, linked in more nuanced ways than
beards and outlaw behaviors. But both populations became the focus of
spectatorship in San Francisco. The hippies, however, became increasingly
hostile about the Gray Line tours, and on May 15, little more than a month
after they began, the tours were discontinued.
While the tourists were eyeing the “tripping” hippies as an ethnographic
spectacle, Ann was working toward framing a number of mundane prac-
tices—taking a bath, cleaning up the litter on downtown streets, eating
lunch—as art spectacles. Much as Marcel Duchamp had transformed every-
day objects into art, Ann created “found” dances, “ready-made” collections
of movements that served as a prefabricated rather than customized cho-
reography. Ann was, as the art historian Wanda Corn has noted of Du-
champ, “questioning every inherited boundary of art making, especially
those hierarchical categories that declared what was and what was not art—
or what was and was not beautiful.”6
Ann was “finding” not just the finished product, but also the means for
generating it. By 1967 she had absorbed the teachings of Fritz Perls, turn-
ing his Gestalt psychology methods of being on the “hot seat” into her own
rubric for generating movement situations in workshop settings. She had
also reached a complacency about the use of nudity in her work, so that
having students or performers take oª their clothes was becoming just an-
other aesthetic and psychological training tactic for her. The Hunter Col-
lege scandal sparked by the undressing and dressing section of Parades and
Changes had helped bring her to this point of equanimity. Now, in 1967,
Ann turned her self-actualizing gaze on the spectator. She was about to
prompt and prod the audience in a way that was more confrontational than
the eye contact in Parades and Changes. In the process she would become
a student herself and a mythmaker. She was fluidly changing roles, like Car-
olee Schneemann and other contemporary women artists who were en-
deavoring to write their own story through the medium of the body. In her

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 201

 work she would invite a deliberate confusion between what the performance
scholar-theorist Peggy Phelan has noted in “ordeal art” as the divide be-
tween presence and representation.7
For Ann this shift in her work had been years in the making, and it came
more from a ritualistic than an experimental theater focus:

I’ve always longed for that sense of tribal belonging and that sense of
a complete life where all aspects of one’s life can come together and can
be expressed tribally or community-wise. This is something that was very
important to me and it’s been translated into the relationship of audience
to performer. I have resisted (this separation) for many years and one of
the first breakthroughs I made, I made it spatially. I broke through the
proscenium arch and then I began to deal with audience participation
and then to create dances for audiences.8

A key transitional piece in Ann’s new conception of the spectator was The
Bath, a group event in which Ann cast the audience as a collective voyeur.
Voyeurism can be seen as a stage of partial embodiment for the spectator.
The spectator of sensual or sexual material is at once lost in the traditional
role of yearning to be the fully embodied performer, yet also more sharply
conscious of herself as someone who is looking on at the scene before her.
This dual attentiveness means that she only partially loses herself and at
the same time partially becomes acutely aware of herself watching.
The Bath selects a set of physical gestures from the same room in which
Duchamp found his urinal, the bathroom, and puts them on public dis-
play. As with Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), there is an inescapable eroticism
to transporting such a private practice into a public space. The fact that
Ann picked sensual content for The Bath wasn’t coincidental; by its nature
the material compelled the audience into the role of voyeur, a halfway point
on the road to the full audience participation she would initiate within a
few months.
Most immediately, The Bath focused on ritualizing the commonplace,
on generating a dance through task performance. Early in the summer of
1966 Ann was invited to create a work for a performance the following Feb-
ruary at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. “I was
shown the theater space at the museum,” she wrote at the time. “But the
fountain [in the courtyard, with its ornate, figurative marble statue] inter-
ested me much more. It is an environment we can extend, enliven and make

202 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

relevant by performing a simple task, bathing.”9 For the next several
months, Ann and her dancers met weekly, exploring bathing in a diªerent
way each time, depending on their mood and inclination that day.

I start by bringing bowls of water and having us wash our hands. You
wouldn’t believe all the diªerent ways we washed ourselves. . . . The eªect
is terrorizing. Each performer pours into the simple act his whole essence.
There it comes out in the way he bathes, and he is super-conscious of it
because it is a performance. He says, “I didn’t know that about myself.”
The performance of the simple action, the natural action, objectifies what
is really going on inside the performer’s self. It is the same with the spec-
tator. The spectator’s interpretation of what is there says more about him-
self than it does about the performance.10

For Ann this kind of improvisation using basic tasks was becoming a means
of “clarifying relationships through a focus on ordinary actions.” She noted
excitedly, “It says how we feel about each other.”11
To prepare for the Hartford performance, Ann staged a public showing
of the piece at her San Francisco studio after just ten weeks of develop-
ment, after which the dancers continued to revise their bathing sequences.
When Ann and her dancers finally arrived in Hartford a day before their
performance, they spent the afternoon “becoming attuned with the envi-
ronment.” In this new setting, her dancers spontaneously drew on their
repertoires of bath dances, reimagining the water collecting below the foun-
tain sculpture as a river or stream. Daria began by lying—at the fountain’s
edge, in the water, at the feet of one of the statues’ figures—and later she
bathed the statue. Morris Kelley “put his head in a bowl of water and kept
it there until he began to drown”; Nancy Peterson balanced a tiny bowl of
water on her head, ritualistically dipping her fingers into it to wash patches
of her skin.12
What could be more commonplace than the daily use of water to wash
and bathe, and what could be a more natural costume for doing this than
nudity? This final level of realism, however, so upset the Hartford spon-
sors that Ann consented to flesh-colored leotards for the women and briefs
for the men. According to Ann, she decided to forgo nudity in the Hart-
ford performance of The Bath because she knew that she and her dancers
would be arrested, and she didn’t want to risk this immediately before their
next stop, New York’s Hunter College, where they were giving the first U.S.
performance of Parades and Changes, with its undressing and dressing se-

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 203

 quence. Moreover, the person at the Atheneum who was responsible for
their visit, Vladimir Hubernack, told Ann he would lose his job if the
dancers took oª their clothes.13
Ann decided instead to amplify the act of dressing. As if enacting the in-
verse of a tape loop of a never-ending striptease, Ann created a processional
preamble to The Bath. First she arranged a path of clothes and various ob-
jects winding through several galleries of the Atheneum. The performers
were then instructed to each take three diªerent items and put these on
their bodies, walk for one minute, then take the things oª and repeat this
process with the new materials ahead on the pathway. “So you were sup-
posed to see this progression of images,” Ann said, noting that “it was open
if the audience wanted to join in.”
Indeed, that is what happened during a parade of costumed performers
that went on in one of the museum’s interior medieval galleries while The
Bath was being performed in the courtyard. The audience in this gallery
quickly dispensed with spectatorship and joined in, donning costumes and
walking in the parade. One audience member, Judson Church dancer Deb-
orah Hay, also tried to join in the bathing sequence. Ann, who didn’t know
who Hay was at the time, remembered vividly how Hay climbed to the top
of the fountain’s statue. But climbing on the antique statue was something
Ann had been warned not to do, so Ann regretfully sent someone to ask
Hay to leave. It wasn’t until she arrived in New York the following week
that Ann learned who Hay was.14
Ann’s growing interest in the audience’s involvement in the performance
comes across in this comment about The Bath: “The people were amazed
to see a space they took for granted transformed and used with such sim-
plicity. . . . In this way the spectator is changed to see an accustomed sur-
rounding stretched, extended, and bent by an ordinary activity.”15 It is an
insight that is as much architectural as choreographic. And, indeed, there
was an architectural connection. Just before rehearsals for The Bath began,
Ann finished teaching the first “Experiments in Environment” summer
workshop with Larry. The 1966 workshop had emphasized the “continu-
ing search for new approaches to creativity,” asking its thirty participants
to solve a series of tasklike exercises about relationships between people and
their environment.16 This focus on locales and the people who inhabit them
had an immediate impact on how Ann related to the fountain environment
of the Atheneum. Much as one of Larry’s landscape architect associates
might study how people navigate an urban plaza, sitting here to eat lunch
and there to sunbathe, so too Ann seemed to regard the site for this next

204 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

commissioned dance as a tacit collaborator and the source of the themes
and gestures for her dance.
Larry himself had begun to regard an environment as a series of con-
straints that prompted “Happening-like” events. In a series of notes and
sketches that he made while planning for the summer workshop, Larry
mused on the relationship between theater and the environment. He drew
nine movement studies, progressing from a dancer lying relaxed on the floor,
through her moving her body along the floor and noticing the space be-
tween the body and the floor, until she is interacting with the other dancers,
the walls, the space, and the rhythm. “An environment is in fact simply a
theater for action and interaction to occur,” Larry wrote. “One can [also]
take the theater as a mirror image of environment design in that the clas-
sical theater has a programmatic structure of events.”17
During the 1966 summer workshop Larry and Ann, along with the ar-
chitect Charles Moore, who was designing the Sea Ranch development with
Larry at the time, asked participants to build a city on the beach out of
driftwood, an exercise that would become a staple of Ann’s Sea Ranch work-
shops for decades. Like an architectural Rorschach, the design solutions that
emerged gave, as Larry noted, “enormous insight into each person’s inte-
rior desires and personality, his interests and attitudes.” He concluded, “The
restrictions create the form.”18
Ann’s work with her dancers on the dance deck, however, steadily moved
away from framing habituated behavior in the manner that architectural
design tended to, in favor of instigating actions that were novel because of
the unexpectedness of displaying them in the public sphere. This put her
at odds not just with Larry’s interest in letting restrictions create the form,
but more importantly with the customary progression of most theatrical
rehearsals. Instead of cementing movement sequences and phrases in a
dancer’s head, Ann encouraged her dancers to move past the easiest and
more predictable responses. She moved from closure to increasing open-
ness, whereas most dance performances of the time went in the opposite
direction. Her thinking was that if she could get her performers to take a
bath by acting out clichés in rehearsal, they would move on to even fresher
material for the actual performance.
The Bath seemed to play provocatively with the nature of voyeurism and
spectatorship by deliberately blurring the fine line between the two. More-
over, bathing in itself is usually a very private act, and to oªer it up pub-
licly to a paying audience makes the private act not only public, but also
commodifies it. In so doing Ann introduced commodification as a fram-

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 205

 ing device for turning quotidian acts into theater. The person who pays and
the one who receives payment parallel the spectator/ performer divide, es-
tablishing who will watch and who is embodied.
As a dance event The Bath might have been forgotten quickly, except that
on September 14, 1967, the photographer Irving Penn came to the Bay Area
to do a photo essay on hippies for a special issue of Look, the first one de-
voted entirely to the arts. Penn rented a photographer’s studio in Sausalito
and ordered a cement wall, which he textured himself, to be built as back-
ground. One by one emblematic figures of West Coast counterculture—
including the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and
the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang—appeared before Penn’s camera. Finally,
it was time for the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop to be photographed.
Ann recalled that as the dancers entered the room, the Hell’s Angels, whom
Penn had just finished photographing, all walked to the windows, raised
them, and urinated out onto the street below as their way of acknowledg-
ing Ann and her dancers.19
“The situation was extremely tense to begin with,” Ann recalled. “Irv-
ing Penn did not know us and we did not like the idea that was assigned—
to paint each other in couples.”20 Ann persuaded Penn to let the dancers
begin with a warm-up period, in which they would divide into couples and
give each other a bath. So the dancers undressed, performing The Bath nude
for Penn. Then, ingeniously, Penn suggested first the water bowls, then the
towels, then the pitcher of water—all of the props—be removed. “We were
left with the absolute purity of a boy and girl relating to each other in the
most magical, mysterious way, and yet it seemed real. What [the dancers]
were left with was creating the essence of the bath, but it had nothing to
do with actual bathing anymore.”21 In Ann’s words, it had turned into a
strange combination of “exquisite poetry and sculpture and yet dance and
drama too.”22 Looking at the contact sheets from that photo shoot eigh-
teen years later, Penn spoke of the chaste naturalness of the dancers:

What I remember is the purity of relationship of these young people and

an innocence so diªerent from today’s. As I look at these pictures, how the
dancers touch each other, how they embrace, because the pictures are pri-
marily of embraces, a boy and a girl, boy and girl, boy and girl, beautiful
and touching. Here they are without clothes, there’s love, the gestures are
tenderly erotic but certainly not pornographic. And there’s a serenity that
as a photographer I’m not used to. I didn’t know Ann Halprin at all, but
I know from these pictures, I tell you, I like her very much.23

206 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

 As the photographer, Penn created the images as much as his subjects did:
he eªectively edited the dance as one would a film, telling the dancers when
to start moving, when to shift into another relationship as they improvised,
and when to pause while he made an exposure, freezing the moment that he
wanted. Penn responded to the capacity of Ann’s work to transform the pre-
senters, to make their investment in the direct task of what they were doing
transcend exterior concerns about vanity, appearances, and consciously “per-
forming.” Ironically, the Look editors could only appreciate such a cultural
move in consciously theatrical terms, not as a matter of practical, innocent
nudity. Tellingly for the time, they were also the only photographs from the
session that Look refused to publish because of the untheatrical frankness of
the dancers’ nudity. (Nearly thirty-five years later, in the spring of 2002, Penn
opened an exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of a series of
awesomely frank nude photographs of worn and overweight women that he
had photographed in the late 1940s and only now was displaying for the first
time. These nudes, beautiful in their candor and unromanticized docu-
mentation of the female body, are the precursors to the kind of looking Penn
immortalized in his photographs of The Bath that afternoon.)
In the lead editorial for this issue of Look, “Culture: The New Joy,”
William K. Zinsser pays lip service to the cultural winds of change, laud-
ing precisely what the magazine did not publish: “I detect an underground
rumble which says that we must redefine ‘culture’ to make it far more em-
bracing, less of an exclusive club for the fortunate few, closer to life as it
is lived every day. It means staying loose. It means that joy and celebra-
tion are proper lubricants of art and of the national spirit.”24 In censur-
ing Penn’s photographs, the magazine’s editorial staª probably felt uneasy
because these images are confessional studies of what the art historian John
Berger would call naked people, distinctive individuals being themselves
rather than artful nudes, posing without clothes.25 In fact, the Look issue
contained several images of nudes—Marilyn Monroe partially wrapped
in satin bedsheets, a woman on the beach with her nude backside turned
to the camera—but none showed full frontal nudity, nor did they oªer the
candid, unassuming exposure of one’s private self that The Bath plays with
as its central theme. The dance is also, implicitly, about task performance,
the execution of prosaic actions oªered as something one might regard with
the same aesthetic attentiveness one does classical dance movements. Iron-
ically, the Look staª found it acceptable to print consciously seductive, par-
tially clothed bodies as agreeable but banned the more chaste yet complete
nudes in Penn’s photographs.

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 207

 Of all the photographs he took for that Look shoot, Penn believes the ones
of Ann’s dancers may “live” the longest.26 As if to confirm this assessment,
in a 1999 exhibition of Penn’s work at the Maison Européenne de la Photo-
graphie in Paris, his photographs of The Bath were presented as emblematic
of the mid-1960s moment in America. In the catalogue introduction Ed-
monde Charles-Roux describes these photographs as “anthropological,” not-
ing that they do not represent the exact choreography, but rather a “free inter-
pretation of the movements of the dancers, mise-en-scène, uniquely captured
in the medium of photography.” Speaking generally about Penn’s work,
Charles-Roux observes that “never before had people seen such a desire for
truth or such a spare, uncluttered style.” This is particularly true of his Bath
photographs, where truthfulness and spareness are also qualities of the impro-
vised performance. The Bath photos reflect a photographer and a choreog-
rapher who met on the same common aesthetic ground, territory expressive
of a nascent moment in American culture, one filled with “the melancholy
grace of young, nude couples—their gentle gestures—their timid looks—
at the same time capturing the pleasure of bathing together.”27

On Thursday evening, October 19, 1967, Ann followed The Bath with the
opening of Ten Myths, an event that took spectatorship and embodiment
in dance to a further frontier. This event, which took place on ten Thurs-
day evenings, scattered over several months, at the Divisadero Street stu-
dio, was initially announced to the public by a postcard, mailed in late Sep-
tember and written by John Rockwell, then a young arts critic as well as a
graduate student in German studies at the University of California, Berke-
ley. Basing his text on discussions with Ann about her goals for this daring
series of audience participation events, Rockwell wrote:

“Myths” are experimental. The performers, members of the Dancers’

Workshop Company and participants in Ann Halprin’s Advanced Dance
Seminar, are unrehearsed. What unfolds is a spontaneous exploration of
theater ideas.
“Myths” are meant to evoke our long buried and half forgotten selves.
Each evening will explore a diªerent relationship between the audience
and performers, and between our awareness, our bodies, and our environ-
ments. The audience should not be bound by accustomed passivity, by
static self images, or by restricted clothing. “Myths” are your myths. They
are an experiment in mutual creation.28

208 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

 Provocative in tone and word choice, the postcard seemed to script in ad-
vance an enticing parameter of loosened behaviors. “Experimental,” “unre-
hearsed,” and “spontaneous”—these words, appearing in the first three sen-
tences, carry a sexual innuendo that is amplified by subsequent promises to
“evoke long buried and half forgotten selves” and “explore a diªerent rela-
tionship between . . . our bodies.” Participants seem invited to approach a
precipice of behavioral norms and then, with the final sentences, to jump
oª : “The audience should not be bound by accustomed passivity, by static
self images or by restricted clothing.” It is interesting that the inverses of Rock-
well’s words are all markers of a performing body—activity, dynamic self
images, and unrestrictive clothing. The implication is that a truer, sexual,
physical, performative self lies beneath each person’s socially constrained one.
There is also the suggestion that the dancing body gives out special, often
sexual, truths.
Participation in Myths is proªered as a way of entering a newly permis-
sive space, where the realization of the freshly liberated self will be possi-
ble. The emphasis is more on shedding behavioral encumbrances than on
what specifically participants are supposed to create. Only the last sentence
addresses this, and it is tempered by a reminder about group behavior: these
events “are an experiment in mutual creation.” Rockwell’s words underline
Ann’s way of working. The very choice of the word creation—rather than
performance, work, piece, or event (the more customary nouns used to de-
note a dance product)—signaled this was a process rather than a set piece
of choreography. Ann has never been particularly interested in creating in-
dividual choreographers or even in being a traditional I-made-every-move-
ment-up-by-myself director; rather, her most comfortable role, and one that
is clearly apparent in Myths, is as a director/facilitator. She likes to set up
the conditions for a dance or performance to happen (the set, environment,
context, and larger metaphoric themes) and then have people collectively
begin to find their own movement answers to the theatrical questions these
elements pose.
There are clear liabilities to working this way. It is one of the ironies of
improvisational dance that, while it may be intensely real in the moment
it is invented and performed, it usually fades quickly from memory—both
the performers’ and the audience’s. Without the traditional memory an-
chors of repetition, choreography, rehearsals, staged ensemble passages,
plot, and a set musical accompaniment, even trained dancers have di‹culty
re-creating what a particular evening’s improvisation looks like. This prob-
lem of recall is, of course, intensified for novice performers. So there is

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 209

 hardly any documentation of what a full evening of one of the Myths looked
like.
Participants among the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop members, who
acted as initiators in the first two sessions and knowing participants in the
subsequent ones, recall mostly isolated moments and images, as well as
“things that went wrong.” Although Ann has described her ambitions for
each evening and the environments her collaborators, lighting and envi-
ronment designer Patric Hickey, drummer Casey Sonnabend, and sculp-
tor Seymour Locks, created,29 the actual bodily movements and incidental
choreographic patterns have vanished, except in some still photographs of
the evenings. For the historian this is both frustrating and instructive—the
focus each night was really on the process of personal transformation from
a heightened sense of oneself as an individual to a more muted sense of
oneself as part of a collective social body. This kind of process often leads
to personal epiphanies and insights, things that are felt more than per-
formed. It is about experience, not the communication of a set text or the
production of an artifact of performance. “The whole reason for doing these
Myths,” Ann explained, “[was] that I wanted to find out what people . . .
what ordinary people would do, and how they would react. So I was do-
ing it to study audiences. This was like research for me.”30
The first myth took as its focus “Creation.” For this opening event Hickey
filled the studio with sixty opened folding chairs, which he hung from the
walls at eight- and twelve-foot elevations. On the ground he placed a series
of platforms, eight, four, and two feet high, with lights illuminating them.
Since the chairs were too high to sit on, the audience members seated them-
selves in the pools of light, either on the floor or on one of the platforms.
No instructions were given before the first myth began. Once the fifty or
so attendees had paid their $2.50 admission and found a place to sit, the
Dancers’ Workshop dancers entered and seated themselves in a circle on
the floor. The performance was under way.
(Throughout the Myths series Ann steadily collected an admission fee
from those who showed up to participate. Charging admission in this con-
text seems to exist as a vestige of a traditional performance, where a pre-
pared spectacle is “sold” and delivered to the audience. The other common
dance occasions when one pays a fee to participate are workshops or classes,
where one will learn some skills, have an experience, be changed by an en-
counter with a master teacher. The Myths hover at the margins of these two
events. It is meaningful that Ann initially staged all of the Myths in her
Dancers’ Workshop studio, a space used for performances as well as daily

210 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

classes and workshops and at times as a communal home by several of her
dancers. Already, then, this was a space that blended the “real” of training
work and daily life with the “not real” of performance, the same states Ann
would commingle in her dances.31)
The first evening formally commenced when one of Ann’s Dancers’
Workshop dancers was asked to step forward, stand in the center, close her
eyes, and wait. Then another dancer was asked to stand behind this person
and slap her up and down the spine, progressing over the shoulders, arms,
hips, and legs, through the entire body. The drums began to sound, and
eventually all of Ann’s dancers were slapped into sensory alertness and set
in motion. As Ann later explained:

A dance began with audience becoming performers, the original perform-

ers acting as catalysts. The physical environment, originally meant for
seating, became the stage. The director began to work with responses in
movement, guiding them, shaping them, and adding new ideas until
everyone was actively participating in “mutual creation.” As the energy
spread through the studio, the idea of the original circle with its uncon-
sciously perceived powers kept reappearing.32

Clearly, in this interpreted and editorialized account, Ann, as director, in-

fers her own cultural reading of archetypal patterns and significance into
the spatial patterns of the performers. The “mutual creation” becomes si-
multaneously a public exploration of oneself.
The most detailed artifact remaining of this evening is a diagrammatic
drawing with an elaborate key depicting the “score” and just where in the
space the platforms, performers, lights, and drum player were situated. Pho-
tographs of this first myth yield little choreographic information. One shows
a group of six figures in shadowy light: two are crawling on the floor, two
are seated, and a pair of men stand together as one walks his hands down
the curled back of the other, who hangs over limply. This photograph sug-
gests that the performers were engaged in their own private exploration of
the space around them and their movement colleagues. Perhaps most im-
portant, they seem transported by the heady freedom of regarding their ac-
tions as ends in themselves rather than as rehearsed utilitarian motions for
another function. They seem focused, serious, and they do not appear to
be performing for show.
A few weeks after this gentle beginning, the second myth, “Atonement,”
abruptly changed the tone, oªering an emotionally and physically hostile

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 211

 environment. Hickey had covered every inch of the studio’s floor, ceiling,
and walls with newspapers, actually the same identical page. As Ann later
described the “ordeal”:

After being briefed on the floor of a small room, and deciding whether
to participate in this “ordeal,” the audience entered the studio one at a
time. They stood facing the wall, looking into blinding spotlights placed
around the perimeter and ceilings of the room. They selected a position,
minimally altered some pieces of their clothing, and remained still and
silent for one hour. A deafeningly loud continuous roll on a snare drum
was played by Casey Sonnabend seated in the center of the room.33

Ann concluded this assault to the senses with a debriefing in the small stu-
dio, where the “survivors” were asked to think of two words that best de-
scribed their experience and relate them to each other in small groups. Al-
though she never spoke of it as such, “Atonement” had the quality of an
initiation rite, a passage to test the lengths to which the spectators would go
in dutifully following and silently enduring whatever challenges, or abuse,
Ann and Hickey tossed at them. The docility of this behavior, particularly
in the face of such an assault to the senses, makes it seem like a hazing rite.
Years later Ann said that her intent was to evoke the Holocaust from the po-
sition of the inmates.34 If this was indeed a reference to World War II, then
another reading is possible. Instead of being the victims, the participants in
“Atonement” could also be seen as willing executioners, the “good Germans.”
Equally poignantly, they could have been feeling lost and manipulated, like
Dustin Hoªman’s character from that year’s film The Graduate.
The subsequent eight Thursday evening events, which stretched into Feb-
ruary of 1968, dealt with progressively more interactive and sensual mate-
rial.35 The third myth, “Trails,” and the seventh, “Carry,” for example, both
invited touching and other physical contact that lapped at the boundaries
of publicly permissible behavior. At the same time all the events had an in-
structional quality, as if they were “lessons” in human experience. The fourth
myth, “Totem,” for example, gave the audience a chair- and costume-filled
space to explore for two hours. Afterward, coªee was served and the poet
and filmmaker James Broughton talked about the relationship of totems
to myths and about historical and cultural traditions of sitting. Only one
myth, the ninth one, “Story Telling,” used the spoken word. Here partic-
ipants walked one by one around the interior of a large circle formed by
the other participants and told a childhood story, a story no one had ever

212 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

heard before. The storyteller held a candle and then passed this candle on,
signaling another person’s turn to begin her story. People then gathered in
small groups, with the remaining storytellers recounting their tales to the
person seated next to them. At the end the words stopped and all the par-
ticipants danced slowly together, each holding a lighted candle.
According to Ann, there was no grand plan at the outset of Myths, other
than to find a way to bridge the gap between audience and performers and
to channel any potential hostility viewers might feel at the nontraditional
nature of her work. For Ann, the dance is discovered by attending closely
to simple biological truths—like the range of rotation possible in a shoul-
der or hip joint. Diªerent movements can evoke diªerent emotional states,
which in turn can inform one’s physical actions. From the mid-1960s for-
ward, this was really the only kind of dance Ann trusted. Viewed from a
dance historical perspective, it also positions her in direct opposition to the
intense focus on individuality through dance that the previous generation
of modern dancers had championed. The individual voice of each partic-
ipant, like each student, is loosened and encouraged in Ten Myths, but only
temporarily as a step on the way to re-forming a collective group identity.
On the performance evenings Ann eªectively turned the theater into a class-
room and a kind of behavioral psychology laboratory. To prepare the Myths
audiences to be performers, Ann drew on the kinds of group body explo-
ration warm-ups she had learned from Margaret H’Doubler—attending
to one’s breathing patterns, noticing how one’s muscles and joints moved
as one executed a simple action. Like H’Doubler, Ann worked like a con-
ductor, gently orchestrating the group’s focus and energy.36
The exercises helped loosen and encourage the individual voice of each
participant as a step on the way to re-forming a collective group identity.
As the evening progressed, Ann watched from the sidelines as various kinds
of movement material and diªerent interactions among participants were
tried on and accepted or rejected. What happened was arrived at in the mo-
ment and then shaped and pushed forward by Ann. In all this, Ten Myths
foregrounds Ann’s skills as a teacher rather than showcasing her choreo-
graphic prowess, the more customary function of an evening of a dance
artist’s work. Ironically, in one sense, she becomes even more of an authority
figure than the traditional choreographer, because she roams the perfor-
mance space during the actual performance, editing, encouraging, and
prompting the dance into being at each moment. Authority and power be-
come making people move. While in Ten Myths these were people whose
mantra was absolute freedom, the dynamic of the environment Ann set up

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 213

 suggests something more complex. The dance studio became a safe and con-
tained place to be wild, to go crazy within reassuring boundaries and never
for longer than the two-hour duration of the event.
As a press release issued partway through the Myths series explained:

On any given evening, varying slightly according to the central idea of

the night, there was remarkably little passive observation. A few people
left. But the vast majority stayed, participated, even participated ecstati-
cally. Some people, those who left on any given night or who lasted one
evening, dropped out. But they were more than replaced by a continu-
ally swelling influx of new people, attracted, one assumed by word of
mouth. And many came regularly, making myths a part of their weekly
schedule.37

“What I was trying to do was to design scores for the audience to do,” Ann
later said. “So at the beginning, for the first few Myths, we had a company
who would engage the audience. That was the first step. They would do
things like demonstrate. But then later on, as we moved into the fourth and
fifth myth, we didn’t have that catalyst at all. They just met in one studio.
They were given a score, and they were told, ‘If you would like to do this
score you can come in and we’ll do it. If you don’t want to do it, you don’t
have to, and we’ve had a little warm-up, and thank-you and goodbye.’”38
There is an unspoken myth referred to here—that of primitivism, the
natural man/woman who waits dormant inside of our compliant social
selves. Yet instead of freeing the “uptight” in ordinary people, Ann may
have simply attracted unconstrained individuals from the general popula-
tion at the outset. By the fourth myth in early December, Ann discovered
that the audience, many of whom had become regulars, had taken over the
show. No longer occasional or part-time participants, they were “on” from
the moment they entered the studio, sometimes constructively and at times
destructively. “In Myths the audience actually did the scores [mapping out
the performance],” Ann recalled. “I was giving the audience choices of how
close they wanted to be, or how they wanted to distance themselves. And
to be able to make those choices during the performance, because they
wouldn’t know before they started what was going to happen.”39
Who was this audience? According to Ann’s press release, “the ‘audiences’
were, by and large, neither homogeneous nor an ‘in-group.’ They were a
fascinating mixture of hippies, student groups from the San Francisco Art
Institute, all types of businessmen, dance students and professionals, ar-

214 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

chitects, city planners, encounter groups, psycho-therapists, casual visitors
to the city, and even occasionally, people lured by the Workshop’s reputa-
tion for nude performances.”40 The working class is essentially absent here.
This is an audience of generally a›uent Bay Area residents—students, pro-
fessionals, the hip, the artistic—people who may even have been practiced
in readily letting their social guard down for the duration of an evening.
After each event Ann and her dancers discussed what had happened for
days and sometimes weeks. “We learned how things worked, and then we
based our next myth on something that did not work but could have,” Ann
later explained.41 “Not working” meant that the participants had not be-
come meaningfully engaged with the evening’s tasks, or they had deviated
from the implicit intention of Ann’s score and instead become captive to
an expression of their personal desires.
Almost as if the process were ethnographic fieldwork, Ann used audience
questionnaires and post-performance “coªee klatches” to solicit feedback:

We quickly noticed that we had to evolve structures that were free enough
to allow everyone to become involved in his own way, avoiding any feel-
ing of manipulation, but simultaneously we had to set up boundaries, so
that the inclusion of so many people wouldn’t lead to complete chaos. It
was touchy, balancing these polarities. It meant avoiding the use of words
and relying on the materials to create stimuli and multiple choices—verbal
explanations are either interpreted a hundred diªerent ways or simply
forgotten.42

Ann’s abiding belief in “body wisdom” being more infallible than words
and, more important, in what Victor Turner calls “spontaneous commu-
nitas,” generated the rules of the game.43 While Ann had a distinct idea for
each evening—ranging from sensuality to conflict, aggression, play, bewil-
derment, and the sharing of tragedy—she was wary of overdetermining
the event. “We can no longer depend on our masterminds,” she explained,
elaborating, in what can be read as a sociopolitical statement: “There is too
much for one mind to master. It’s more enjoyable and more unpredictable
to let things happen that just let everybody be, and it’s wonderful to see
what comes about when you release people’s resources.”44
This kind of spontaneity has been strongly criticized by Richard Schech-
ner, who sees it, in direct opposition to Ann, as the “weakness” of “group
creativity.” He cautions that “outside of a culturally defined theatrical sys-
tem participants tend to fall back on their own sincerity, their own per-

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 215

 sonal truth . . . all too often a combination of clichés of intimacy, unex-
amined cultural fact and romantic distortions of pre-industrial religious ex-
perience.”45 Judged by standard performance criteria Schechner is right;
spontaneity does not necessarily make for a transporting experience for the
spectator. Yet viewed from the perspective of an educator, which might more
accurately define Ann’s role in Ten Myths, spontaneity can be a rich peda-
gogic starting point, a way of generating a strong connection between “pre-
parer” and “partaker.” Ultimately, spontaneity becomes an active form of
participant enjoyment. The test of whether this approach can work as the-
ater depends on where one goes from there.

Like a costume party for personal emotions and behaviors, Ten Myths was a
forum for sampling various social ways of being. Ann said that in Ten Myths
the overall ideas she was exploring were “intimacy, sensuality, and trust, as
opposed to sexuality.”46 Ann’s third myth, “Trails,” focused on touch between
strangers. When the audience entered the studio, they were directed to a small
platform at one end, where they discovered chairs arranged close together.
After sitting down, they were told to relax into the chair, letting out what-
ever sounds flowed from their breathing. The group sound eventually grew
into a shout and then quieted into a prolonged humming. Ann’s dancers then
blindfolded the audience members, who were instructed to grasp someone’s
hand and form a line.47 Then the last person in the line was told to move to
the front by feeling his or her way along the row of strangers. The long line
was then split up into four or five shorter lines, which Ann called “trails,”
and again the last person in each moved to the front. After repeating this ac-
tion in silence for an hour and a half, people pulled oª their blindfolds and
just gazed at each other “for a long time.”48 This concluding “cool-down”
stage, which Ann usually included in her participatory dances of the time,
allows for processing of what has been learned. Whether through a post-
experience discussion or ritual, or both, time is allowed for the performers
to return to the ordinary sphere of existence from which they began.49
With Ten Myths Ann seemed to trust in, as she still does today, a natural
state of innocence in people. It is di‹cult not to think of the risks of tak-
ing a group of fifty men and women, including anyone who walked in oª
the street, and having them remain blindfolded as they touch their way across
each other’s bodies. Ann reveals this trust in a curious exchange with three
of her dancers who performed in Myths and who voiced a clear uneasiness
with the tenor of several interactions with the non-dancer participants:

216 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

 ann: Because they [the audience participants] have no pre-set
physical habits, the things they do have tremendous
authenticity. . . .
dancer 2: I don’t think that’s true. They are more frightened than we
are by the intensity that can be reached.
dancer 3: [agreeing ] When you are working with dancers there is
always care and love for the body. Even if you’re mad and
use your greatest energy, a dancer won’t break your bones,
because he knows about the body. “Carry” would have
stopped much earlier if it had been in a class. At first it was
beautiful when I was carried, but it went on and on, and I
felt I was being used. They forgot that it was me, the person.
ann: Watching, I had the exact opposite feeling—that these people
were involved in a gift-giving ritual.
dancer 3: [protesting ] They said, “Turn her around in a somersault,”
and they were hurting me. . . .
dancer 2: I find it hard to be really open with guys from the outside.
They were kind of horny. They got me up-tight.
ann: They usually get horny when the lights go oª. There is
tremendous starvation for the opportunity to touch. If they
had had more experience they could balance it. . . .
dancer 3: I think it’s frightening to see all those people who are not
sensitized yet, having their first sensual experience of not only
touching but moving. I go through with it because I believe
the man on the street can learn, but it takes a great deal of
humility on my part to look at it.50

As much as Ann embraced spontaneity, she also had an impulse to con-

trol, or at least edit, people’s reactions to her work, and it seems telling that
this exchange was omitted from the collection of her writings Moving to-
ward Life, published in 1995. The dialogue documents the dangers inher-
ent in activating the audience in Ten Myths. The three dancers speaking
here point to the predictability and safety of working with a trained part-
ner and the riskiness and potential violence of being manipulated by un-
trained strangers. This interchange also reveals the sexual resonance of Ten
Myths as well as how swiftly the audiences positioned themselves as per-
forming equals with the dancers. Instead of mentors, the dancers simply
served as better-equipped bodies to play with. Ann’s dancers suggest that
they felt they were in the odd position of dancing with theatrically unso-
cialized people. The social anthropologist Erving Goªman has used the

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 217

 phrase “merchants of morality” to discuss how people in everyday life may
market themselves as obeying moral concerns when in reality they are play-
acting as they pursue their own, not always moral, ends.51 For some people,
“becoming authentic” in Ann’s Myths may have allowed a similar illusion,
giving them license to abandon certain norms of behavior and instead pur-
sue their private ends, charging ahead with whatever felt good. It seems clear
that even in audience-participation works, including fairly chaotic and the-
matically prosaic ones, the stage must have its own code of morality and
behavioral order, and Ann would swiftly learn to build this into her scores.
In the meantime she enjoyed leading audiences to the edge of promiscuity
and back.

We really didn’t have a progression in mind, in the sequence of Myths

from “Creation” to “Trails.” I think that we just got ideas as they came.
“Trails” was very interesting, because we were dealing with intimacy
and sensuality and trust, as opposed to sexuality. Because everybody was
blindfolded the person at the end of the line had to find his way to the
front, and the only way they could do that was by feeling their way down
the line. So you had to be touching people and had to be being touched.
And there was no time to linger to get involved in the touch. It would
just happen, and then you’d go on. They could touch you on your breast
or your genitals or your face—you just had no way of knowing. . . . I
wanted the audience to have that experience so that they would appreci-
ate that touching was more than sex.52

Ann’s three dancers’ comments suggest, however, that for some touch
became sex, or at least foreplay. The seventh myth, “Carry,” tipped the bal-
ance between sensuality and sexuality. The evening began with the partic-
ipants entering the performing area and climbing up to seats on two risers
at opposite ends of the room. For a long time they all sat watching each
other, accompanied by steady drumming from below. Finally, Ann stepped
forward and asked for someone to choose another person and carry that
person across the room to the opposite riser. As Ann recounted, “After a
pause a man jumped down, selected a girl, and very simply carried her, and
the drumming rhythm, the lights, and the carrying action began to work
together.” Soon Ann broadened her instructions to include “Will two people
carry one person?” and “Will five people carry two people?” and “Will those
of you who want to be carried stand in the passage [between the risers] and
wait?” In her words, the evening soon resembled “a Bacchanalia [and] was

218 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

suªused with a ritualistic quality.”53 As Rockwell recalled with clear amuse-
ment thirty-two years later:

The idea [in “Carry”] was that you would go across to the other side,
take a person who was sitting on the other side, and carry them back to
your first side, and then go back to their side. Well, you know, given the
general musky vibes hanging in the area, there was a lot of sexuality to
this. I mean, you were going over to strange people (most people did it
heterosexually) and you’d go to your regular partner or to a new person
or something so there was trust involved, but there was also sexuality
involved. Anyway, one couple got into it, and started fucking in the
middle between the two rows. There were . . . nineteen people watching
this couple. What was so funny to me about it was that Ann, this great
avatar of free sexuality, was utterly flummoxed by this, did not know what
to do, and didn’t like it! Because it wasn’t part of the drill, right? And here
they were, fucking away, and all Ann could do —she must have said this
about five times—she would say over and over, after about a fifteen-second
pause each time, she’d say, “Will the people who have finished the activity
please move to the side of the room?”54

Like Duchamp’s dramatic gesture of submitting R. Mutt’s Fountain to

the 1917 show of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, Ann’s
use of real-life activity was dependent on its being presented in the context
of art, and it needed this contrast to give it resonance, meaning, and value
as “art.” A main reason Ann objected to sexual intercourse in the midst of
“Carry” was that it broke the frame and evaporated this aesthetic opposi-
tion. It also deviated from the intended focus— on the task of carrying—
and disrupted a deeper exploration of this prosaic act by letting immedi-
ate personal desires take over. (Ann was also sensitive to the fact that at the
time nude performances were illegal in San Francisco.)
A man and a woman simply coupling with one another in public lacks
the sophistication of art and also the complexity of having a theatrically ar-
ticulate body suddenly start speaking “vernacular.” As Sally Banes has noted,
the performing arts of the 1960s came suddenly to “embody” democracy by
blending artistic and social radicalism, and this radicalism was often enacted
through “new aesthetics that could be incarnated several times in several
decades.”55 Ann and the San Francisco dance community, however, didn’t
have the artists and critics of the Judson Dance Theater performances of
1962–64 to provide an art reference for the significance of task performance
in postwar modern dance. Although Ann introduced this in the late 1950s

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 219

 summer workshops and was using it extensively by the 1960 summer work-
shop, on the West Coast there wasn’t enough sense of dance history for lo-
cal dancers or the public to appreciate the daring and aesthetic meaning.
Outside of Ten Myths, the overt performance of “love” was widespread
in San Francisco in 1967. Ten Myths followed the much publicized “Sum-
mer of Love,” and public lovemaking was not unheard of at the huge love-
ins in Golden Gate Park. Kathelin Gray recalls a Death of Mr. Hippie
Passover event at the time, where unison lovemaking was part of the un-
traditional seder ceremony.56 The topless clubs of North Beach had also
initiated nude “love acts” as floor shows with amateur performers, and on
occasion some of Ann’s moonlighting dancers joined them. Rockwell and
Gray recalled that one afternoon in 1967, “just for the hell of it,” they joined
two Halprin dancers who regularly performed in the North Beach clubs,
simulating intercourse. “[We] just went and cavorted around one after-
noon . . . before an audience consisting of ten old guys in raincoats,” Rock-
well remembered. “I took oª my shirt and kept on my jeans while the
women were topless and wore g-strings.”57 Others who studied with Ann
reported embarking on similar experiences. Sex, marketing, and “love” with-
out entanglements intertwined in curious ways. Publicly showcasing one’s
ease with sex seemed to connote emotional and physical candor of the sort
that Fritz Perls’s Gestalt workshops aimed for on a psychological level.
An indirect consequence of Ann’s audience participation experiment in
Myths was to make the boundary between performative behavior and real-
life action permeable for the dancers and highly confused for the non-
dancers. As Goªman has noted, a special kind of intimacy exists among
people engaged in group physical activity, like teammates, but this is “in-
timacy without warmth” or “dramaturgical co-operation.”58 Ann’s audiences
could quickly become fairly intimate when asked to perform actions like
touching or carrying, but did they need to be educated about the virtual
nature of imagery, emotionality, and theatrical intimacy in dance? Over the
next few years Ann would, in fact, elect to keep the reality of using non-
dancers and their actions authentic. Instead, she would shift the frame of
her theater to highlight these unmediated undertakings as “art.”
At the outset of Myths, however, Ann’s goals were diªerent. In a press re-
lease issued in the midst of Ten Myths, Ann said every evening was about
answering a diªerent human need or desire and then testing the audience
on the kind of commitment it takes to be a performer. In this way the public
could gain respect for work that puzzled them or which they disliked. Ann
later explained:

220 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

 I felt that a performer has to make an incredible commitment to perform.
The commitment is on so many diªerent levels. It’s on a physical level, the
training for that performance, the rehearsing, the building the body to be
able to physically do the piece. And then to become vulnerable and place
yourself in front of an audience who are all judging you, and critics who
are going to make decisions about whether this is a good or bad piece.59

Almost as if she were treating each evening’s audience as a huge collective

performer, Ann deliberately prodded these crowds into vulnerability, test-
ing the commitment she saw as essential for a performer to stand in front
of an audience. Viewed from this perspective, Ann’s emerging idea of au-
dience participation concerns transforming the audience into a participat-
ing perceiver sensitized with the vulnerability and humility of a performer.
While Jerzy Grotowski, Herbert Blau, and the Living Theater, as well as
Allan Kaprow and other artists involved with Happenings, were experiment-
ing with forms of audience participation in the 1960s, none rethought audi-
ence participation so systematically in dance. In an interview she gave several
months before Myths began, Ann acknowledged the intertwining of educa-
tional objectives and theater in her approach to art making. These objectives
can be in tension in the same way that art and politics frequently are—one
is about creating iconoclastic images and the other is socially normative.

Since I’ve been working simultaneously in education and theater all my

life, it’s hard for me to know the source for an idea. But I do know that
in the theater experiences, I want very much to deal with people on that
stage who are identifying with very real experiences in life, in such a way
that the audiences can identify themselves with the so-called performers.
Rather than just looking at somebody doing something very unusual, I
want the audience to be able to identify and realize that this is a person
more than he is a dancer, a person who identifies with very real things.60

Here Ann candidly reveals her desire to demythologize the acts of both spec-
tating and performing and to elicit a new sympathy of one for the other.
She is not striving to create illusionistic theater, but rather to emphasize the
everyday reality of her performers as people. While other choreographers
would work in this direction by making bluntly functional costumes and
choreography for their dancers, Ann simply invited the prosaic and every-
day folk onto the stage. In this way she did not dissolve the audience so
much as reconstitute their role into that of “witnesses.”

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 221

 Indeed, Ann has said of this period: “I began to stop thinking of an au-
dience as an audience and to think of them as witnesses. I tried more and
more to break down separations, whether it was separations between audi-
ence and performer or whether it was separations between people within
the performance. [I wanted] a sense of gathering together to appreciate our
diªerences and then to find our commonalties.”61 This notion of the au-
dience as witness gave Ann a new conception of what kind of engagement
she wanted her dances to initiate and what kind of viewers she wanted her
audience to be when they weren’t participating. “My idea of witness rather
than audience is that a witness has to have a commitment,” she indicated,
“that they’re there for you, that they are supporting you in some way.”62
In Ann’s mind, one major influence that pushed her from the idea of
spectator to that of witness was the creation of her dance deck in 1954. As
she explained, “When we started showing some of the work the audience
was right there. They were practically in the same area we were dancing in.
And I think that the separation between audience and performer began to
be diminished when we were doing those early works.”63 A few years after
Ten Myths, Ann’s budding ideas about active spectatorship gained rein-
forcement from a performance of the Mandan Sun Dance that she and her
husband attended at the newly opened Native American D-Q University
outside of Davis, California, in 1971. The Halprins stood in the circle fac-
ing the young men who had gathered around a large cottonwood tree. They
watched as each man had the skin on his chest pierced by a bear claw, which
was then attached by rope to the top of the tree. Each initiate then tried to
break loose by letting the hook tear through his chest skin—a bloody and
painful task. Unhooking by hand is not permitted; instead, the perform-
ers repeatedly circled the tree, trying to get the hook to tear through their
skin. After several hours of watching the young men’s agony, Larry sud-
denly passed out. As Ann stooped to help him, she felt a sharp pain as a
branch was whipped across her shin. “The dancer needs your help,” an eld-
erly Native American woman seated next to her reprimanded her. “Your
husband will be fine; keep your focus on the dancer, your role is to help
him by being a witness.”64
Ann later said this experience dramatized for her the concept of wit-
nessing. It underlined how crucial the viewer is in supporting the performer.
In much the same way that Larry was seeking design models of organic
unity in the California landscape at the time, Ann began looking to Na-
tive American ritual practices as ideals for performances that engaged view-
ers and performers equally and also held special social potency. As she in-

222 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

creasingly incorporated this more engaged posture of witnessing into her
dances, disrupting the traditional role of the spectator, all other parts of
her performances also shifted. She was looking for ways to make her per-
formances as instructive for spectators as her workshops were for the per-
formers. Ann’s whole dance began to take on more of the ceremonial qual-
ities of a ritual, with active audience “witnessing” as one of these.

One of the most direct, and implicitly ironic, references Ann made to her
heritage as an American modern dancer in Ten Myths was through her sim-
ple choice of the word myths as her title. In the 1940s and 1950s Martha
Graham had initiated the widespread dance theater use of myth with dances
that drew on Greek mythology and Native American rituals from the South-
west. In what were generally highly theatrical, meticulously structured, and
emotionally dramatic pieces, Graham retold, in her rigorous dance vocab-
ulary, archetypal tales of the human psyche. She tended to use myths
metaphorically, as parables for intensely emotional and private material
couched as a heroic figure’s story. In this she was strongly influenced by
Carl Jung’s theorizing on the relationship between the workings of the psy-
che and the images that stream out of the subconscious through dreams.
Jung believed that by observing preindustrial cultures, people in modern
Western culture could glimpse essences of their own rational existence.65
Generating myths was seen as a psychological process, a form of living re-
ligion that bubbled up from the subconscious.
Ann’s concept of myth, however, was considerably diªerent from Gra-
ham’s. Rather than creating a modern work of art around an ancient para-
ble of human behavior as Graham did, Ann envisioned myth as a much
more intimately scaled movement expression that was immediately func-
tional. Ann’s sense of myth was more consonant with aspects of Joseph
Campbell’s interpretation, which sees myth as the fuel for everyday life ex-
perience, a narrative we generate that gives a logic and aesthetic shape to
our “life journey.” When asked about Campbell’s influence, however, Ann
said, “I didn’t connect strongly to Joseph Campbell because he was talking
about myths that relate to certain cultures and I saw myth as something
that people make out of their ordinary lives.”66
It is interesting that Campbell, who was married to the choreographer
and former Graham dancer Jean Erdman, believed the artist is our closest
contemporary equivalent to the great heroes of antiquity.67 The artist is the
one who shapes expressions of individual experience into a new mythol-

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 223

 ogy, a ritualistic story, for our time. For Campbell, rituals are the means
through which individuals learn the myths of their communities and become
members of these groups, a type of contemporary tribe. He warned of the
social dangers of abandoning myths, cautioning that youths may become
destructive without rituals (myths) to induct them into their community-
tribes. The absence of a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood in
modern society, according to Campbell, leaves a vacuum that can only be
filled through release—sometimes sexual, sometimes violent—to simulate
a ritual. The artistic process, in his view, oªers a model for a ritual passage,
allowing for discovery and re-creation of the self through the particular ma-
terial the artist chooses to work with.
Campbell’s dicta can in some ways be seen as a blueprint for Ten Myths,
in which Ann functioned as an “artist-shaman,” creating the context for
her audience’s public invention and discovery of a ritual for the evening.
In her press release for Ten Myths, Ann spoke of “a theater of movement
and involvement” and “a seminal theater of community.” She indicated,
“The central factor in the initial planning [of Ten Myths], in the search for
something which would release people’s buried creativity, was a commit-
ment to ritual, to ceremony, to rites, to initiation.”68 Instead of going “from
ritual to theater,” as Victor Turner proposed in a book by that title, Ann
was taking theater “back” to ritual. Turner described how, as an actor in a
ritual performance, “one learns through performing, then performs the un-
derstandings so gained”—a statement that might apply equally well to Ann’s
impromptu dancer/spectators.69
The communal myths created each evening during the Myths series grew
out of the audience’s performance, fabricated by the San Francisco Dancers’
Workshop dancers and initially shaped by Ann. Unlike Graham, Ann was
not interested in using historic myths as ancient narrative structures to show-
case contemporary dance dramas; rather, she wanted to have her audiences
create their own spontaneous links between their psyches and an invented
vocabulary of movement symbols. Her goal was resolutely on emotional
change for the participant. While Ann kept her gaze steadily on altering
the spectator’s role and engagement, the whole dynamic of her theater be-
came reconfigured as well. Over the course of each evening, as the partic-
ipants explored that evening’s topic, their “myths” became contemporary
mini-rituals, what Campbell would have called “spontaneous productions
of the psyche” rather than the “manufactured symbols” of theater.70
A decade later Richard Schechner would draw a theoretical distinction
between ritual and theater that may serve as a measure of Ann’s success. He

224 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

recast this divide as one between “e‹cacy and entertainment,” and he coined
the term transformance to describe performances that “do something” in
the way rituals do. In a transformance, as in a ritual, e‹cacy becomes an
essential criterion for judging the success of the event.71 Sincerity, experi-
encing the requisite feelings, thoughts, or intentions, creating the appro-
priate mood and atmosphere, and staying within the proper boundaries were
all signifiers of a well-working ritual. Just as equally, they were standards of
success for Myths.

For the mainstream media at the time it was unclear what standard to use
in measuring the success of Myths. Was it a licentious “hippie” escapade or
an attempt at art? Reviewers for the local papers seemed uncertain whether
to adopt an inside (participant) or outside (critic) vantage point and
whether to let the licentiousness emerge on its own or impose it in their re-
porting. The suggestion was that licentiousness exists in opposition to art.
In part because the erasure of a spectator’s viewpoint was one of the work’s
objectives, the reviewers seemed to have had a di‹cult time figuring out
where to situate themselves as traditional critical spectators in relation to
the work. They roundly failed Myths as traditional dance, but they sensed
it might be working on some other level. Ritualistic? Therapeutic? Prelude
to a love-in? They could not quite identify it. “Things were getting friend-
lier and friendlier all the time, but I had had it,” Heuwell Tircuit, a con-
servative opera and music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote,
adding: “One could easily be upset, considering this a childish or even a
dirty event, but the dominant aesthetic was one of overwhelming inno-
cence. Here lies Ann’s power—that one leaves feeling bothered by not be-
ing able to like it.”72 This reaction to Ann’s work as being aªecting as a
process yet unpersuasive as art was a frequent one at the time.
The San Francisco Examiner critic William Gilkerson actually quizzed
Ann about whether there would be any nudity in the Myth performance
he planned to attend. He reported that she responded with “a giggle” and
the statement: “Everybody wants to see nudies now,” going on to explain
that nudity is erotic only if it is presented as a performance spectacle. This
was a time when feeling casually intimate with strangers, without being com-
pelled to actually be intimate, may have come as a welcome relief. The Sun-
day before Ten Myths opened the city’s conservative music critic Arthur
Bloomfield had written a surprisingly supportive feature about nudity, de-
scribing a controversial performance in Ann’s studio. Choreographed by

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 225

 some of her dancers, this concert had at one point involved a nude dancer
painting her body. Apparently it was more risqué in the recounting than
the viewing. “It would have taken a pretty puritanical mind to see anything
crassly pornographic in the evening’s entertainment,” Bloomfield wrote.
“The nudity was incidental and natural, not a parading of voluptuousness.”
He concluded by citing Ann’s response to nudity: “She doesn’t see the bare-
ness as rebellion but simply an a‹rmation of the body as a part of nature.
In the highest sense, she feels a performance involving bare facts can make
for an honest situation re-enforcing the idea of a communion between au-
dience and performers.”73
Gilkerson came to realize that the Myths programs “were not perform-
ances as such. They were rather heightened forms of life experience, open
to the general public, intended to do away with an audience as a passive
factor. Everyone participates.”74 Throughout his article Gilkerson flickered
between the perspectives of voyeurism, traditional spectatorship, and
would-be participant as he searched for the right vantage point for Myths.
In the end he took a sympathetic tone, understanding the performance as
a game, as “an exceptionally intimate kind of blind man’s bluª.” And he
quoted Ann on how she judged the success of each “myth”: “As long as I’m
discovering new things I’m successful. I use [Marshall] McLuhan’s defini-
tion: He says a Myth is simply an audience turn-on.” Although Gilkerson
seemed to interpret this as a sexual turn-on, for Ann the turn-on could be
in many other realms.
Beyond describing a performance, critics often want to clarify what the
piece “means.” But for Myths this question was not easy to answer. In aban-
doning text-based theater in Myths and in valorizing the spontaneous while
devalorizing the choreographed, Ann had placed her work firmly in the tra-
dition initiated by Antonin Artaud—that of regarding theater as an open
field: “I maintain that the stage is a tangible physical place that needs to be
filled and it ought to be allowed to speak its own concrete language.”75 How-
ever, the ambiguity of the performers’ relationship to the material they were
performing in Myths and their divergent understandings of what it all meant
invited confusion. As the historian Gay McNulty has noted, even in the
most controlled situations, performance is radically unstable in the mean-
ings it generates and the activities it engages because it is an event rather
than an object.76 Gilkerson hinted at the mix of metaphors when he de-
scribed the actions of one man who enthusiastically removed his shirt while
“moving like a strange caterpillar” and later began bellowing excitedly “like
a bull rhino.” In eªect, Gilkerson and Tircuit could find no fixed mean-

226 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

ings in Myths because Ann deferred transmitting meaning in favor of let-
ting each performer “give or make an oªering of his or her presence,”77 a
position that echoes Artaud’s metaphorical redefinition of theater:

It is a theater which eliminates the author in favor of what we would call,

in our Occidental theater jargon, the director; but a director who has
become a kind of manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies. And
the material on which he works, the themes he brings to throbbing life
are derived not from him but from the gods. They come, it seems, from
elemental interconnections of Nature which a double Spirit has fostered.78

Artaud’s faith in the magic of author-less theater being a conduit to the

gods escaped the journalists who wrote about Myths. In January 1969 Time
magazine depicted Ann’s Myths as some tawdry and vulgar practice of a lost
tribe known as San Francisco’s hippies. While skeptical of Ann’s large-scale
claims toward “releasing people’s creativity,” the writer was clearly charmed
by the sincerity of the performers. Intuitively this writer sensed one of the
dilemmas of performance—that what is presented is always both real the-
atrically and not real practically. “Her workshop activities are as much an-
thropologic as choreographic. . . . By encouraging her audiences to act out
their anxieties in terms of free-moving myths, Ann is providing not only a
therapeutic outlet but an artistic one as well.”79 The irony for critics was
that the more “real life” details Ann added, through audience participation
and individuals’ generation of their own actions and stories, the less the
sense of a theatrical reality Myths generated.
A related but diªerent approach to blurring the boundaries between the-
ater and reality can be seen in the work of Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s
Living Theater, whose radical performance model was overtly political from
the start. Like Ann they were interested in generating a community of
artists through collaborative works of non-naturalistic theater, but, as Sally
Banes chronicles, by the early 1960s “their concern with community had
shifted . . . to organizing, through art, in the larger community—rousing
both actors and audiences to political consciousness and action, in partic-
ular against the Bomb and for world peace.”80 In 1968, after four years in
exile in Europe for failure to pay taxes, the troupe returned to the United
States to begin a nationwide tour. In the spring of 1969 the troupe reached
the Bay Area, where they performed their disorderly and aggressive call for
nonviolent social revolution, Paradise Now. This work ended with the full
cast, joined by the audience, streaming oª the stage and into the streets

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 227

 outside the theater, ready to begin the new order, but more often into the
arms of police o‹cers waiting to arrest any nude performers for indecent
exposure. “Even within the Movement they were controversial for their an-
archism,” Banes notes.81
Beck and Malina contacted Ann before their arrival in the Bay Area and
arranged to “work out” in her studio. “I think Julian and Judith considered
us fellow revolutionaries and anarchists because we would disrobe,” Ann later
said.82 More directly, Ann’s warm-up exercises had become part of the Liv-
ing Theater’s movement regimen when Peter Weiss and Karen Auberg, two
of Ann’s dancers who had appeared in the 1967 Hunter College performance
of Parades and Changes, joined the Living Theater.83 Yet the Living The-
ater’s anarchist path of social engagement was very diªerent from what Ann
envisioned for her small Dancers’ Workshop company. “I thought they were
amazing and bold, but visually messy,” Ann recalled. “I admired them very
much. I don’t know any other artists who were that committed.” Ann worked
her dancers and her dancing audiences more gently and more apolitically,
much as H’Doubler had led her classes of young women at the University
of Wisconsin in the early decades of the century. What the dance looked
like and whether it entertained the audience and moved them to political
activism mattered little to Ann. For her, the most important thing was how
the experience of embodiment changed each person who shared the per-
formance space with her that evening. So far the myths that Ann had ex-
plored were gently universal in theme, with the people performing them feel-
ing their way through the dark to express small personal truths. In the months
ahead her canvas, and her goals, would broaden considerably.

The most immediate context surrounding Ten Myths was not aesthetic but
social. By the mid-1960s in America, disengagement was out; it was not
longer enough to watch passively from the sidelines or to just finger-point.
The common use of the term activist at this time underlines the emphasis
placed on “doing something.” Even the shorthand “the Movement,” for the
coalition of activists who were gathering to protest the war and other is-
sues, reflected a premium on action. Mario Savio’s 1964 speech that galva-
nized Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement called for political engagement via
bodily commitment—putting your body against the machinery of the state.
By the later 1960s, as the protests against the Vietnam War escalated, the
call was growing for draftees to register their protest by withholding their
bodies from the military.

228 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

 Throughout San Francisco in 1967 people were grappling with ways to
awaken, address, and control the social body. One feature in a local paper
commented on a new light show Glenn McKay and his Headlights team
premiered at Bill Graham’s rock concert hall, the Fillmore Auditorium,
where multiple projection devices “composed the entire room in one vast
abstraction, constantly in motion, bathing the walls in an unending wash
of liquid color.” The writer speculated: “You felt that the young people who
were there wanted to telescope time and swallow all of experience in one
immense gulp; hence music and light and dance together, and hence also
the overwhelming volume at which the music blasted out of the speakers
onstage.”84 This kind of sensory inundation suggests a visceral rather than
a gentle intellectual engagement. “Tune in, turn on and drop out” of so-
cially constrained behaviors, the mantra of the cultural left, might well have
been the subtitle for Myths.
Be-ins, love-ins, rock concerts, and antiwar vigils—all were indirectly ex-
ploring the boundaries of participant/spectator, because just showing up
at these events implicated one as a participant. In San Francisco the year
had begun with the January 14 “Human Be-In” in Golden Gate Park. This
all-day celebration of self, involving twenty thousand young people, fea-
tured antiwar speeches by countercultural celebrities including Allen Gins-
berg, Timothy Leary, and Gary Snyder; Jerry Rubin’s pleas for bail money
for draft resisters; and performances by the Jeªerson Airplane and other
rock bands. Anyone who attended was asked to bring food to share, flow-
ers, beads, costumes and feathers to wear, bells and cymbals to play, and
flags to wave. Marijuana joints were passed from stranger to stranger, and
thousands of tablets of high-quality LSD were distributed free to the crowd.
Viewed from the perspective of a performance, it was a spectacle, with chem-
ical inducements shaping the audience’s perceptual state. It was not a tra-
ditional formula for art, but it certainly oªered one model for how to mass-
produce a specific state of receptivity among spectators as an integral part
of a public event. The social historian Todd Gitlin writes of a prevalent
utopian fantasy of this time as “the hippie as communard: the idea of a so-
cial bond that could bring all hurt, yearning souls into sweet collectivity,
beyond the realm of scarcity and the resulting pettiness and aggression.”
He explains, “The counterculture thus devised institutions in which hip
collectivity and the cultivation of individual experience could cohabit.”85
Participation in free festivities like this was a way, of course, to keep pro-
testers motivated and involved, and social protests cast a broad performance
frame over daily life. Over the next few months several other mass partic-

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 229

 ipatory spectacles were staged in San Francisco: On March 5 a “rockdance-
environment happening” benefit was staged in honor of the CIA (Citizens
for Interplanetary Activity). On April 15 one hundred thousand people gath-
ered for an antiwar protest in Kezar Stadium in Golden Gate Park. On June
2, for a Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mount Tamalpais, “Trans-Love
Buslines” ferried participants from the parking lots to the festival. June 16
saw the International Monterey Pop Festival, August 27 the start of the Peace
Torch’s hand-carried trip from San Francisco to Washington, DC, and
finally October 6 the massive demonstration “The Death of Hip” at the
intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets.86 Less than two weeks later Ann
opened Ten Myths.

In the 1960s one didn’t even have to be a participant to become a performer.

Just being a spectator, even at a nontheatrical event, could thrust someone
into the role of performer through the framing device of the media lens.
Onlookers at an antiwar rally, for example, might see themselves in footage
broadcast on the evening TV news or in a newspaper photograph the next
day. From rock music, to protests against the war, to general displays of
mellowness (love-ins and be-ins), group activities in the streets, parks, and
outdoor stadiums were becoming ways to add a political charge to the nar-
rowing gap between obedient actions and new socially challenging postures.
As a variety of audience members at diªerent art and political events dis-
covered what it felt like to cross over from spectating to doing, they were
indirectly structuring a space for confounding culture by being both con-
sumers and producers of their own art. In disrupting the categories of doer
and looker, they echoed a crisis between activist and pacifist roles that res-
onated throughout the Vietnam War. How might one perform social es-
trangement and disengagement? In Ten Myths these would become aesthetic
as well as political categories.
The disruption between the categories of observer and participant was
not just happening on the radical fringe. Within popular culture, photo
booths and the television program Candid Camera reveal a fascination with
disrupting the categories of observer and participant, framing the nonper-
forming person on the street as an ironic performer. The divide between
voluntary and involuntary participation in a performance was blurred. In
an almost Duchampian gesture, Candid Camera stretched the definition of
a performer to include anyone who performs a functional activity that, be-
cause it is given the frame of an accidental performance, becomes “art.”

230 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

One’s body is freed to be regarded as a site of cultural projection without
one’s even being aware of it.
Photo booths, prevalent in arcades and drugstores in 1950s and 1960s
America, were little curtained stalls—mini-theaters actually. There, for
about a dollar, anyone could sit on a small bench before an automatic cam-
era and discreetly strike four quick poses. Three minutes later, a strip of
those arrested moments of improvised performance emerged from a tray
outside the stall. The result was that one was framed as a performer, a short-
term star, a closet celebrity, in a show of one’s own impromptu design. Then,
just as quickly as one emerged from the booth, all the facial and bodily pro-
jections of “cutting loose” ceased, one returned to one’s controlled public
self and retrieved the documentation of oneself as a recondite performer.
With Candid Camera, the creation of a former Yale psychology major,
Allen Funt, hidden cameras were trained on unsuspecting people as they
found themselves in the middle of bizarre scenarios that had been secretly
staged. The scenarios were designed to catch them “in the act,” usually in
the act of being themselves. The understanding was that being oneself was
an act, an act based on assumptions about controlling who one was in public
and who in private. Of course, once the footage was broadcast, the private
and the public were turned upside down. Funt was a follower of Kurt Lewin,
a founder of modern social psychology who used experimentation to test
hypotheses, particularly those related to group dynamics and how people
behaved in social situations. Funt’s Candid Camera moments “freeze” the
psychology behind attitude changes and social influence. They show the sit-
uational causes of behavior—how situations can have such powerful eªects
on behavior and thought that they override personality diªerences.87
One classic Candid Camera vignette showed bowlers waiting for their
bowling balls to plop out of the return chute, only to discover that sud-
denly the balls had no holes. In another, a trio of men mimed carrying a
massive pane of glass; as they staggered back and forth across a huge side-
walk with their imaginary load, passersby had to decide whether to walk
around or through them. Another episode featured an actress soliciting
passersby to help her lift a heavy suitcase, which was secretly locked to the
ground. In each of these scenes, the hidden camera invites a massive crowd
to witness the “drama” without being seen. These unseen spectators turn
people’s puzzled examination of hole-less bowling balls or frustration at find-
ing the entire sidewalk blocked by three men carrying something impossi-
ble to see into humorous entertainment, where a realistic emotional response
to a deceptively unreal situation becomes a comic performance. One might

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 231

 compare this to a forced method-acting exercise, in which an authentic aªec-
tive response is elicited by an acted event in a real-life setting far outside
the theater or the television studio.
A spectator’s pleasure in watching Candid Camera comes in part from a
sadistic voyeurism, from relief at seeing someone else embarrassed and at
times humiliated. Yet the captivation also comes from the delight of seeing
the ordinary suddenly thrown into relief as the theatrical. The show wrests
an individual from the anonymity of daily life into the focused spotlight
of a performer. Instead of celebrating nonconformity, as much experimental
and street performance does, Candid Camera at first tacitly ridicules any-
one who does not conform. Yet this haven of conformity is short-lived, be-
cause once the ruse is up and the hidden camera revealed, the person feels
even a bigger fool for having participated. It turns out that the frame of
conformity is outside the situation one participated in—for example, one
shouldn’t have crossed the sidewalk to avoid the invisible pane of glass; in-
stead, one should have trusted one’s own sense that there was nothing there
and walked on through. There is an added irony because, in the context of
Candid Camera, willing participation in the skit makes one an object of
humiliation for the television audiences at home. The interesting thing
about Candid Camera was that both the audiences and those caught as un-
witting performers loved this coercive performativity.
As much as Ann may have been trying to frame the ordinary as art in
Ten Myths, it involved a kind of compulsory performing, and the potential
for being humiliated and intimidated through that performing, that was in
the spirit of Candid Camera. With Ten Myths, however, the climate of
slightly coercive participation pushed participants into individuality. Even
when the focus was on creating a group identity, it was a group of indi-
viduals, with room to celebrate standing out. With Ann’s work, the safety
for individual performance was knowing that everyone was doing it and
no one was watching. With Candid Camera it was not knowing that any-
one was watching, although, in fact, millions were.
How we “present” ourselves on and oª “stage” (or on- and oª-camera)
was the focus of Erving Goªman’s influential 1956 book, The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life. In his reading of daily living as performance,
Goªman spoke of perception, as well as behavior, as a form of communi-
cation. “If we see perception as a form of contact and communion, then
control over what is perceived is control over contact that is made,” he
wrote.88 In other words, what we let others see helps determine our rela-
tionships to others. We are always both performing and watching others

232 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

perform. What Goªman’s text oªers is a way of reframing our quotidian
acts in a new context. He referred to his book as a “report” that can serve
as a “sort of handbook detailing one sociological perspective from which
social life can be studied.” The perspective Goªman chooses is that of a
theatrical performance. Although Ann had not read Goªman’s work, she
too was interrogating the performer/spectator relationship with an eye to
highlighting the spectator’s engagement, to making explicit the transfor-
mations and perceptual shifts theater traditionally prompts in a viewer.
Goªman’s use of theater as a metaphor for human behavior and inter-
actions in a sense turns the question posed by Duchamp’s Fountain on its
head. Instead of asking whether an object becomes a work of art because
an artist makes us see it diªerently by choosing it and placing it in a gallery,
with Goªman’s work we are left wondering: could art be an ordinary event,
chosen by an artist but not placed in a gallery? Having put the frame of
theater around life in this way, Goªman’s insights might well have indi-
rectly influenced Ann to play with this framing device in other contexts.
In Ten Myths she moved the frame of the theatrical from the stage to the
entire environs of the theater space. In this way, as in Goªman’s model of
a generic society, everyone inside the space becomes a player—the house
staª, ticket takers, lighting technicians, and, of course, the audience. Ann’s
ends were not only aesthetic but also practical and social; she allowed the
spectator’s fantasy of having the kind of embodied and authentic experi-
ence usually reserved for the performer to become a reality.

At the time she began her Myths Ann was aware of the work of Antonin
Artaud, whose influential call for a reassessment of theatrical structure, The
Theatre and Its Double, first published in French in 1938, had been pub-
lished in its first English translation in 1958. In this collection of essays,
Artaud argues that the Western tradition of literary theater had reached a
dead end and that theater should abandon the word and return to more
Eastern conceptions of ritualistic spectacle and an intimate performer-au-
dience relationship. Artaud advocated enticing the audience to become
participants in the theatrical process, a strategy he borrowed from ritual
theater.89 Ann learned about Artaud indirectly, after the critic Kenneth
Rexroth referred to Eugene Ionesco in his review of Apartment 6. “I wanted
to find out who Ionesco was,” Ann recalled, “and so that led me to Beck-
ett and then Artaud.”90
It is tempting to draw parallels between the social moment in mid-1930s

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 233

 France, when Artaud penned his reflections on theater and culture, and
Ann’s own moment in 1960s America, which prompted her to push for a
similar immediacy in her dance works. The analogy works to an extent.
Both these artists were working in periods of great political uncertainty,
with the likelihood of a great war in the instance of Artaud and with an
expanded (unpopular) one in the instance of Ann. In his first essay in the
collection, “The Theater and the Plague,” Artaud deliberately linked his
aspirations for art to social aspirations: “And the question we must now ask
is whether, in this slippery world which is committing suicide without notic-
ing it, there can be found a nucleus of men capable of imposing this su-
perior notion of the theater, men who will restore to all of us the natural
and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer believe?”91 It
is a question with which Ann could agree. Politically, however, Ann’s and
Artaud’s social moments were quite diªerent. The “slippery world com-
mitting suicide” that Artaud referred to was Europe in the grip of rising
totalitarian regimes in Spain, Germany, and Italy and the threat of World
War II. Ann’s Ten Myths, in contrast, sought a new set of natural behav-
ioral codes to replace cold war America’s emphasis on containment, blind
obedience to the government, and a materialist, middle-class life.
By 1967 Ann was also aware of the work of the other leading theater rebel
of the time, Jerzy Grotowski, and his Polish Laboratory Theater. Ann and
Grotowski had planned to meet in Poland in 1965, one of the stops on the
Dancers’ Workshop’s European tour with Parades and Changes, but at the
last minute an airline strike prevented them from connecting. Indeed, Ann
had not yet had a chance to see Grotowski’s work (relatively few people out-
side of Poland had), but his exercises and descriptions of his work had ap-
peared in the Tulane Drama Review. One parallel between Grotowski, as
well as Artaud, and Ann lies in their concept of creating a new “myth” for
the contemporary moment through audience participation pieces. Grotow-
ski uses the word myth repeatedly in his writings, recasting it as the “equa-
tion of personal, individual truth with universal truth,” a kind of knowl-
edge that we “put on like an ill-fitting skin” to look at life.92
More important, like Ann, Grotowski sought to dissolve the audience-
spectator dichotomy, although he approached the problem from the stand-
point of a theater director. As he explained in his influential book Towards
a Poor Theatre:

[An] infinite variation of performer-audience relationships is possible.

The actors can play among the spectators, directly contacting the audi-

234 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

 ence and giving it a passive role in the drama. . . . The elimination of
stage-auditorium dichotomy is not the important thing—that simply
creates a bare laboratory situation, an appropriate area for investigation.
The essential concern is finding the proper spectator-actor relationship
for each type of performance and embodying the decision in physical
arrangements.93

Implicit in Grotowski’s vision for theater here is that the relationship of per-
former and spectator should be rethought for each performance along with
the physical design of the performance space—just what Ann was doing
in Ten Myths. Grotowski called this new performance form “poverty in the-
ater,” a model that abandons what he derisively referred to in an industrial
metaphor as “the stage-and-auditorium plant” of traditional theater.
The first major work in which Grotowski challenged the actor/spectator
division was his production of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (1961), where he
abolished conventional staging, vowing that he would never return to it.
In this piece Grotowski treated viewers as silent and stationary actors, struc-
turing their presence in the performing space so that they eªectively per-
formed the act of “spectating,” watching the action around them, while in
turn being watched by other audience members. Like a frame within a
frame, this setup highlighted the idea of the drama as a spectacle specifically
for the viewer, and it also invited a regard for the act of spectating as a per-
formance of “paying attention.”94 The fact that Dziady was a classic pa-
triotic tale of Poland as a victim of foreign powers added an important
emotional bond between the original actors and spectators, but there did
remain a divide between who was active and vocal and who was passive.
The following year, with Kordian, Grotowski stepped up his level of au-
dience involvement. Once again he placed the spectators amid the action,
in chairs or seated on the props of hospital beds; this time, however, they
were designated as patients or inmates of the asylum that was the setting
for the play. As Richard Schechner has noted, it was with Constant Prince
(1965)—where Grotowski had the audience peer over a fence built around
the performing area to see what was happening to the prince—that Gro-
towski first called the audience “witnesses,” because this play is not com-
plete unless it is actively seen. “So I think possibly Ann took that term
from Grotowski or maybe they discovered it simultaneously,” Schechner
said. “Most importantly with Ann,” Schechner continued, “I would say
[that] rather than making the spectator obsolete, she put holes in the
boundary on the walls separating the spectator from the performer . . . [to

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 235

 show us that] in life we are constantly participating and spectating at the
same time.”95
Interestingly, in his later works, rather than progressing to full audience
participation, Grotowski shifted his attention more and more to the actor.
By 1968 he would state: “Gradually we abandoned a manipulation of the
audience and all the struggles to provoke a reaction in the spectator, or to
use him as a guinea pig. We preferred to forget the spectator, forget his ex-
istence. We began to concentrate our complete attention and activity on,
above all, the art of the actor.”96
By forcing her audience to move, to dance, Ann circumvented the chal-
lenge of how to provoke a distanced emotional reaction; she simply or-
chestrated a visceral one. Grotowski, in contrast, perhaps because partici-
pation in his work entailed the professional delivery of rehearsed text,
confined his audience confrontations to the physical level, herding people
onto the set so that they were on view as spectators wherever one tried to
watch an actor. Yet it is curious that however aggressively Grotowski forced
the integration of the theater space, he remained respectful of the audience’s
ultimate passivity. Ann, in contrast, invited participation, and then once
she secured the spectators’ commitment she pushed hard to their limits.
The visual artist Allan Kaprow had also been pushing the boundaries of
passive spectatorship, beginning with his Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts
(1959). Like Grotowski, Kaprow at times scattered the audience throughout
the performance space, but his intent seems mainly to have been to play with
the vantage point of the viewer. As he explained about Happenings in general:

The Happenings were presented to small, intimate gatherings of people

in lofts, classrooms, gymnasiums, and some of the oªbeat galleries, where
a clearing was made for the activities. The watchers sat very close to what
took place, with the artists and their friends acting along with assembled
environment constructions. The audience occasionally changed seats as
in a game of musical chairs, turned around to see something behind it,
or stood without seats in tight but informal clusters. Sometimes, too, the
event moved in and amongst the rows, which produced some movement
on the latter’s part. But however flexible these techniques were in practice,
there was always an audience in one (usually static) space and a show given
in another.97

Kaprow admitted that performing his Happenings in gallery spaces in-

vited an unfavorable comparison with theater. In comparison he understood

236 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

his Happenings might look like “a ‘crude’ version of the avant-garde The-
ater of the Absurd . . . night club acts, side shows, cock fights and bunk-
house skits.” Once audiences caught these “unintended” allusions, he cau-
tioned, they would take the Happenings for “charming diversions, but
hardly for art or even purposive activity.”98
It is a curious irony that spectators are accustomed to be mobile when
viewing the static art of a gallery and static when viewing the mobile art of
performance. Kaprow, as a visual artist presenting what he called little per-
formed “acts” in the nightclub sense of the word, confounded these cate-
gories when he asked his audience to be static to view quasi-static acts. The
other challenging border that Kaprow straddled was that between what
Michael Kirby called “the genuinely primitive and the merely amateurish.”99
For the most part, Kaprow used performance novices: non-professionals from
the visual arts world and occasionally amateurs from the performing arts.
Writing in the mid-1960s, after Happenings had become a cottage in-
dustry among visual artists, Kaprow spoke out against the presence, or even
the existence, of an audience:

. . . the audience should be eliminated entirely. All the elements—people,

space, the particular materials and character of the environment, time—
can in this way be integrated. And the last shred of theatrical convention
disappears. For anyone once involved in the painter’s problem of unifying
a field of divergent phenomena, a group of inactive people in the space of
a Happening is just dead space. It is no diªerent from a dead area of red
paint on a canvas. . . . A Happening with only an empathetic response on
the part of a seated audience is not a happening, but stage theater.100

Kaprow lobbies instead for what he calls “knowing participation” as a way

to circumvent this. “I think that it is a mark of mutual respect that all per-
sons involved in a happening be willing and committed participants who
have a clear idea what they are to do. . . . The best participants have been
persons not normally engaged in art or performance, but who are moved
to take part in an activity that is at once meaningful to them in its ideas,
yet natural in its methods.”101
Although Ann shared Kaprow’s interest in absorbing the audience in the
performance, she didn’t agree with the chaos of his performance, any more
than she did with the aleatoric methods of Cunningham and Cage. “I
thought with Merce and John it’s so odd to throw the dice or I Ching to
make a decision—why torture it?” she asked rhetorically. “All you have to

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 237

 do is sit on my deck and feel nature. I never wanted to call events Hap-
penings like Kaprow. I wanted whatever I did to be organic, not clever. I
really like Allan Kaprow as a person, but his Happenings were nonsensical
to me. I thought, why are we doing this?”102

Not since the dadaists had decried the devastation of World War I and na-
tionalistic hypocrisy had theatricalized public spectacles been such a pop-
ular medium of registering social protest as they were during the mid-1960s.
This social context, with its emphasis on civic engagement, likely provided
a supportive push for Ann’s audience members to cross over and become
performers in her works. Of course, there were ancient precedents for this
kind of theatrical modeling of civic responsibility. In the fifth century b.c.
Greek drama had been used to coach Athenian citizens in democracy by
portraying moral, legal, and social dilemmas theatrically in ways that chal-
lenged notions of citizenship and justice. The Greek theater scholar Rush
Rehm calls it “a theater of, by and for the polis (‘city’), the social institu-
tion that bound Greeks together as a human community. . . . Athens [was]
a performance culture, one in which the theater stood alongside other public
forums as a place to confront matters of import and moment.”103 This re-
gard for the value of theater was not nearly as pervasive in America in the
1960s, yet within a subset of the alternative community—the marginalized
youth of draft age—the public participatory events of the 1960s had the
allure of institutional subversions, serving as ways to define a disenfran-
chised subculture.
Although the social agenda for Ann’s Ten Myths was deliberately loose,
the exercises—whether in “Creation,” “Atonement,” “Carry,” or another
myth—could be seen as practice sessions for acting collectively. Indeed,
loose organization rather than tight sophistication was a trademark of
many 1960s social protests. Since prime targets of antiwar and Free
Speech Movement protesters were the “military-industrial complex” and
regimented democracy, their opposites—spontaneity, loose organization,
and an easy (“mellow”), accepting manner—were virtues to be cultivated.
And these were the performance attributes showcased in Ten Myths. As
Herbert Blau noted of this era in regard to performance: “When we think
of the state of awareness required to live consciously in this world, we’re
not entirely sure, in the illusory passage of current events, whether we are
spectators or participants. It is a confusion out of which we tried to make
theater.”104

238 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to [To view this image, refer to [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.] the print version of this title.] the print version of this title.]

San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop and audience members performing Myth 2 (Atone-
ment) from Ten Myths, SFDW Studio, 321 Divisadero Street, San Francisco, 1967.
Scores for Myths 2, 7, and 10. Photo: Casey Sonnabend.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in studies from The Bath, Sausalito, California,
1967. Both photos © Irving Penn.
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

John Rockwell and Ann Halprin with San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in Blank
Placard Dance, Market Street, San Francisco, 1968. Photo: Lawrence Halprin.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Architects and dancers performing Automobile Event, part of the “Experiments in

Environments” Workshop, in a parking lot at 1620 Montgomery Street, San Francisco
1968. Photo: Rudy Bender.
Below: Ann Halprin, Norma Leistiko, Gary Hartford, and Larry Reed in Lunch,
Hilton Hotel, San Francisco, 1968. Photo: Michael Alexander.
Above opposite: Annie Hallett and Sir Lawrence Washington with other San Francisco
Dancers’ Workshop members working through a disagreement in the workshop for
Ceremony of Us, 321 Divisadero Street, San Francisco, 1969. Photo: Tion Barea.
Below opposite: Ann Halprin and Margaret H’Doubler, her teacher from the
University of Wisconsin, in the Halprin home, Kentfield, California, 1970s.
Photo: Coni Beeson.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Ann Halprin doing outdoor improvisation at Sea Ranch, California, 1970s.

Photos: Coni Beeson.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Closure of a Trance Dance, 1970. Photo: William Vorpe.

 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Above: Ann Halprin dancing the positive side of her self-portrait with cancer.
Below: Ann Halprin and students on the dance deck, Kentfield, California, 1970s.
Photo: Peter Larson.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

“The Monster Dance” from Circle the Earth, Redwood High School gym,
Larkspur, California, 1989. Anna Halprin and participants (above); witnesses
participate by donning masks to protect themselves from the monsters (below).
Both photos © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Anna Halprin in Still Dance with Anna Halprin by Eeo Stubblefield, 1998.
Photo © Eeo Stubblefield.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Above: Anna Halprin in The Grandfather Dance, Southside Theatre, Fort Mason,
San Francisco, 1995. Photo: Coni Beeson.
Below: Anna Halprin and David Greenaway in Intensive Care: Reflections on Death
and Dying, Paris, 2004. Photo © Rick Chapman.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Above: Score for Planetary Dance, showing outer circle (vigorous run), middle circle
(moderate run), inner circle (easy steps), and center, where runners can rest by
standing around musicians. Graphic design by Stephen Grossberg.
Below: Planetary Dance, Santos Meadow, Mount Tamalpais, California, 2002.
Photo © Sue Heinemann.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Seniors Rocking, Marin Civic Center, San Rafael, California, 2005.

Photo © John Kokoska.
 [To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Lawrence and Anna Halprin, at their home in Sea Ranch, California, 2005.
Photo © Rick Chapman.
Ann often claimed that the experience of having an agitated audience mem-
ber charge down the aisle onto the stage during a performance of Parades
and Changes on the University of California, Berkeley, campus in early 1966
challenged her to rethink her assumptions about the passive viewer. “There
was one woman in the theater who seemed to become unglued by the per-
formance,” Ann recalled. “She rushed onto the stage and smashed the sole
kerosene light we were using for illumination, cutting Daria’s legs and stun-
ning the cast, who abruptly ended the performance.”105 The woman banged
furiously against the theater doors as she fled out into the night, with such
dramatic rage that many in the audience assumed it was a planned part of
the performance. Ann, already shocked at the level of anger her work had
elicited on her 1964 and 1965 European tours, decided to address the audi-
ence directly, and so in designing Ten Myths she gave it not just tasks to do,
but an actual role in creating the performance. By virtue of its participation,
the audience was essentially swallowed into the performance.
Ann found herself asking: if audiences were going to be active, how could
she frame and channel that activity, threading it back into the performance?
Contrary to the literary theorist Han Ulrich Gumbrecht’s suggestion that
the active performer and passive spectator work in opposition—that au-
thentic experiences for the subject are oªset and enabled by the triviality
of spectacles for the passive viewer—Ann’s impulse in her dance works of
the mid-1960s was to shift the notion of an authentic experience to the
viewer as well. This meant that the assumption of passivity would have to
be abandoned, a move that was both practical as well as strategic, since
emerging models of performance as social activism suggested that a truly
passive viewer was an oxymoron. This was true not just in the performing
arts, but in other arts as well. Writers in particular were working with diªer-
ent literary structures that forced readers to collaborate in creating mean-
ing. It was a time of what the literary scholar Marjorie Perloª has called
“making rather than taking” meaning.106
Ann had begun penetrating the space of the spectator well before Ten
Myths. Parades and Changes and Esposizione both instructed the perform-
ers to enter the stage through the audience at various points and to per-
form certain tasks in the theater aisles or oª the balconies. Penetrating the
viewer’s space in this way not only disrupts theatrical conventions and the
safety of the viewer’s passivity, but it aggressively integrates the feminizing
space of being on view on stage with the masculine role of the observer in
the audience.107 Curiously, the eªect is to make everyone feel observed, un-

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 239

 der the interrogating gaze of another. The convention of the stage as the
site where individuals and their actions are on display spills into the the-
ater, so everyone and all actions suddenly come under a diªerent type of
regard. This democratizing of the roles of spectator and performer reflected
other binaries that were also being breached. As faith in the objectivity of
the artwork becomes increasingly questioned, so too does the necessity of
technique training and the divide between high and low art practices.
Gumbrecht contends that spectacular shows compensate the viewers for
their state of disembodied inaction with a virtual or illusory full-bodied-
ness in the performers.108 If this is so, then might the converse also be true—
that nonspectacular events, those that oªer limited scopophilic rewards,
need to compel a more embodied and active response? If satisfaction does
not reside in the role of the viewer, or it is diminished, then Gumbrecht’s
claim suggests a new equilibrium can be achieved by giving the spectator
a more active, engaged, participatory role.
In Ten Myths Ann’s larger subject was what cultural theorists Hans Ul-
rich Gumbrecht, Erving Goªman, and Barbara Freedman have explored
in other contexts as the dialectical relationship between performing and em-
bodiment on the one hand and spectatorship and disembodiment on the
other. Yet Ann did not start out with any sense of theory guiding her. Rather,
she set out to learn intuitively through practice how a dance created in this
period of intensive questioning in American society could oªer a fluid new
canvas linking the performers’ and spectators’ bodies. Ironically, in order
to challenge her audiences Ann began by eªectively eliminating the per-
formance as it was customarily defined in the Western dance traditions.
Gumbrecht, Goªman, and Freedman have all implied a perilous and po-
tentially politically charged balance between being a watcher and being a
doer. Theoretically, in Gumbrecht’s terms, the one who engages in physi-
cal performance action is represented as having an “authentic” experience,
while the one who watches has a “trivial,” passive or inauthentic experi-
ence. The person who acts becomes embodied, while the viewer slides toward
disembodiment. The pleasure of spectatorship is that it oªers this passive
viewer the illusion of embodiment, albeit at the price of disembodiment.
Spectator sports oªer a good example. There is an old joke about the defini-
tion of a televised professional football game being twenty-two men des-
perately in need of rest being watched by thousands desperately in need
of exercise—a simplification Gumbrecht’s model supports.109
Freedman also indicates that the self-presence spectatorship creates is
illusionistic.110 She points out that human captivation with corporeal im-

240 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

ages in particular lies at the heart of the spectator’s identification with a
performer. Gender too plays an important part in this identification, as fem-
inist theorists like Ann Daly and Laura Mulvey have pointed out.111 Build-
ing on Mulvey’s formulations on the male gaze in film, feminist readings
of the performing body have emphasized the pleasures of specular engage-
ment as a gender-based negotiation of power, objectification, and desire.112
But that does not mean the performer is without agency. As the feminist
theorist Elizabeth Dempster explains, “Social and political values are not
simply placed or grafted onto a neutral body-object like so many old or
new clothes. On the contrary, ideologies are systematically deposited and
constructed on an anatomical plane, i.e., in the neuro-musculature of the
dancer’s body.”113 This assertion supports the dance historian Susan Fos-
ter’s claim that each dancer constructs a performing body that not only en-
compasses her personal identity, her physical limits, and the dance styles
that have shaped her movement, but also serves as an evolving document
of the expressive vehicle she is struggling to invent out of herself.114
After tracing what “intellectuals” who view performances do with their
bodies, Gumbrecht concludes, “As authentic subjective experiences of the
body, today’s intellectuals stick to those body experiences that go the
limit . . . to those limits where the experiencing of the body turns into an
expansion of consciousness. Perhaps this obsession with ‘experiencing lim-
its’ is an indication of how di‹cult it has become for them to be in their
bodies at all.”115 (Gumbrecht’s supposition suggests an interesting parallel
with twentieth-century dance, where events with the most physical virtu-
osity, like classical ballet, garner the largest audiences, and those with the
most prosaic bodies or audience participation, like much of Ann’s work, at-
tract some of the smallest.) Gumbrecht complicates this challenge of how
to be in one’s body while lusting after the virtuoso “other” of an athlete or
dancer by suggesting that one of spectatorship’s lures is the pleasure of a vi-
carious embodiment. Nested within these observations seems to be the be-
lief that (to paraphrase Walter Pater) all spectators aspire to the condition
of the participant. Ironically, it is an aspiration that looms as continually at-
tractive in part because it is never realized. Seeing is generally positioned as
more pleasurable than doing, and there is a special satisfaction in denial.
Wanting to perform can often be more satisfying than actually performing.
Goªman has observed that the audience de facto disappears as a third
party when the event portrayed moves from theater to real life.116 Instead
of existing separately as spectators, the audience is now embodied in each
“player.” Yet even in real life, Goªman notes, the role of the spectator does

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 241

 not completely vanish; instead, it is absorbed and traded between individ-
uals as they alternately act and attend. What they are playing with is the
possibility of moving from the mode of apprehension as a spectator to the
state of authenticity as a performer. This is not just a change in vantage
points. It is an actual change in perceptual states and embodiment, a shift
in the way one focuses one’s attention on, and attends to, information within
and without oneself and one’s body, one’s world.

Dance is the art form that deals most vividly with these kinds of shifts be-
tween being embodied (performing) and disembodied (spectating). For a
moment in the mid-1960s American dance bridged the traditional divide
between performer and audience to become an authentically participatory
event for the viewer, and Ann was at the vanguard of this crossover. Com-
ing from a background steeped in experiential education, and mindful of
the links between female physicality and American culture that had been
the implicit lesson of Margaret H’Doubler’s dance instruction at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin, she was prompted to explore how motor (physical)
involvement could stimulate a more intense aesthetic engagement, a com-
passionate regard for others, and perhaps, ultimately, a changed awareness
of the world outside the stage for her spectators. Three decades earlier in
H’Doubler’s classroom, Ann had learned that one could quest for a moral
and democratic ideal via the dancing body. Every day in class she had expe-
rienced the subtle interconnectedness between emotions, the body, the mind,
and moral behaviors. Now she was attempting to make this model accessi-
ble to both dancers and non-dancers, performers and audience members.
Early in March 1968, after almost five months of Myths performances in
San Francisco, Ann took her new formula for audience participation on
the road, when she and her dancers visited the University of Oregon in Eu-
gene. She decided to adapt her tenth and final myth, “Ome,” for a larger
audience. Originally, this myth had been a calming group meditation, which
began with breathing exercises and gradually grew louder into an eªortless
exhalation of the sound om. After thirty minutes, a drumbeat started and,
one by one, the participants entered a central area, framed by a hanging
plastic sheet, where they performed a simple movement, rolling, stretch-
ing, or rocking. At one point the movements intensified, only to quiet into
another meditative chanting of the sound om. As Ann described it, “These
people were no longer an audience but were by now a community.”117
For the Oregon performance, Ann began by instructing the seated au-

242 FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

dience to chant om as a vocal warm-up and way of resonating sound through
their bodies. Then she asked everybody to stand and begin dancing in a
line up and down the aisles of the theater. Here Ann was consciously try-
ing to forge links between the mutuality that emerges in an audience re-
sponding to an aªecting performance and the individually transforming
experience of a workshop. She had found a way to merge spectatorship with
embodiment, at least for an evening. With her next investigation, she would
take the aesthetic potential of this new collective performance process more
clearly into the social area, tackling the di‹cult issue of race.

FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT 243

 EIGHT

Ceremony of Memory
1968 – 197 1

In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body.

paul connerton
How Societies Remember

Improvisation is an act of collective memory as well as invention.

joseph roach
Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance

on a late autumn day in 1968 Daria Halprin, a sophomore at the Uni-

versity of California, Berkeley, was in the ceramics studio in Lower Sproul
Plaza throwing pots when she was called to the telephone. The Italian film
director Michelangelo Antonioni was on the phone and wanted to speak
with her. Daria, sure it was a prank, discovered it was not. The director of
the avant-garde film Blow Up wanted her to take a screen test for a part in
his next feature film. He had glimpsed her dancing with her mother’s San
Francisco Dancers’ Workshop in Revolution, an underground film about
hippie street life in 1967 San Francisco, made by Jack O’Connell, a former
associate of Antonioni. Already at nineteen Daria was strikingly beautiful,
with thick, straight brown hair that hung well below her waist and smoky
green eyes. She had the long legs and slim hips of her father and a cool,
self-assured manner.
In Revolution Daria makes only a brief appearance, as one of six nude
dancers whose bare torsos are repeatedly oªered to the camera as living
canvases for spiraling light projections of tie-dye-like patterns. Only the
women’s torsos are shown full-on, usually headless, like one of California
sculptor Robert Graham’s detailed miniature female bronzes. Daria’s long

244
hair shrouds her face and breasts as she repeatedly steals across the narrow
and darkened stage in front of the projections. There is a wild-child qual-
ity to her determined crouching walks, but she never says a word or ap-
pears in full light or face. Clearly Antonioni must have been responding
to a “look,” a fantasy, here. All of the dancers in this film sequence im-
provise freely, presenting their bodies as undulating and curving surfaces
for the lights to dance across. Their bodies look shaped by dance training,
but more to achieve control than stylization. The visual impact is one of
physically sophisticated and trained performers moving with the ease and
open unselfconsciousness associated with the theatricalized “natural” of
nude performance.
Daria flew to Los Angeles and took the screen test for Antonioni. Within
two months she found herself on location in Death Valley as the lead in
Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a meditation on 1960s American youth, racial
tensions, and violence. Antonioni put Daria opposite another non-actor,
Mark Frechette, whom Antonioni had discovered standing at a bus stop in
Boston, where Frechette was screaming angrily at a stranger in an apart-
ment window across the street.1 Media accounts of the time noted the life-
imitating-art coincidences of this casting, since in Zabriskie Point both Daria
and Mark use their own names and portray individuals similar to their real-
life personas. Daria plays a middle-class hippie (Look called Daria “a bratty,
free, earth child” whom Antonioni didn’t try to change)2 and Mark a sen-
sitive lower-class guy who is radicalized and drops out of college.
Zabriskie Point oªers a cinematic world of modernist fictions in which
characters do not have elaborate psyches or pasts, reality is fluid, and a cer-
tain one-dimensional characterization is fine. Mark joins, half-heartedly at
first, with students protesting for a black studies department on campus.
Suddenly he seems to get swept up in the cause, murdering a policeman
and then stealing a private plane to escape. But then he quickly forgets about
this cause as he encounters Daria in Death Valley and his flight turns into
a kind of joy ride. Antonioni tends to keep his distance not just from the
events in the film, in a sense underdramatizing the dramatic, but also from
the people, giving us only the outlines of Mark and Daria as two discon-
nected kids with no real commitment to social or personal causes.3
The way Antonioni does not cinematically amplify the scope and the
directness of Daria’s (or Mark’s) actions, mood changes, and emotional ex-
pression oªers a pure sample of Ann’s performing ideal of the time. In this
way the film oªers a rare window onto what one of Ann’s performers looked
like at this moment and suggests the quality of untheatrical, privately scaled

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 245

 projection and presence in Ann’s work of the late 1960s. Only a movie sit-
uation like Zabriskie Point, where Antonioni deliberately recruited Daria
as she was, could do this. Rather like the fossil of an ancient animal acci-
dentally trapped in tar, Daria’s celluloid image preserves intact the Halprin
dancer at the end of the 1960s.
Both Daria and Frechette were inexperienced as actors, but their presence
in front of the camera diªers. Frechette’s lack of any performing background
shows in his acting, which tends to be more wooden than naturalistic. He
fails to convey either a theatrical or a real attraction to Daria; instead, his
character dissolves into his surroundings and feels as shallow as the indif-
ferent police and corporate executives, who are deliberately shaped as one-
dimensional establishment figures. Daria, in contrast, seems more realisti-
cally scaled, so that she seems to perform an untheatricalized self-portrait.
At the time, having Daria cast in Zabriskie Point seemed the perfect
fulfillment of the hybridity between life and art that the Halprins were pro-
moting, and both Larry and Ann were proud of Antonioni’s choice of her.
A contemporary newspaper account suggests that not only did Daria ide-
alize American youth for Antonioni, but that his direction of her was a
sparse variation on the “be yourself ” directive that reverberated through
much of the Dancers’ Workshop work.4 As in the summer workshops Larry
and Ann were conducting at the time, in Zabriskie Point authenticity is po-
sitioned as something arrived at by stripping away the sediment of civi-
lization and socialization from oneself. Yet, however much Antonioni’s open
directing style was reminiscent of her mother’s work, film proved to be a
less forgiving medium than live performance for Daria, one that demanded
a special amplification and performativity about emotions in order to reg-
ister it as natural. Playing oneself has a diªerent edge when it involves a
professionally trained actor (or dancer) letting go and throwing away tech-
nique for the moment than it does when someone, like Daria, has no act-
ing tradition to discard. As Daria later explained:.

This unexpected branching out [as the female lead in Zabriskie Point]
from my home environment, my involvement with dance, my commu-
nity of friends, was the beginning of a seven year period in my life which
challenged me in ways I’d never expected, and exposed me to a life style
which was radically diªerent from the one I’d known. I was unprepared!
Although I’d been a performer and “lived” in the theater since childhood,
acting in films required another set of skills and an awareness which I
didn’t have.

246 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

 After Zabriskie Point I joined the Lee Strasberg School in Los Angeles,
feeling that if acting was what I was going to do, I’d better start learning
how to do it! I found method acting to have close similarities with the
movement-theater approach I was familiar with and the orientation of
being present and authentic within a character.5

Daria’s lack of experience in the artifices of acting may have eªectively

ended her film career, for even Antonioni would later opt for illusionistic nat-
uralness, not the raw, unmediated real thing. Still, in watching Daria in
Zabriskie Point, one realizes how radically Ann rethought not just the nature
of the actions inside her dance, but also the framing concept of theater and
spectatorship around it. Performers could be realistically scaled in her theater
because the frame was about exposing the individual’s emotional self, not in-
venting a new one. Additionally, in live performance spatial and sensory in-
formation registers more meaningfully than in film, so observers in real life
pull meanings out of a range of stimuli that are never consciously shaped.
What Antonioni’s film allows us to see through Daria’s performance is
the direct and unaªected Dancers’ Workshop manner of wedding emotions
to actions while biasing the nonverbal. In Zabriskie Point Daria knows how
to be present, but there is no history or future to her representation of char-
acter. What we see is the Daria of Irving Penn’s photographs of The Bath,
a young woman who is naturally, rather than theatrically, sexy. Her actions
are scaled to daily life rather than cinema or the traditional stage. In the
film’s big lovemaking scene in the desert, she is far more natural than her
partner, Frechette, planting real kisses on his lips and tumbling over him
as her loosened hair envelops them both. She also seems unabashedly
indiªerent about being seen, focusing instead on what she is feeling at the
time about her partner.
Daria’s experience in Zabriskie Point reveals some of the liabilities of the
climate of candor and easy creativity the Halprins’ work during this period
oªered. The on-camera romance between Daria and Frechette spilled into
an oªstage aªair, so that by the time the shooting was finished Daria had
dropped out of college and was living with Frechette in his commune in
Boston. They split up soon afterward. Then in 1975 Frechette was arrested
and jailed for robbing a bank. He was found murdered a short while later
in the prison gym, a violent end eerily presaged by Zabriskie Point, where
his character is shot to death by police.
The similarities between Antonioni’s method and Ann’s go beyond their
respective use of non-actors and non-dancers. Antonioni’s narrative in the

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 247

 film is comparable to Ann’s impressionistic style of storytelling, particu-
larly in the way he spills narratives across a spatial field. Zabriskie Point
begins with a naive addressing of the social issues of race in the form of a
student-led revolt, but then the discussion of race is soon forgotten and the
film instead becomes the story of disconnected sex among the parched earth
ruins wrought by the violence of American culture in the 1960s. The one
sex scene in Zabriskie Point is staged like a great neo-romantic ballet, where
suddenly Daria and Mark’s nude coupling is echoed by a dozen other nude
long-haired young women and men kissing and embracing on the sand
dunes around them.
Most important, the themes of racial tension and sex in Antonioni’s film
would be central to Ann’s next dance event, Ceremony of Us, which was cre-
ated at about the same time. Specifically, Zabriskie Point modeled how a
white artist’s focus could slide from issues of race into sex and violence—
three issues that were often linked in the late 1960s. The African American
studies scholar Calvin C. Hernton, for example, devoted his 1971 book,
Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred and Sexual Hang-ups, to the
complex tensions, prohibitions, and desires surrounding sex and race in
1960s America.6 As the feminist scholar bell hooks has observed, “Race and
sex have always been overlapping discourses in the United States.”7 A 2001
study reported how often fiction has linked ideas about the civil rights move-
ment and social change in the 1960s with interracial sex, communicating
the larger social issues through small-scaled stories of personal relationships
across the color line.8 Tales of interracial couples became a means for au-
thors, including Alice Walker in Meridian and Lanford Wilson in “The
Gingham Dog,” to explore the push for racial equality through metaphors
of intimacy. As Tommy, one of the lead characters in Meridian, taunts a
black man married to a young white Jewish woman, “Black men get pref-
erential treatment, man, to make up for all we been denied. She ain’t been
fucking you, she’s been atoning for her sins.”9
For Antonioni, the subjects of civil rights and racism in America served
not as a focus, but as the cultural background for his film. For Ann, these
topics would be treated as background mythology for her collaborative per-
formance about race, Ceremony of Us, in which she began making partici-
patory theater out of conscious and subconscious engagement.

In July 1968, a few months before Daria received her call from Antonioni,
Ann and Larry held their second “Experiments and Environment” work-

248 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

shop, for forty architects, designers, city planners, dancers, and students.
They collaborated with Jim Burns, a former senior editor of Progressive Ar-
chitecture, and Paul Baum, the psychologist who had introduced Ann to
Fritz Perls and who served as an on-site consulting therapist. As the inter-
personal issues in these workshops heated up, his role would become in-
creasingly critical.
Larry intended for this second summer workshop, subtitled “Commu-
nities,” to explore the links between “meaningful urban design and the right
process of bringing together disparate elements and experiences that make
up an urban environment.”10 Most radically, he aimed to maximize cre-
ativity and innovation in design work by prompting people to use the “in-
tuitive modes of perception of bodily and kinesthetic awareness” when they
were placed in diªerent natural settings. As he later commented:

The 1968 workshop was the [most] seminal workshop that I ever did and
I think it was for Ann too. Its idea stemmed from 1966 when Ann had
done some workshops before and I had seen what she did. Most design
studios in architecture deal with the intellect, almost completely, or did
at that time . . . and I thought that, having watched Ann, some of the
same attitudes that dancers have and which were revealed in music and
in drawing and movement might be something that we could apply to
architecture as well.11

In Ten Myths Ann had worked in the reverse, mapping a method that was
equally novel for the dance world by creating an artificial environment and
rules, and then letting people loose to see the behaviors these environments
evoked.
Shortly before the 1968 workshop Larry had completed a design study
for the City of New York that was “the first major proposal stressing the
importance of having citizens participate in what happens to, and in, their
own environment.”12 This 119-page report, with its proposals for six urban
renewal projects in New York and its redefining of open space in the ur-
ban environment, attracted significant public attention, particularly because
it called for treating the black inhabitants of the Morningside neighbor-
hood around Columbia University as equals with university o‹cials in re-
designing their community. Indeed, the report would earn Larry the 1968
Smithsonian Institution Industrial Design Award of Excellence and the Mu-
nicipal Art Society of New York Certificate of Merit for its pathbreaking
approach to having citizens actively help plan the uses of space in their

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 249

 community. Larry’s study argued repeatedly against the “mindless imposi-
tion of open spaces in dense crowded city spaces.” Instead, as Douglas Davis,
the architecture critic for Newsweek noted, Larry’s plan “sees the city as an
excuse to enjoy many options rather than just a few and it keeps open a
multiplicity of options for the citizens—work, play, rest, repose, tension.”13
This reenvisioning of the city as an array of sites evoking diªerent “per-
formances” is evocative of Ann’s participatory theater pieces. In the realm
of architecture Larry was seeking the same thing Ann was in theater—to
create an avenue for participatory fieldwork.14
Starting with the building blocks of a community—families—Larry and
Ann now wanted to script a series of situations in which it would be pos-
sible to observe how family and community relationships develop and
evolve. They hoped to create a performance site that generated a working
process, bridging civic and artistic arenas. The model they chose—a large
group workshop—was not surprising. Conceived and led collectively by
the Halprins, Burns, and Baum, this workshop sought to both model and
inspire collective creativity as a social and design solution to contemporary
problems. Over the three weeks of the workshop, participants engaged in
a variety of exercises designed to sensitize them to their environment, their
bodies, and each other, many of which—like a blindfolded environmen-
tal walk and a group partner massage on the deck—were familiar exercises
from Ann’s dance classes. Yet the degree of interchangeability in the way
these core exercises might be framed by each leader (they took turns facil-
itating sessions) to highlight architectural, choreographic, or psychological
problems and solutions was remarkable.
The workshop was documented in 1974 when MIT Press published Tak-
ing Part: A Workshop Approach to Collective Creativity, a thick handbook
replete with the messy exuberance of images, ideas, and ambitions that must
have characterized the actual experience of being in the workshop. The dig-
ital media artist Chip Lord, who participated in the workshop, coming to
it directly from architectural school, and went on to cofound the art col-
lective Ant Farm five months after the workshop ended, felt it was a very
strong influence, particularly the movement sessions on touch with Ann.
“It has all stayed with me and I really think that is valuable,” he later said.
“It probably translates into a video-camera, looking through it. The way
you frame, the way you look at a person’s body. A sense of movement when
you’re recording something or when you’re framing something.”15
In his introduction to Taking Part, which includes a day-by-day de-
scription of the 1968 workshop, Larry draws a direct link between a soci-

250 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

ety of engaged and diverse citizens—individuals animated by active lis-
tening, attentiveness to body language, and the pleasures of play—and a
political structure free of chaos and dictators. The tone of the book is en-
ergized and innocently optimistic about viewing each person as a “con-
tributing artist” whose objectives are “personal growth,” “artistic expression,”
and “recycling the experiences of the workshop back into life.”16 In link-
ing the artist with the engaged citizen and making this link available to others
through the 1968 workshop, the Halprins enhance the function of both.
They suggest that creation is not reserved exclusively for the professional,
nor is it frivolous, but instead a critical dimension of civic life for all.
One of the signature exercises of the 1968 summer workshop involved
blindfolding all the participants and instructing them to stand in line with
a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. Then, holding onto each
other, they had to walk “blindly” over wooded paths, uphill, downhill, and
through cascading water. The goal of these “environmental awareness
walks” was to prompt people to experience their surroundings using senses
other than sight. As the participants would inevitably discover, these other
senses—smell, taste, touch, and hearing—when attended to, put one more
deeply in touch with the corporeal, which in the climate of the late 1960s
also immediately meant the sensual. Underlying this exercise was also the
belief that in muting our strongest sense, the visual, the competencies of
our other senses can be heightened.
Since the furor over the dressing and undressing sequence in Parades and
Changes, nudity had become de rigeur in Ann’s summer workshops. Burns,
who participated in both the 1966 and the 1968 July workshops, recalled
how matter-of-fact Ann was about advocating nudity as an important way
of “building community” and trust:

I think it was about midway through the [1968] workshop and Ann led
an all-afternoon session on the dance deck in Kentfield. . . . It was a very
long session, but it was very relaxed and nondemanding. I was one of the
last persons to take oª my Fruit of the Looms. But Annie was very good
at that. She just stood there and looked at me until I said, “This is ridicu-
lous,” and “Why don’t I take oª my shorts?”
There was one guy, an architect, who practically lost his mind because
he had to miss that session because he had a family thing back in the East.
And he came out just at the end of it, and he looked down on the dance
deck and everyone was naked as a jaybird. He cried, “I’ve missed it! I’ve
missed it!” As if he’d missed his whole life opportunity. Obviously no one
had to do it, but eventually everyone went along, most of them happily. It

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 251

 was a kind of bond between everyone in the group. So much so that the
very next day . . . we decided to have a celebration lunch and to take an
o‹cial class photo.
So we took the photo and then someone said, “Okay now we have to
take a photo that shows the end of the process,” and so we all took oª our
clothes and got back in the same pose and no one had any problem doing
that at all. It was just immediately clothes hitting the ground all over the
place.17

As Larry and Burns explained in Taking Part, the point of this kind of nu-
dity is “not how naked people can get, but how confident they can feel with
their own bodies and how trusting and non up-tight they can become with
the group.”18
The nudity “score” started oª with the participants pairing oª and tak-
ing turns massaging each other’s body. Framing this partner massage as a
form of psychological research, Larry and Burns assert, “The operative ques-
tion concerning nudity was: ‘What are your objections to removing your
clothes for a massage?’” This sounds like more of a challenge or a rhetor-
ical inquiry than a neutral question. Yet Larry and Burns continue: “This
approach, not demanding but asking, puts the responsibility for being
clothed or nude on the person instead of behind a stalking-horse of socie-
tal moralism.”19 Their description suggests, in the prevalent spirit of naive
innocence of the time, that physically exposing oneself is linked to psy-
chological candor, that taking oª one’s clothes might have a social and moral
resonance—rather like the undressing in Parades and Changes.
The final day of the 1968 workshop was devoted to seven scored events,
beginning with a movement session led by Ann in which the participants
were instructed to “isolate, then reassemble, diªerent parts of your body.”
Moving through basic explorations of the sort H’Doubler might have used,
the participants tested possibilities of lifting, supporting, cantilevering their
bodies as if they were construction materials for a building. Then, prior to
lunch, the men and the women were divided into separate groups and asked
to make a performance of what the leaders had identified as “women cas-
trating men by defusing and diverting all process discussions and men let-
ting it happen.” (No mention was made that three of the four leaders were
male.) Photos of this show the women in a close cluster, wearing under-
pants and bras, their long hair loose, as they embrace one another. On the
opposite page the men, shirtless and wearing pants and shorts, are stand-
ing with arms solidly linked as one ring of men stand on the others’ shoul-

252 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

ders. Read decades later, these images that must have seemed so natural and
spontaneous in the 1960s now look markedly shaped by essentialist clichés
about gender roles and behaviors.20
During lunch it was decided to take two photos of the whole group—a
before and an after, presumably to show how the changes of the twenty-
four-day workshop registered on the participants’ bodies. Here too there is
a strong sense of people performing the roles of counterculture rebels,
recording, through what they are willing to take oª, how much they have
taken in. In the first, “before” version, the participants and instructors pose
on the back balcony, stairs, and patio of the Halprins’ Kentfield home.
Everyone is dressed in casual clothes—mostly cut-oª jeans and shirts. They
are packed in close to one another, almost all facing the camera, looking
relaxed and smiling broadly with their arms resting aªectionately on each
other’s shoulders or knees. In the second, “clothes-oª ” version, everything
is the same, but everything is also very diªerent. Although everyone is in
more or less the same position as before, they all seem to be laughing self-
consciously and only a few people look directly toward the camera. There
is unease in this disclosure of a complex history of bodies, particularly the
women’s bodies, whose tan lines suggest a history of sunbathing in bikinis.21
This emphasis on nudity, heightened by the prominence of these two
full-page photographs in the book, loomed disproportionately large in the
workshop’s legacy. Years later Larry put this bit of spontaneous play into
the broader context of the workshop’s objectives:

I am concerned about the emphasis about nudity as if this [were] the

major emphasis of the workshop. It certainly was not my intention. Mine
was particularly for the architects to urge them to realize that architecture/
landscape architecture is largely a sensory art as well as intellectual and
that sensory implies the sense other than the visual, which is the usual way
it is taught, i.e., through the use of paintings as vehicles for plans! My
emphasis then is on sound, smell, touch, movement through space,
kinesthetics (which for Anna leads to the body). For that reason we did
do a score for body which involved removing clothing.22

For Larry, the 1968 workshop was a turning point, crystallizing his con-
ception of what he called an “RSVP” feedback loop, an approach to the
creative process that Ann soon found crucial to her work as well. This way
of addressing and solving design problems involves four components: an
assessment of resources (R), the formulation of a plan or score (S), an eval-

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 253

 uation (V), and a performance (P).23 Larry’s involvement in drafting the
performance blueprints for Ten Myths may have prompted him to think
about how one might plan for flexible participation in creating an event
where the goal was to promote perceptual acuity and to foster change rather
than to control a theatrical situation. According to Larry, “My own inter-
est in participation stems from early experiments in scoring . . . scoring
meaning the energizing of processes over time such as in musical scoring. . . .
I first became involved many years ago through my need to develop choreo-
graphic notations for the new theater of my wife.”24
Indeed, the 1960s was the period when Ann and Larry collaborated most
harmoniously and profoundly using their respective art forms of dance and
environmental design. This was the decade during which they each forged
signature identities in their respective fields precisely because of the hybridity
their interactions prompted. While Larry was gaining a new sense of how
to include interactivity, bodily awareness, and group participation in his
architectural projects through Ann’s influence, Ann was applying spatial,
design, and architectural insights to her choreographic problems. “The les-
sons learned in the 1966 and 1968 workshops gave rise to the conviction
that people in communities could become important influences on how
those communities evolve,” Burns later wrote.
Later in 1968 Ann would wed these lessons in community with her ex-
pressionistic performance methods and work with the performer’s genuine
subjective responses to deal with an urgent social agenda. She had already
been reacting against the pretense of fictional narratives in dance, just as Jerzy
Grotowski and Joseph Chaikin were attempting to eliminate the social mask
from the actor in drama. Ann had begun doing this in dance through her
use of task performance, because tasks did not create a fictional illusion of
character and they existed in an actual, not imaginary, time and place. (These
were some of the same benefits the Living Theater was gaining from using
task acting in its mid-1960s pieces.) With Ten Myths, however, Ann had ad-
vanced further into identity realism by using not stripped-down actors, but
confessional audience members and workshop participants as her perform-
ers. More and more she was focusing on the group rather than the individ-
ual as the important identity, a facet of what Theodore Shank calls the “We”
rather than the “I” theatrical idealism of the mid-1960s.25

Ann found her art dramatically challenged by Larry’s concern with how to
include urban voices of varying classes and social roles in his design solu-

254 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

tions. While working on his New York study, Larry had detailed in his per-
sonal notebook his fantasy of setting up a weekend encounter group to study
the real needs of cities. He described the site as “in the environment” and
the participants as “housewife, cop or fuzz, pusher, kids, druggist, . . . pool
hall hustler, designer, beurocrat [sic].”26 Within a year Ann would bring to-
gether a somewhat diªerent grouping of urban denizens to create a dance
out of a city crisis.
By 1968, as violence and hard drugs displaced the earlier innocence of
the Haight-Ashbury district, serious social problems began to intrude on
the idyllic notions of community Ann’s work had championed. Both Hal-
prins sensed the urgency of finding new means and new communities to
assist them in addressing social problems through their art. Ann did not
have to look far for her new community and wider context. Turning her
aesthetic gaze away from Haight-Ashbury and its hippies, she now looked
four blocks north of her Divisadero Street studio, to the center of San Fran-
cisco’s oldest black community, a neighborhood called the Western Addi-
tion. Since the period immediately after the 1906 earthquake, the city’s
African American community had been centered in this area of several
blocks, which formally located its cultural center, the Booker T. Washing-
ton Community Center, on Divisadero at Bush Street in the 1940s. As Ann
later recalled:

I had just finished teaching the twenty-four-day July workshop with Larry
and Paul, and I was asking, “Where are the black members of our com-
munity?” I felt that we were not getting an accurate response to our
design problems because we weren’t using the real mix of people in the
real world. I had gone as far as I could exploring boundaries of audiences
and theater. Now I wanted to go into the next phase, who the audience
was. If we were creating for the urban world then shouldn’t all the
variety of people who live in a city be part of the design process too?
Where were the black members of our community?27

In Ten Myths and The Bath Ann had focused on the distinction between
passive spectatorship and active performance and the implicit divide be-
tween public and private behaviors. Now she wanted to address the incen-
diary divide of the 1960s—race. What had been in the background would
be brought sharply into the foreground as she struggled to find a perfor-
mance form that could both recover and actualize the mnemonic reserves
in the bodies of two very diªerent groups of performers—working-class

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 255

 African Americans (from Watts, as it turned out, not the nearby Western
Addition) and the middle-class white students of the Dancers’ Workshop.
The dance that would result would be a performative slice of that period,
an artist’s living document of these bodies and of what the cultural histo-
rian Paul Connerton has called the bodily practices of social memory.28
Rather than an interpreted statement of these two populations’ responses
to their moment, Ann would create a structure, a container, into which
both groups could sift their viewpoints and imaginings. Yet any hope she
might have had for a smoothly collective, non-messy theater was illusory.
No position in regard to race, particularly in a dance theater made with
black and white bodies, could be neutral. As Toni Morrison cautions in
Playing in the Dark: “The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a grace-
ful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already dis-
credited diªerence . . . [so] every well-bred instinct argues against notic-
ing.”29 Ann’s struggle would be how to both notice and respond, and in
responding to actively cancel out the habit of “not noticing” to which Mor-
rison refers. She needed to figure out how to push for the visibility of race
while at the same time curtailing her own interpretation so that the per-
formers might be both visible, vocal, and noticed on their own terms. The
work she would begin creating in the summer of 1968 would activate the
racial American imagination of its participants and audiences, embodying
and replacing the dichotomy of race with an image of social love, harmony,
and an “us” group identity.
Civil rights marches, sit-ins, and riots were some of the contested forms
of spontaneous expression diªerent groups of Americans had already em-
ployed in response to the racial divide. Ann, however, wanted to pioneer
an atmosphere in which the content grew out of the personal issues of the
participants in her theater, so that together they might generate a dialogue
in art. She was hoping to express the elusive shape of racism by embody-
ing, and perhaps defusing, it through the language of participatory theater.
The risk was, as Morrison has noted, that the subject being imagined can-
not be free of the person imagining it.30 Much of what would happen in
Ann’s work with these two groups of performers would directly reflect her
own tacit, white, middle-class myths about sexuality and race.
Ann had already begun incorporating a form-generates-content ap-
proach in Ten Myths. But making a theatrical event out of contained im-
provisations with real-life objects, performers, audiences, and impromptu
environments, as Ten Myths did, and actually letting an environment gen-
erate its own art form, as the summer workshops had done, were two diªer-

256 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

ent things. The dance project she was about to embark on would do both
and serve as her first foray into the social topography of race.
In working toward a truly participatory dance, Ann has acknowledged
that she was inspired by Larry’s steady insistence on finding the group’s
common experience and paying attention to the feeling as well as the con-
tent of people’s statements and design goals. In eliciting felt responses to
racial divides Ann would tap parts of a cultural and physical memory—
something the performance theorist Joseph Roach explores in his idea of a
“kinesthetic imagination” as a form of historical memory that each indi-
vidual holds as a muscular artifact of the past.31 Larry and Ann focused on
how to take this embodied memory forward, into a deeper understanding
of the intersection between human movements and how civic behaviors
become sedimented in the body. They were aware that both urban design
and postmodern dance, however much they might have emphasized open-
ness and bringing the voices of the real world into the decision-making
process, had eªectively ignored one arena of deeply ingrained habits: that
of a racial dichotomy.
Already in 1967, in his work with Paul Baum on mediating the dispute
between Columbia University and the surrounding black neighborhood
over the development of Morningside Park, Larry had found a way to de-
fuse tensions considerably by giving people a way to map their own short-
term destiny. While Ann had not been part of that project directly, the les-
sons about how one’s place in society determines one’s perception and
capacity to call for change were not lost on her. By the summer of 1968, in
the months following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, she, like other
leading liberal artists, was calling for more black participation in work for
mainstream audiences.
Although Ann was not familiar with them at the time, several revolution-
ary models of theater for the dispossessed were already being explored. The
Free Southern Theater, for example, had formed five years earlier, in 1963,
in Tougaloo, Mississippi, with the goal of using theater to call for integra-
tion. Created by John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses, two writers working in
the civil rights movement, and including the actor Eric Weinberger (a vet-
eran of the Living Theater), the Free Southern Theater was envisioned as
a means for “fortifying in the rural Southern Negro the sense of pride in
his heritage from which a new way of life would be built.”32 In 1964 Richard
Schechner, then a professor of drama at Tulane University in New Orleans,
accepted an invitation to work with Free Southern Theater as a director,
creating another direct link between the theater avant-garde and political

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 257

 action. The Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Op-
pressed also emerged during this time with the goal of using theater to fos-
ter critical thinking among outcasts as a first step toward political action.
Ann’s theater, however, diªered from the Free Southern Theater and the
Theater of the Oppressed because it was less didactic in content and much
more focused on change for the performers rather than the audience.
Perhaps most dissimilar was that Ann rarely knew going into a new piece
just what its specific political aims and messages would be. What Ann did
share with these groups was an emphasis on participatory theater, which
is essentially rooted in the call-and-response tradition of African culture.
The Kenyan social activist Ng[gE wa Thiong’o has lauded this tradition as
the ideal pedagogical form of theater, because through call and response the
drive toward change becomes a community eªort.33 Admittedly, Ann did
not arrive at this way of working from theory as much as from being a per-
ceptive observer of African American cultural practices around her. Her
dance theater was not true call and response so much as a “try it, you’ll like
it” form of theater where the options are open and the stakes not so high.
But an enriched sense of community was indeed one of its goals.

The political roots of the changes that led to Ann’s investigation of race
began three years earlier, on August 11, 1965, in the area of South Central
Los Angeles known as Watts.34 It was a hot and muggy evening when Lee
Minkus, a California Highway Patrol o‹cer, responded to a tip from a mo-
torist, who had complained about a car that was speeding and weaving in
and out of tra‹c. After pulling twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye over,
Minkus stepped oª his motorcycle and began to fill in an arrest citation
for drunk driving. A small crowd quickly gathered to watch with amuse-
ment as Frye humorously responded to the field sobriety test. It was 7 p.m.
and already Frye and his brother, Ronald, had consumed several screw-
drivers in celebration of Ronald’s release from military service and his re-
turn home. Following procedure, Minkus radioed for backup and for a
tow truck. The backup o‹cer, tow truck, and Frye’s mother, who had been
summoned by a friend, all arrived within a few minutes, and the tone of
the gathering shifted. Frye became belligerent, the o‹cers swung at him
with their riot batons, and issued a code 1199—O‹cer Needs Help— over
the radio. Frye’s brother, Ronald, and mother were both arrested as they
tried to help him.
By now the crowd, growing angrier by the moment, had swelled to more

258 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

than a hundred people. Continuing to follow the prescribed procedures for
dealing with such a situation, o‹cers poured into the area, sirens scream-
ing. Advised to go home, the crowd began to disperse, when suddenly one
of the police o‹cers felt someone spit on him. He and another o‹cer rushed
the crowd and dragged out a young woman in a barber’s smock, resembling
a maternity dress, and threw her into a police car. Upon seeing this the crowd
became enraged, and rocks, bottles, and bricks were thrown at the depart-
ing police vehicles. The Watts riot had begun. According to Larry Reed, a
San Francisco participant in Ann’s Dancers’ Workshop, one of the mem-
bers of the angry crowd that day reportedly was the mother of Xavier and
Jasmine Nash, two Watts teens who would soon become leading teachers
and performers with the Dancers’ Workshop.35
The Watts riot lasted six days. In that time 34 people were killed (all but
2 of them African American), 1,034 people injured, 3,952 arrested, and 1,000
buildings burned. At least 31,000 African Americans were believed to have
actively participated in the rioting. The strictest military curfew in fifty years
for a domestic crisis was imposed on an area of forty-six and a half square
miles (larger than the city of San Francisco).
In retrospect, the riot would come to be seen as a protest against a social
system that many saw as broken, as an enactment of what analysts have
called “the politics of violence” and “the politics of despair.” Scores of stud-
ies and commissions investigated why this riot, a watershed event for Amer-
ican race relations, happened in the midst of a major national civil rights
eªort, with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights
Act to support enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment. The conclusion
was that Los Angeles may have been the first, but it would certainly not be
the last city rocked by the collision of a rapidly changing African Amer-
ican population with an indiªerent white population controlling the insti-
tutions.36 Indeed, for three years after the Watts riot other violent protests
shook such cities as Chicago, Newark, Detroit, and Cleveland.
Within Watts itself, the riot was followed by a boom in projects and or-
ganizations rooted in the community, and in outside money to sustain them.
One project, the Studio Watts School of the Arts, was actually started a few
months before the riot by a group of nine artists, including a young the-
ater artist, James Woods. This laboratory for art and theater exploration
oªered free classes in the visual arts (including ceramics), music, and the-
ater, targeting young high school dropouts as its main population. Woods,
the director, wanted to use the arts to help young people take leadership
roles.

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 259

 In June 1968 Woods was introduced to Ann’s work when he happened
to see a performance of Lunch by the Dancers’ Workshop in San Francisco.
He was attending a meeting of the Associated Council of the Arts at the
Hilton Hotel as the guest of theater director Howard Adams, and Ann had
been commissioned to perform during the lunch hour. Her piece Lunch, a
one-time event held in the hotel’s banquet room, had echoes of the call-
and-response tradition in the recondite dialogue it set up between the au-
dience and the performers. It was also an actively subversive form of the-
ater because it oªered a prototype for how to wrest power from those in
control and claim it for oneself, at least for the duration of the lunch hour.
During Lunch the spectators were prompted to become conscious of them-
selves as a community for the day, a community that had the ability to ac-
knowledge itself as a powerful group.37 This must have resonated as a vi-
sion of the future for Woods.
When Ann was asked to perform for the conference, she asked if the
dancers might also eat with the attendees. “‘Certainly,’ was the reply,” she
later reported. “I didn’t hint we’d be doing both simultaneously.”38 Letting
the banquet hall venue set their theme, Ann and her dancers proceeded to
dissect the “act” of eating lunch, using this act as the score for their dance.
Just what did the physical act of eating lunch involve? According to Norma
Leistiko, Ann decided this could be reduced to sitting down, picking up a
fork, moving it to your mouth, and so on. “Ann then did variations on this
theme, playing with tempi and spacing,” Leistiko said.39 The intention was
to encourage the audience to identify with the performers by noticing that
they too were eating, just like the dancers. Each performer was asked to eat
in a particular style: one might always steal food from the other plates, while
another might keep spilling things. Like the mirrors the hippies had held
up to the tourists in the Gray Line buses the summer before, the treatment
of eating as a slow-motion dance of fork raising and water sipping flirted
with role reversal, turning the Hilton’s grand ballroom lunch crowd into a
giggly participatory audience.
On a raised platform in the center of the room where the eight hundred
delegates were being served lunch, a spotlit table was set with white table-
cloth, cloth napkins, silverware, and dishes identical to those on all the lunch
tables in the room. Ann’s leotard-clad dancers sat around this table, each
posed at first in a frozen attitude of vacant concentration. Norma Leistiko
crouched on top of the table staring down at the food like a half-wild, half-
domesticated animal ruled by hunger and unsure of the proper social deco-
rum in such an environment. Patric Hickey, billed as the performance’s “en-

260 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

vironmental design expert,” arranged candles on each of the tables and set
up his lighting equipment at the sides so that the dancers’ actions could be
seen very clearly.
The commencement of the real lunch being served in the ballroom trig-
gered the beginning of the performed Lunch, although not all the guests
noticed this right away. Woods, for one, remembers asking his friend Adams
when Ann’s performance was going to begin. He was at first startled and
then delighted when Adams explained that the dance was already well un-
der way, that the people eating lunch in slow motion on the dais in the cen-
ter of the ballroom were the dancers!

I was kind of stunned by the fact that I had been midway through the
lunch waiting for her dance presentation and then I realized it had already
started. . . . I thought it was just the preparation and I said, “Well, when
are the dancers coming?” And my friend said, “Well, you have been in the
concert!” And I was stunned because I was aªected by them. The process
of perfection the dancers described in the act of eating made you think of
the way you yourself were consuming food and the way you too were in
the process of eating. I said, “This is really something else. I really want
to get to know that person.”40

As the delegates ate, the dancers echoed their actions in excruciatingly

slow motion. “It was like watching living sculptures,” William Glatkin, re-
viewing the performance for the Sacramento Bee, wrote.41 Beneath this sur-
face of docility and naive simplicity, however, the performance carried an
edge; Lunch resonated with social satire, providing an acid commentary on
the overdone social ritual of the business luncheon, in contrast to people’s
simple need to take in midday nourishment.
With his musical score for Lunch, Charles Amirkhanian (who had been
with the Tape Music Center upstairs from Ann’s Divisadero Street studio)
helped to heighten the audience’s awareness of the slowed-down eating:

I worked with the audio technician John Payne, and we created a quizzi-
cal mix of Muzak-like radio station music broadcast recordings which
were piped into the room from time to time, fading up for a few minutes,
then down and out for a few minutes. This way we found we could cho-
reograph the heads of the diners in the room. When they heard the odd
Muzak, they’d turn toward the center of the banquet room where Ann
and her dancers were, moving in slow motion, as if eating their lunches
in a standing position. Lots of the motion had to do with lifting a fork

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 261

 high over the head and stabbing an imaginary steak down at foot level on
the tabletop, then slowly moving the fork toward the mouth. I am still
amazed at the ability to turn heads of the guests by raising the sound up
and down.42

It was not just the volume but more importantly the rhythm of the
music—from Chopin to Porgy and Bess to rock-and-roll—that influenced
the pace of the eating.
The establishment, even an arts-administration establishment, was ac-
customed to being the butt of public jokes, so it was likely in this spirit
that they gave Ann what Leistiko described as a “cheering ovation.” While
fully aware that they were the target of her satire, they must have been re-
lieved that their participatory roles had been so painless, inadvertent, and
(unlike those on Candid Camera) nonhumiliating. Besides, Ann’s method
of working at this point seemed safely innocent of any overt social agenda.
She focused on formal experimentation—in this case, the task of eating
and its various forms, patterns, vocabulary—leaving the meanings to con-
verge between the comfortably ambiguous and personally intimate (eat-
ing is a bodily function people don’t generally like to be observed doing ).
Ann trusted that one’s values radiated through one’s work and that to be
overtly political, as in the guerrilla theater of this time, resulted too often
in statements that were as weak artistically as they were strident politically.
She was never deliberately a politician, but she was often an astute artist-
activist. The embodiment of performance for her intersected and overlapped
therapeutic probings into the self. “We wanted to stimulate in the audience
a sense of community by . . . pointing up that we are all performers in the
‘performing’ of our normal activities,” Ann wrote soon after the event.43
Half a year earlier, in the fall of 1967, two of the most flamboyant an-
tiwar activists, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoªman, in a purely political ges-
ture, had created a public event that shared a spirit of confrontation cloaked
in humor similar to that of Ann’s Lunch. Under the guise of responding
to an announcement by the Washington police that they were ready to
use a new stinging, temporarily blinding spray called Mace, Hoªman and
Rubin announced a new drug of their own, “Lace.” Lace, they said, when
squirted onto the skin or clothes, quickly penetrates to the bloodstream,
causing the subject to disrobe and get sexually aroused. As Todd Gitlin
describes it, “Before bemused reporters, two couples sprayed each other
with water pistols full of a fluid . . . called Schwartz Disappear-O! imported

262 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

from Taiwan, which was as good as its name: it made purple stains and
then disappeared. The couples proceeded to tear oª their clothes and make
love, not war.”44
Here, as in Ann’s Lunch, the object was to illuminate reality by satirizing
a business-as-usual practice and hold it up for public scrutiny. In Lunch the
performance exposed the hypocrisy of the business lunch, where taking in
sustenance is one of the least significant goals. In Hoªman and Rubin’s
demonstration, the notion of a new “street” weapon that would cause indi-
viduals to make love not war neatly turned the table on the escalating ag-
gression of the time. What if we performed art three times a day instead of
just eating a meal? What if police sprayed aªection instead of discomfort
over the crowds of disenfranchised students? A revolution could start here.
Theatricalizing the act of eating, while on the surface an innocuous and
even whimsical gesture, actually taps into significant issues about social dis-
cipline, memory, class, and even race. Perhaps what Woods responded to
was the tacit social and class critique in Lunch, tacit even to Ann. Paul Con-
nerton argues that a mnemonic and ceremonial display of bodily control
is often vividly enacted through the etiquette for eating. Ann seems here
to have intuitively gravitated toward a gesture that was simple on the sur-
face yet profound in its interior implications. This was one of the steadi-
est lessons and most frequent epiphanies of her theater—that standing out-
side a practice allows one to notice how performing authorizes a new set of
symbolic meanings to be assigned to actions. By focusing on what is there
in a ritual practice, like sitting still on chairs at a table and manipulating
utensils to eat, one can see what isn’t there, the invisible “rules” behind these
actions. Manipulating these rules can then become the basis for turning life
actions into performance gestures.

The implements used at the Western table are not implements with ob-
vious purposes and evident uses. Over the course of centuries . . . their
functions were gradually defined, their forms consolidated, and the values
attached to those functions and forms slowly inculcated. The way in which
knife, fork and spoon are held and moved was standardized step by step;
the practice of using a fork was acquired slowly, as was the habit of taking
liquid only with a spoon . . . they are technical skills imbued with moral
values. . . . What is being remembered is a set of rules for defining ‘proper’
behaviour; the control of appetite in the most literal sense is part of a
much wider process which will appear, depending upon our vantage point,
either as a structure of feeling or as a pattern of institutional control.45

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 263

 With Lunch, Ann was responding intuitively to this relationship between
behavior and social and institutional control. This is a relationship in which
the body is the “point of linkage,” to use Connerton’s terminology.
Critiquing an institution from within the institution can be both mis-
chievous and dangerous, and this is what made Ann’s work such a flash-
point for both social and artistic activists of the 1960s. “Everything she does
is prophetic,” Amirkhanian said about Ann. “Where we see barriers, she
sees possibilities.”46 Ann’s work could stand as easy satire or trenchant so-
cial critique. Lunch exaggerates the internalized constraints that rule us in
as common a practice as eating, and in this way brings out important nu-
ances about the lines between our public and private lives and civility and
the cultured control of appetites. Through table manners we see how rules
of consumption get remembered in the body.

Ann may not have focused directly on the political situation in her work
to this point, but she was living in a time of accelerating political and so-
cial awareness, not only in the nation as a whole but in the Bay Area in par-
ticular. Beginning in 1965, as the first American combat troops landed in
Vietnam, antiwar protests erupted at UC Berkeley, followed by huge public
demonstrations against the draft at the induction center in Oakland. The
assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 drew attention to his call for
black nationalism, while the Watts riots underlined African Americans’
anger at ongoing inequities. In the fall of 1966 Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, which
soon gained national attention. The year 1968 brought increasing turmoil.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April and Robert Kennedy in
June. The United Farm Workers’ grape boycott went national, and women’s
liberation groups started as part of the women’s movement that had been
growing since the 1966 founding of the National Organization for Women.
There was both an expansive and a theatrical quality to many of the
protest events of the time—as if social conflict were suddenly being played
out on a scale designed to capture the attention of the media and the hearts
and sentiments of the nation. An event had to be big enough to make large
numbers feel it was their community issue, yet personalized enough to make
one care on an emotional level. Costuming was part of the political pack-
age. The identifiable look of the Black Panthers, for example, heightened
the impact of their message. As Bobby Seale recalled, the Black Panthers’
all-black uniform of pants, leather jacket, turtleneck, sunglasses, and beret

264 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

was inspired in part by an old movie on the French underground that he,
Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey Newton watched one evening on television.47
Just as theater was becoming the means of politics, so too were political
issues becoming the stuª of theater, particularly in the Bay Area. In the fall
of 1965 members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a fledgling street the-
ater group, were arrested for using obscenity in Il Candelaio, a free play
staged in Golden Gate Park. The troupe’s young manager immediately
arranged a benefit for the arrested actors. At the benefit, the manager, Bill
Graham, discovered rock music, simultaneously launching his career as a
presenter and the Bay Area’s reputation as America’s center of rock music.
“San Francisco created the sound for the revolution,” Wavy Gravy has said
about the era.48 Ann created the dance.
Indeed, the pulsing, pumping beat of rock and colorful, amorphous
splashes of light shows seemed to underscore the salient subjects of the
time—sex, a new body awareness, and a focus on inward experience as a
precursor to external, social action. For anyone living and working in the
Bay Area at the time, the words and the pulse of this music revolution were
inescapable. “The lyrics of rock and roll and the music made a lot of white
people do what most of them had never done before—move pelvically, pub-
licly,” Bill Graham wryly observed. It was an insight not lost on Ann, who
also, in response to the era’s loosening attitudes about sexuality and phys-
ical expression, was working to broaden her performance vocabulary with
movement and improvisatory situations, including nudity and more openly
sensual and potentially erotic situations.
Another undercurrent of these times was the romance between liberal
Jewish artists and black political causes.49 While the Dancers’ Workshop
performers and audiences may have been predominantly white, just the act
of setting up shop in the predominantly black Western Addition neigh-
borhood was a significant gesture of interracial support in the 1960s. The
Fillmore Auditorium, Graham’s landmark venue for his weekly rock con-
certs by groups that included the Grateful Dead, the Jeªerson Airplane,
and Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, was located a couple of miles
away from Ann’s studio on the other side of the Western Addition neigh-
borhood. More than just inexpensive rent, there was a certain political ide-
alism at the time that prompted Jewish Americans like Ann and Graham,
who had emigrated from Poland just before World War II, to locate their
music and dance centers in San Francisco’s black community. (By 1971, how-
ever, Graham would close the Fillmore Ballroom, and Ann would follow
suit two years later, moving most of her operations from Divisadero to San

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 265

 Francisco’s Fort Mason for two years and then to her home studio in
Kentfield.)

James Woods called Ann in late July 1968 to ask her to create a work like
Lunch with his group of young theater people in Watts. “I wanted her to
come in as a teacher and to work with African Americans in Watts,” Woods
recollected. “And out of that action would occur a piece that would be a
statement of that process, a statement of the involvement of a master dancer
with apprentices. That’s what I was attracted to, and that’s the experience
I wanted to commission an original work about.”50
According to Ann, “When James Woods called I recognized from his voice
and his way of talking that I was talking to a black man. But he never said
anything about that; then when he said he was from Studio Watts I put the
two together.” She listened to his proposal, but she immediately began
rewriting the assignment: “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Now this is a
great opportunity!’ He was shocked when he asked me if I would do it and
I said, ‘Absolutely no!’ Then I followed up by telling him what I wanted to
do was develop an all-black company at Studio Watts. ‘Can you make this
possible?’ [I] asked.”51 What Ann had in mind was eventually to see what
would happen if a group of black dancers from Watts came together with
her all-white San Francisco company. The negotiations, tensions, and re-
alities of that encounter would become the basis for a performance em-
bracing audience participation as well.
It took awhile to hammer out the details, but in late September Ann be-
gan commuting weekly to Watts. She was to be paid a total of two thou-
sand dollars, most of it coming from money Woods had raised from pri-
vate sources. For the next five months Ann flew down to Los Angeles early
every Saturday morning at her own expense. She spent the full day, from
9 a.m. to 6 p.m. with an hour-long lunch break, in an intensive workshop
session with eleven Studio Watts performers before returning to the Bay
Area at night. It seemed to Ann she did little else during that period except
work on the Watts performance, either planning for each Saturday marathon
or working with the San Francisco contingent. Patric Hickey was oversee-
ing a repeat of some of the previous year’s successful Myths performances
at the Divisadero studio; Ann was involved, but her priority was to pull the
Watts project together.
From the first, “fascinating” day, Woods remembered, Ann made a strong
impression. The Studio Watts performers “were impressed with her because

266 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

Ann is a very dynamic woman.” According to Woods, she told them she
hoped they would be able to explore their interactions and “to work out
their own energies and myths and directions.”
According to one of the Studio Watts participants, Wanda Coleman, Ann
conducted auditions for the Watts performers by watching them interact
with one another and sort through “power dynamics” as they set up rela-
tionships in improvisatory exercises. Coleman said she was selected as the
“symbolic earth mother” of the group: “I was the biggest. I weighed about
one hundred sixty pounds at the time. So I was heavy. I was probably the
least physically attractive in the sense that the dominant culture understands
beauty or defines it.”52
Ann did not have any technical requirements for the group. “None of
them were trained dancers or movers per se,” she recalled, “but Jim Woods
had been doing interesting things with them so I just basically took who-
ever he had.”53 In total, seven men and four women were selected for the
Watts group.
Soon after Ann started working with the Watts group, she began shap-
ing a counterpart group of eleven dancers in San Francisco. She soon had
eight women (many of whom, including her daughters, had already per-
formed with the Dancers’ Workshop), but to create more of a gender bal-
ance she added three men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five
whom she auditioned in San Francisco in late October specifically for the
Watts performance.54 She began rehearsing this group every afternoon, from
4 to 6 p.m., on the dance deck. Larry Reed, one of the men selected from
the audition, recalled the climate of intensity and experimentation with its
emphasis on what the dancers were feeling: “I think this was one of the
transition projects for Ann, where she went from being performance ori-
ented to being therapy oriented. She was very excited about Fritz Perls at
the time and that whole movement, the Gestalt thing. And she really went
from wanting to be an avant-garde theater person to wanting to be a ther-
apeutic dance person. And this was on the way to that.”55
Rather than turning outward in an eªort to make a large political state-
ment, Ann seems to have been catalyzed by the social moment to turn more
deeply inward. Her work in Watts would change the scale of her artistic
imagining. Decades later she reflected that in bringing together the all-black
Watts and all-white San Francisco groups, she attempted “to use my expe-
rience with Gestalt therapy to integrate emotional responses through an art
process instead of therapy. I wanted the dancer to be a whole person.”56
Unlike Ten Myths, in which she had to create the situation to induce emo-

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 267

 tions and then explore those emotions through movement, the Watts per-
formers already had a reserve of strong emotions. Reed noticed this as well,
remarking on the diªerence when the two groups came together: “I think
the challenge there [was] to direct these hippie feelings of sort of vague, all-
encompassing love, and then these ghetto feelings that are very much more
directed, and to make a mix of them all—that required each of us to really
become someone else, to open up, to be more than we had been.”
Coleman, who would become an accomplished poet but who at the time
was on welfare with two young children and a marriage that would soon
break up, pinpointed one diªerence. She recalled that the Watts perform-
ers responded to the opportunity to work with Ann with an enthusiasm
approaching desperation: “You have to remember that all these carrots of
opportunity were being held out to young blacks at that time and I was
snatching for the carrots just like everybody else. We saw this as a real pos-
sibility. All the black members of that troupe felt this was a beginning, that
this was going to take us to great heights.”
Ann herself entered into the project charged with the excitement of em-
barking on a new undertaking, one redolent of social discovery and emo-
tional change. For her the first shock was the setting of Watts itself. “I was
not so much surprised as touched,” Ann said of that first visit to Watts.
“In those days to see that kind of poverty was shocking. And it reinforced
the sense I had of the polarization in our community and our society. It
was much more of a ghetto than anything I had ever seen in San Francisco.
You really didn’t see any white people at all. I was the only white person in
sight.”57
The thing that struck Ann most about the initial rehearsals was that there
was little room for make-believe in the gestural language of these performers:
“The intensity was mind-boggling. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced
before. I remember at one point having them share weight by taking part-
ners, holding hands and pulling gently back and forth. I started to demon-
strate with John Hopkins, and I realized as I started doing it that they were
not abstract about movement at all. It immediately triggered oª a sense of
challenge and competition, and it suddenly became a black man and a white
woman pulling.” The rest of the performers gathered around and watched
with growing interest as Ann planted her feet, realizing she had walked into
a drama larger than both of them. For Ann, that one movement turned
into a dance metaphor for the struggle between African American men and
white women, a public testing of her mettle as the workshop leader. It was
an exchange that would be played out repeatedly in the months ahead,

268 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

prophetic of both the politics and the sexual territory the Watts project
would explore.
The dancers dubbed Ann “Blue-Eyed Soul Mama Number One” as an
aªectionate tribute to her grit and sincerity. “We loved that woman down
to her dirty drawers, as they say in the ghetto,” Coleman laughed. “In fact,
we loved Jim Woods too. I don’t think there are two people I’ve known in
my experience in an artistic arena that were more loved, with no reservation.”
Soon after the initial challenge to her determination, Ann decided to in-
troduce an exercise drawn from the “Experiments in Environment” work-
shop. She was working hard to define the Studio Watts performers as a co-
hesive community, a community that trusted her direction enough to follow
her into the risky territory of personal exploration. The assignment Ann
planned was for the performers to each blindfold themselves securely and
then join hands while she led them on a serpentine walk through the neigh-
borhood surrounding Studio Watts. The idea was that with the sense of
sight closed to all but Ann, the performers would be dependent on her vi-
sion and their own hard-working other four senses to experience the envi-
ronment. They were eªectively “blinding” themselves in order to “see.”
As it happened, however, Ann’s plane was fogged in at the San Francisco
airport the morning the walk was scheduled. So an assistant of Woods, a
young white woman with no particular experience doing this sort of thing,
took Ann’s place as leader of the line. For Coleman, it proved a disastrous
substitution. A few minutes into the exercise, as Coleman clutched the hand
of Xavier Nash and moaned that she had a strong premonition that some-
thing bad was going to happen if she continued to walk blindfolded, her
upturned face smacked into a lamppost and the metal pole shattered her
right front tooth. She became hysterical and had to be carried back to the
studio by three men, bringing that experiment in trust to an abrupt end.
Woods saw that Coleman got a false tooth made, and the next week she
was back in rehearsal, wary but determined to make this opportunity work
for her.
After that mishap the rehearsals in Watts continued relatively unevent-
fully, with Woods a steady presence in the studio. He participated mostly
from the sidelines, assisting with administrative details and watching, as
he called it, each performer embarking on a personal “healing process”—
“healing his sense of who he was.”
In late January 1969 Ann brought the two groups together for the first
time for an intensive ten-day joint rehearsal period before they performed
together in Los Angeles. The dance now had a title, Ceremony of Us, but

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 269

 no cohesive order had been set, nor had a specific body of material to be
included in the performance been chosen. Ann was trusting the interac-
tion of the two groups to generate the shape and focus of the event. The
black group and the white group now both had a voice in movement; the
charge was to create a physical conversation for the stage.
For Ann, the intensity of that first meeting, which was held in her San
Francisco studio, was both electrifying and frightening. She decided to des-
ignate the Watts group as “hosts” for the day, and they gathered outside the
studio door, preparing their entrance, with the white dancers sitting inside
as their audience and “blind date” partners. Pepe Hill then led the Watts
dancers in a serpentine line around and through the large studio. The im-
pact of the Watts group’s opening was extraordinary. It was as if that snaking
line of eleven people, linked hands to hips, contained a distillation of the
Watts performers’ aspirations and trepidation. As they passed the stream
of movement down the line, the dancers’ weight was firmly into the ground,
and the action rippled through their spines, into their pelvises, and ended
in eleven pairs of feet slamming as one into the floor. The men exhaled a
guttural “ha!” with a volume and intensity that left the white men in
Dancers’ Workshop bracing themselves for a power challenge. Melinda
West, a twenty-year-old member of the Dancers’ Workshop group at the
time, recalled crying at the raw expression of rage the stamping line of Watts
performers generated.58
The white dancers responded to the black group’s dance of introduc-
tion with their own line dance of open, expansive, and consciously shaped
gestures. Ann sat on the sidelines, anxiously wondering, “How are these
two groups ever going to move with any kind of cohesion?” The answer
came as the two lines of dancers sinuously curved paths through the studio,
the blacks trying to “steal” dancers from the white line and the whites try-
ing to steer away from the building confrontation. A pair of drummers—
one a virtuoso black musician, Billy C. Jackson, and the other a young
white one, Casey Sonnabend—played congas in the corner, and Ann and
Woods watched silently as the dancers worked toward finding their own
resolution.
“Life is being now, not yesterday,” Ann’s voice intones at the start of the
film Right On! which Seth Hill made of the initial days of the joint work-
shop, as the two groups began to explore one another and intense emotions
seemed to coat every exchange. “Now is something you don’t know, you
have to discover it.”59 Rather than starting out with a preconception of the
final performance, Ann was willing to let the dancers discover their dance

270 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

through their encounters with each other. As much an opportunity for
redefinition as healing, the rehearsals oªered all participants the chance to
examine and possibly begin to re-create not just themselves but the racial
attitudes of their society. The concrete poet Liam O’Gallagher, who assisted
in the workshops once the two groups came together, explained: “We were
all there for various reasons, but we were intent on proving that we could
and would use each other as a bridge. The object was not to make some-
thing that was aesthetically pure but to create something that was real and
would prove itself over time.”60 Through dance, Ann was oªering the pos-
sibility of reconstituting the world, at least temporarily, within the confines
of the studio. This in fact would become the emphasis of the Watts piece.
Not so much a dance as a lived experiment in attempting to erase bound-
aries, prohibitions, and taboos, Ceremony of Us would turn out to be in equal
measure both daring and timid, both a challenge to the status quo of racial
stereotypes and an unwitting reinforcement of the sexual and class myths
embedded in them.
In a “cut-up” poem that he created based on what he saw and tape-
recorded of the dancers’ experiences, O’Gallagher oªers a distillation of the
Ceremony of Us workshop experience. The splash of one-word impressions
suggests a chaotic, emotionally intense climate, where personal revelation
and sexual tensions dominated. In the poem the biggest and boldest fonts
are reserved for the words “naked,” “love,” “reality,” “risk,” and “intensity.”61
As O’Gallagher later commented, “Rehearsals were highly charged emo-
tional encounters. They would last from two to three hours. My job was
to help Ann resolve not only borders, but barriers and boundaries of cen-
turies of fear, mistrust, and hate due to inequality and ignorance. It was
painful. The nice thing, of course, was there was a maximum allowance for
improvising, and I think this was Ann’s greatest contribution to modern
dance. She allowed the form to emerge rather than imposing it.”
Initially, Ann used many of the same tasks for generating movement and
allowing a form to emerge that she had used in other rehearsal and work-
shop situations. As Ann has described it, “[We used] body exercises, mas-
sages, psychic-stress movement, improvisations to break through an indi-
vidual or group impasse, drawings, self-portraits, and group portraits. We
modeled ourselves in clay, we wrote about the ways we identified with our
workshop experience, we spent time breathing in and out of each other
with our bodies; vocalizing, singing, touching, looking, leading and fol-
lowing with our eyes closed, acting out dreams, fantasizing with dress-up
costumes, acting out roles on street corners with pedestrians as audience.

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 271

 When things got too heavy, we’d play tag, have horse races, do red
light–green light, construct pyramids with our bodies, etc.”62 For Ann,
such childhood games were a favorite device for generating movement
because not only were they disarming in their simplicity but they sug-
gested, deceptively, that the content was light and playful. “I used games
to oªer a container and focus for placing the intensity of conflict and
competition into fun and play,” Ann observed later. “But even then we
had plenty of explosions. I wanted to find some balance.”63 Ann may also
have been thinking of her early success at generating creativity by using
games in her children’s classes during the 1940s and 1950s, and she may
have been influenced by a resurgence of these games’ popularity in the
mid-1960s.64
The games provided straightforward scores. For example, if the direction
was to play follow-the-leader, one person would lead oª with a movement,
which a line of people would then copy, one at a time. For red light–green
light, the focus turned from making movements to one’s speed in secretly
sprinting up behind a designated leader and trying to overtake that person
before she or he turned around and yelled, “Red light!” Abstract movement
itself was rarely what interested Ann in introducing these games; rather,
she was trying to wipe away preconceptions about proper dance actions. “I
was working to establish a common language between the black and white
groups,” Ann said later. “I wanted to show that a value system was being
created mutually and that I was there simply to set the tone, to generate cre-
ativity but not to write the score.” It was an aesthetic as well as pragmatic
choice: “Working with a group of black people in Watts who mistrusted the
white culture and had felt unheard, not listened to, not paid attention to—
this in retrospect was the only way I could imagine I could have worked
and that they could have accepted me. It took everything I had just to be
alert every minute.”65 It is curious, however, that Ann chose children’s games
that play with testing authority as the bedrock of building a new value
system with the Watts and San Francisco performers. Children’s games can
be fiercely competitive and hierarchical, reinforcing rather than repudiat-
ing power structures.
The two groups found they had a lot to negotiate in ten days of rehearsal
together before the performance in Los Angeles. Reed recalled feeling on
edge throughout the process: “I do remember that we became very intensely
involved with each other and that it was threatening to a lot of people. There
was nothing monolithic about it at all. Every kind of emotion that you could
imagine came up, and some of it was positive and some of it really wasn’t,

272 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

except that through Ann’s coaching, we kept going and kept trying to trust
the process basically.”
Ann’s way of working involved a kind of psychological nudity that proved
a lot more risky than the physical nudity of the “Experiments in the Envi-
ronment” workshops. Without consciously aiming to do so, Ann had ar-
rived at the threshold of many of the tensions and myths of racism. Bol-
stered in part by her work with Fritz Perls, she knew how to probe and loosen
emotions in the art-making process. What she wasn’t equipped for, and even-
tually would choose to ignore, were the larger implications of social ten-
sions and societal racism. Up to this point her art had never been deliber-
ately about grand issues, only personal and immediate ones that by honest
exploration could become so transparent they became universal. Now she
was trying to translate this onto a big screen. As Larry Reed expressed it:

We were trying to do something that was much talked about and very
little accomplished at the time, which was to work together between the
two races. There were a few music groups that achieved that. And very
little else. So there was a lot of talk about integration and very little action
on it. And we just went right into it. I guess it was a psychically danger-
ous area to go into, for everybody involved. And the fact that we could,
and that we could come through it, and that we could do something with
it, I think, was hugely significant.

Ann counted on therapeutic means and a trusting relationship like that

between a therapist and client to select the information and then the in-
stinct of a performer to shift focus to deliver this information to an audi-
ence.66 What made this method particularly incendiary with the Watts
project was that Ann did not mute this confrontational aspect of her process
even as she moved into race as her topic. Rana Halprin, who was sixteen
at the time, recalled that from her perspective, the Watts cast didn’t seem
dramatically diªerent than other groups of artists her mother had worked
with. When Rana stopped by the studio one afternoon after high school
and joined in the workshop, she felt that the tensions in the room could
be bridged by innocently and intuitively employing the mirroring move-
ment skills she had learned from Ann, skills that years later she dubbed
“empathetic bonding.” In her words:

I walked in the studio one afternoon, [and] people were in the midst of
confrontation and shouting—trying to find resolution in Perls’s Gestalt

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 273

 style, which I was not into. There was one male participant in the Watts
group who was on the floor, weeping. No one knew what to do —so my
mother asked me to go in. I went in and simply got down next to him
and curled up into a ball mirroring his position on the floor. I reached out
and held his hands and stayed present with him until he stopped crying.
After a while he shifted, tears turned into some sort of release, because he
jumped up and put me on his shoulders and went into the street with me
still riding on his shoulders. After that the male participants in the Watts
group were all very, very protective of me because of the way I chose to
relate.67

Other participants, however, had a diªerent perspective. Wanda Cole-

man felt that Ann and Woods deliberately steered away from looking at the
core of the Watts experience—the 1965 riot and racism. To her, racism was
the implicit, but never satisfactorily addressed, subject in Ceremony of Us:

It’s complex. Racism is the largest part of it because it was a black and
white statement and you could not ignore that. But if we were truly going
to function on the level that they said we were going to, then we had to
come to a certain understanding. [But] there was a sort of naiveté on
Ann’s part. That we could get eleven black kids together and eleven white
kids together and make this wonderful racial statement. Well, they made
one all right. It is not a simplistic thing that all is peace and love and light
and candles. All that stuª was nice. But it had nothing to do with what is
the ugliness and nastiness of what racism really is. Until you get down to
the root you ain’t going nowhere. And as artists, the minute they got close
to that they started running scared.

Here Coleman might have referred to the words of Richard Wright, who,
in a radio broadcast in Paris in September 1960, said: “Our life is still in-
visible to whites. It remains outside the pale of whites’ preoccupations. I’d
like to hurl words in my novels in order to arouse whites to the fact that
there is someone here with us. Negroes, a human presence.”68 In Coleman’s
view there was a lot more at stake than simply bringing black and white
dancers together to create a performance:

You see I was passing through. But these people I knew [the other dancers
in the Watts group], they were investing everything in that experience.
What went wrong . . . was racism. They did not understand, neither Ann
nor Jim, what they were doing. And they did not understand the dynam-

274 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

 ics of racism. They didn’t really understand how deep it went and how
people would respond to it.

It had never been Ann’s interest or method to seek social engagement

directly. Her focus was always pointedly on the individual’s experience.
What came out of that she mediated through scores, prescriptions for act-
ing out in the safe environment of theater. But for her the glimpse of strained
fury that the Watts workshop brought was tantalizing.
Ann would later call Ceremony of Us absolutely pivotal in her work, il-
luminating for her the possibility of using “real people dealing with their
real life issues” as art. “You can separate your life from your art, but it is so
exciting and full of creative possibilities if you don’t,” she said. She ac-
knowledged that she had no real plan for what Ceremony of Us would look
like. “Wherever we were at the end of ten days would be our statement
about who we are in relationship to blacks and whites,” she said. “I didn’t
know what the outcome would be. It might not be very pleasant or it might
be very hopeful. I was after a microcosm and it was very risky.”69
That riskiness came out in the ways issues around, and distinctions be-
tween, sensuousness, sexuality, and intimacy played out along racial and
gender divides. “When these white people saw these [Watts] guys coming
in doing these movements, they were blown away,” Ann recalled. “They’d
never seen anything like it in their lives. The way black people move, the
way street people move. It was totally raw and direct and had all the in-
tensity and solidity and openness of street dance. There they were out there
with their bodies and so sensuous!”70 Melinda West had a somewhat diªer-
ent take: she recalled, “I remember wondering what it would be like to get
to know these people. Then the arguing started, and this whole dynamic
came out, and I got kind of scared, especially when I heard that some of
these black men had never even touched a white person before.” For most,
the sensual subtext was hard to ignore. Coleman noted: “As we worked, the
intimacies of sweat and smell unraveled tension. By the end of the day we
knew each other as well as it is possible to know another’s body sans sexual
intercourse.”71
Ann tried to ground the emotions that came up more in the realm of the
sensual than the erotic. In the Right On! film she demonstrates an exercise,
working with two black men clad in brief swim trunks. She prompts them,
using touch and words, to release the pelvis and buttocks to increase open-
ness in the hips. Her level of ease at touching the bare skin of men’s bod-

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 275

 ies, especially in a region near their genitals, seems very progressive for the
time. Squatting down, she cups her hands under the buttocks of one of the
black men and models what she calls “a respectful, scientific, and not sex-
ual way of relating to the body.”72 Ann’s mother, then seventy-six, was not
so sure about this distinction. When Ida Schuman received a postcard an-
nouncement for the film broadcast, she expressed shock that Ann would
allow such “cheap” filming of intimacies between the dancers. In a reply to
her mother, Ann explained, “To read intimacy as trust, warmth and open-
ness between young people of conflicting race diªerences is quite diªerent
than if it is being read as ‘cheap.’ What I see in Hollywood movies is cheap
because relationships are shallow and of no particular humanistic desire for
improving understanding between people.”73
Ann’s use of bodies in the film is paradoxically chaste yet intensely phys-
ical in a way that invites the spectator to begin to construct her or his own
narrative of memory. These seem to be bodies with private, yet immedi-
ately accessible, personal histories. As the dancers tenderly stroke water along
the skin of their partners and then stroke them dry with towels, or as they
stare at the mirrored reflection of their partner and say, “I see the tip of a
gold zipper on the top of your shorts,” they are enacting complex visual se-
ductions with one another. Ann later said her intention with this exercise
had been to lead the dancers to distinguish between what was “real” and
what was a fantasy projection, the kind of behavior she thought might lead
to racial prejudice.74
One of the most pointed elements of risk involved the tensions between
black women and white women that saturated many of the workshop ex-
changes. In the liminal space between society and art opened up in the
process of creating Ceremony of Us, desire and suspicion—polarized emo-
tions that can be especially frightening across racial lines—had a chance to
be aired and acted on within parameters of safety. Coleman later wrote a
poem about the workshop, “A War of Eyes,” in which she depicts some of
the tensions that arose through the metaphor of an intense, theatricalized
battle between herself and a white woman.75 In the poem Coleman’s dis-
like builds to such a fury that she is about to inflict serious physical injury
on a white woman in the workshop under the guise of following one of
Ann’s directives. Although the Dancers’ Workshop members were familiar
with how Ann used the real emotions that emerged, improvising with them
to create performative, narrative material, the performers from Watts didn’t
have the same training history with Ann, so for them the feelings elicited
may have hovered much closer to the real than the metaphoric. “The point

276 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

of the piece was to work with tension and reconciliation metaphorically,”
Daria explained, underlining that “this was a radical and brave work com-
ing right after the Watts riots.”76 Ann believed so deeply in the salutary ca-
pacity of dance metaphors that she seemed not to have worried about the
dangers of the literal anger and hostility that had fueled the Watts riots and
still simmered in many of the exchanges between these white and black
youths.
During the Ceremony of Us era, Daria later noted, “it was more about
letting it all hang out than letting it all hang out for the purpose of putting
it back together in a way that was healthy.” She explained that, for Ann,
“the main thrust was, and still is, to let it all hang out as artistically as pos-
sible. If it gets put back together, that’s a booby prize.” It was only later,
Daria indicated, that Ann learned through her work with psychotherapists,
as did Daria (who later became a movement therapist), that “one has to be
very careful because this [process] can be detrimental and dangerous, and
I think it has been.”77
Ann did try to defuse the tensions, asking Berkeley psychologist Paul Baum
to lead a group session with the performers. Indeed, Baum had already been
meeting with Ann for several months about her di‹culties around this per-
formance. As he later remarked to James Woods, “Ann has had to confront
some issues in her life that she has avoided with an incredible tenacity. I am
sure it is true that any artist confronts himself in the process of creation.”78
When Baum came into the group as a “human relations consultant,” he said,
somewhat cryptically, “Things had gotten very, very wild and wooly.” As he
reported it, “I don’t know that I helped at all. But apparently my presence
was helpful because I still [decades later] hear about it.”79
To a great degree the “wild and wooly” scene that Baum described cen-
tered on sexual tensions. Hidden power relations were seen as tainting many
exchanges between blacks and whites at the time, particularly sexual ex-
changes. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, published in March
1968, was being widely read at the time, particularly its most provocative
essays, which painted a complex picture of sexual relations as the archetype
of black oppression. The black man, Cleaver charged, had been emascu-
lated because the white woman, symbol of his oppression, was taboo.80 The
charged couplings between some of the Ceremony of Us performers may
have seemed to refute that taboo, but they still upheld the traditional power
dynamics of gender. Moreover, Coleman pointed out, “that myth about
love being able to overcome all turned out to be a myth”—most of the ro-
mantic liaisons in the workshop were short-lived.

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 277

 At one point tensions between the men and the women intensified to a
boiling point, so Ann separated the sexes for two days, sending all the men
into the large studio and the women into the smaller one. At the end of
the second day they came together to share the dances they had created.
The men, black and white, formed a line and like a flank of warriors per-
formed a furious stomping dance in tight unison as they surged forward.81
The women oªered a parallel essentialization of gender roles by enacting
a childbirth scene. Coleman was selected by the group to give birth to a
white woman dancer. The other women crouched in front of Coleman and
in unison pulled her first to one side and then the other while she moaned
as if in labor. Ann viewed these dances as critical turning points where sex-
uality as a tool for power and domination softened into intimacy and trust
between the sexes, and they became incorporated into the final perfor-
mance.82 For Coleman, the “birthing” dance was a particularly memorable
experience. During a later rehearsal, while embracing the “baby,” she be-
gan spontaneously singing the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses” a cap-
pella in her strong, husky voice. When she did this in the actual perfor-
mance, the audience told her to keep singing after she finished the song,
and she did. “I will never forget it,” she recalled twenty-five years later. “It
was like the audience was one mind, like this beast out there who said you
haven’t sung enough, sing more. It was the most electrifying audience I’ve
ever had.”
The material in the performance on February 27, 1969, at the Mark Ta-
per Forum at the new Los Angeles Music Center complex served as a
metaphorical refrain of the discoveries made in the workshop process. The
performance was framed with an opening and closing sequence of gentle
audience participation. At the start, borrowing from an incident during the
joint rehearsal period, Ann had all the Studio Watts performers line up along
one aisle leading into the theater and all the Dancers’ Workshop perform-
ers along the other. The entering audience was thus faced with the choice
of walking down a corridor of either black or white performers. And the
audience for this single performance was as racially mixed as the perform-
ers were. Woods, who was chairman of the Second Annual Los Angeles
Festival of the Arts, of which this performance was a featured part, had
bussed in scores of blacks from Watts. So what happened was that the en-
tire audience spontaneously divided according to color.
As they walked down their respective lines, the performers made the au-
dience the focus of another workshop task—holding up small mirrors in
front of various audience members, the performers briefly described three

278 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

vistas as they looked at the individual audience members: “this is what I
see,” “this is what I imagine I see,” and “this is what I want to see.” Ann
remembered that the black members of the audience immediately got into
the spirit and responded back, while the whites for the most part walked
in embarrassed silence to their seats.
The performers then moved to the stage platform, stopping at the edge
to take oª their everyday clothing, stripping down to briefs and leotards.83
They had all previously recorded their own reactions to looking at each
other, and these became the starting point for the performance, as they be-
gan gazing at and touching each other. Then the dancers split into two
groups—black and white—snaking in a line behind a leader as they con-
fronted each other in diªerent ways. Eventually the men in both groups
split apart into a “contest” of masculinity before the women. The women
then performed their “birthing ritual,” after which the men and women
danced together and finally paired oª for a ceremonial washing of each other.
Taking their bowls of water and towels, the performers then moved out to
gently bathe the hands of several members of the audience. This ritualis-
tic cleansing was intended by Ann as a task performance of metaphorically
washing away surface diªerences of skin color. It concluded the first half
of the program, called “Starting Point.” As Jim Burns later described this
opening half, “Almost no one in the performance of ‘Starting Point’ lost
his own identity, although the entire eªect was a beautiful microcosm of
people struggling together and against each other not only to survive but
to be.”84
Following an intermission, the second section, “Continuing,” began with
Norma Leistiko functioning as an onstage director. She pointed to a huge
chart at the rear of the stage, where a variety of activities were written on
sheets of butcher paper. Among the “choices” were such traditional children’s
games as red light–green light and tug-of-war, as well as new “games,” in-
vented for the performance, and more tasklike options, such as “carry.”
Whatever activity Leistiko pointed to, the performers had to execute it, con-
tinuing full-out until she suddenly shifted to another instruction. Neither
winning/losing nor accuracy in following directions was the focus here.
Rather, these were the structures for getting this radical assortment of per-
formers (radical for 1969 in its mixing of blacks and whites) to move to-
gether in an atmosphere of mutual discovery.
The performance concluded with the dancers moving through the aisles,
inviting the audience to join in a processional out into the courtyard out-
side the theater. There Ceremony of Us participants met the exiting audi-

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 279

 ences from the two adjacent theaters. For the performers it was an incred-
ible event. “We were so happy, we were swinging from the trees outside,”
Coleman recalled. But after the euphoric premiere, Ceremony of Us lived
on only in a couple of local performances and on film. The line between
the real and the acted, between art and life, as portrayed in the film of the
workshop sessions and the memories of the performers, looms thin.
Indeed, underlying tensions surfaced as soon as the day after the perfor-
mance, at a lunchtime “seminar” held at Studio Watts to “review the entire
concept of the Festival and to forecast the Festival for 1970.”85 Led by
Woods, Ann, and Baum, the meeting began with a heated discussion by
the performers, who were angry that their names had not been included in
the printed program but had instead been listed on a mimeographed in-
sert, where they were arranged alphabetically in two columns— one for the
white performers and one for the black performers, including black drum-
mer Billy C. Jackson. In the partial transcript that exists of this meeting the
performers’ argument rages for several pages with both the white and the
black dancers passionately explaining how hurt they felt by this oversight,
particularly since they had spent the previous five months creating this dance
piece. Baum later summarized the larger issues behind this dispute:

It seemed remarkable and fitting to me that the issues [that came up] so
closely paralleled the issues being raised by minority groups in all phases
of society. Here we were faced with the problem in a group that had just
completed a performance of a dance which supposedly had made some
statement to the issues that are dividing our society. The active, vocal
minority was saying “we want in, we want to be included, we want a
piece of the action, we want self determination, we want a share of the
profits.” The Establishment, in this case represented by Jim and Ann, was
stating, “We know what’s best for you and we’ll run things benevolently,
but we run them.”86

As Baum explained, this issue was further complicated by the fact that
Ann, although ostensibly asking the performers if they wanted to perform
Ceremony of Us in San Francisco, had already placed an option on a the-
ater, and the Dilexi Gallery Foundation was to privately produce a record
using tapes of some of the workshop discussions. Charles Amirkhanian,
who created the electronic tape score for Ceremony of Us and worked on
the record, described the studio atmosphere as one of “combustion”: “Ann
felt she could bring the [Watts] dancers to San Francisco, have them work

280 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

with upper middle class white kids, and somehow change their picture. But
what we all learned was that there are certain psychological imprints that
are embedded in our psyches and it’s very hard to change.”87
The rage about the program listing was probably heightened by a divi-
sive conflict that had arisen earlier when late one afternoon, after a partic-
ularly rigorous rehearsal, Ann distributed a piece of paper to all twenty-
two performers and asked them to sign it. According to Coleman, all but
one Watts performer, John Hopkins, or Black John as he was called, signed
the paper without even reading it. John, however, balked. The piece of pa-
per turned out to be a consent form for the making of a documentary about
the workshop process. Ann, who was one of eleven Bay Area artists to re-
ceive a five-hundred-dollar grant to make a film of their work, chose to film
the Watts project. As she customarily did with grants, she turned the money
over to the Dancers’ Workshop fund, which distributed money to mem-
bers of the San Francisco group (excluding Daria and Rana) to help toward
covering the costs of their performing in Los Angeles. The specter of in-
equity had been loosened. As Coleman indicated later, rumors started cir-
culating among the black performers that they were getting “ripped oª ”
by the whites, who were “rich anyway and didn’t need the money.” Although
things were eventually smoothed over enough for the performance to pro-
ceed, an important breach of trust had occurred. Several of the Watts per-
formers felt their worst suspicions of being exploited had been confirmed.
When these feelings came up at the post-performance seminar, Ann coun-
tered by trying to drag the discussion from status, power, and money back
to art:

Do you want to continue as artists? It’s one thing to continue and another
to work towards a specific goal, which we did. What happened last night
has never happened on any stage in the world. That’s the reason we’re all
feeling so intense, we all know this, and we could eªect tremendous change
through artistic and social change. It’s another problem to know if you
can stretch yourselves in your personal lives. That’s the answer I came
here to get.88

Baum, however, sensed a limitation in Ann’s answer when he remarked:

“I felt a certain shallowness [in the performance] which I attribute to an
avoidance of those issues which appeared at that meeting the next day.”89
In seeking to escape the painful binary of being either invisible because of
race or too visible because of it, the Studio Watts performers found that art

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 281

 practices have their own rules of power and authority. Invisibility of one-
self and one’s issues can be achieved inadvertently, just when one thinks
one is proceeding toward visibility. In Ceremony of Us, crafting a theater
piece about race and personal empowerment resulted in the individual rad-
icalized identities of the performers being erased and their authority being
subsumed in the established power structure of the theater. Moreover, there
was a diªerence in expectations. As Coleman pointed out, the Studio Watts
performers were looking to Ceremony of Us as “their ticket out of the
ghetto.” “We were all fixing to go to New York,” she said. “We thought,
‘Oh, Broadway is the next stop!’”
Much as Ceremony of Us drew criticism from its performers, it also re-
ceived a mixed reaction from reviewers. Many people, including Ann,
Baum, and the critics, expected more in the way of an art event. Ceremony
of Us had turned out to be a dance about the process of uncovering rather
than arrival at a well-formed statement. Martin Bernheimer, who reviewed
the performance in the Los Angeles Times, derided it as “pretentious” and
at best “mildly entertaining.” Bernheimer suggested that Ann had aban-
doned her traditional modern dance training in favor of shallow philoso-
phizing through physical actions. “Thursday’s overriding impression had
something to do with happy goings-on at a co-ed gymnasium, one where
the participants take their private religions very seriously,” Bernheimer
wrote. “The artistic validity of the evening is di‹cult to evaluate, since the
producers pretended to be more concerned with sociology than with art.
Miss Halprin long ago gave up conventional dance formalities and turned
her back on her Humphrey-Weidman-Margaret H’Doubler training. She
concerned herself instead with the expression and solution of philosophic
problems in symbolic, physical terms.”90
The review that stung Ann the most was that written by her former as-
sociate and student John Rockwell. Writing in the Oakland Tribune as mu-
sic critic, Rockwell sensitively described the gap between what he felt the
intentions of the dance were and the ways in which it failed to reach those
goals. He criticized the evening for having “too many parts [that] went on
far too long” or that were “crippled by a kind of terribly earnest, self-
indulgent pretension.” In particular, Rockwell noted the audience partici-
pation was “qualitatively and quantitatively on a low level.” He wrote that
Ann “hasn’t figured out yet how to combine a performance situation and
this kind of audience-generated theater experience,” referring directly to the
tension that would plague much of Ann’s work from this moment forward—
how to create an experience that was as captivating for the spectators as it

282 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

was transformative for the performers: “The art did not succeed in pro-
jecting the full intensity of the things I am sure Halprin wanted to get across:
the two groups, the roles of the various strong and weak members within
the groups, the simple fact of racial and human interaction. Far too often
Ceremony of Us was neither natural nor artful.”91
When Ann communicated to Rockwell how upset she was with his re-
view, he wrote her a two-page note of apology and explanation. Rockwell
gently tried to explain how his understanding of her work made him a per-
ceptive, but not necessarily a reflexively sympathetic, viewer. “Being a critic
is a complicated thing,” he noted. “Sometimes I feel, in true D/W [Dancers’
Workshop] manner, that I should just dig things. But I, and the D/W for
that matter, am more complicated than that!”92 Rockwell was striving to
broaden Ann’s conception of criticism and the critic’s role while acknowl-
edging that much in his perceptual training was rooted in his experience
of doing her work. As often happened with the more accomplished people
she gathered around her, Rockwell wanted to push Ann to face the limits
as well as the bounty of her methods. By this point, however, Ann was so
deeply inside the climate of candor and confession that she had worked to
build in the Ceremony of Us workshop that she knew more how the piece
felt than how it read externally as an independent work of art.
In Ann’s attempts to converge the ideological and the aesthetic, the
aesthetic lost out in Ceremony of Us. Success in the world of the studio’s
reality—a frank performance of tasks, for example—doesn’t automatically
equate with success on the public stage. In addition, Ann’s eªorts at mak-
ing social morality the score for the piece had confused theatrical perfor-
mance and ritual.93 Even though Ann was creating a theatrical work out of
the real emotions and encounters of her two groups of dancers in Ceremony
of Us, the performers’ attempts to substitute a theatrical presence for a real-
life one were necessarily incomplete and ambivalent. Being oneself on
stage— or, as Daria had discovered, in front of a camera—is diªerent from
being oneself in daily life, and the context changes the expectations of the
spectator.
In the wake of all the criticism, Ann’s focus went more deeply into the
studio and away from the stage. The experiences and lessons of Ceremony
of Us took hold on the microperformance level, in Ann’s daily studio prac-
tice. If this piece failed as art, that mattered less than whether it succeeded
as an experience. Working intuitively, Ann would turn increasingly to the
experience of change as the goal rather than a performance per se.94
The value of the workshop experience was suggested in an article that

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 283

 John Rockwell wrote based on his direct observations. Even though he crit-
icized the final performance, he recognized: “The Watts sessions, both in
each separate group and especially when the two are combined, have been
absolutely extraordinary in their intensity. Not only are the personal
changes marked, but their expression in artistic terms is transparently clear.”
Although others might have disagreed, for him the prevailing tension in
these workshops was “not a racial tension, really, but an artistic and human
tension.” He indicated, “All of what Ann Halprin had been doing over the
last 10 years seemed to coalesce in these sessions.”95
As a way of continuing the interracial workshop experience, Ann invited
several of the Watts performers to San Francisco to join her group, and three
of the men—Xavier Nash, Melvin Garrett, and John Hopkins—came. Cer-
emony of Us, however, was not performed again with the full cast, although
there was one performance in the gymnasium at Oakland’s Laney College.
In late March 1969, a month after the Taper performance, Ann and several
of the Studio Watts and Dancers’ Workshop dancers presented an abbre-
viated version, “Event in a Chapel,” at the University of the Pacific in Stock-
ton, California, at the invitation of the university chaplain. A newspaper
account contains the by-now customary mix of derision, curiosity, and dis-
missal. “It might have been better described as ‘The Big Turn-On,’” the re-
porter said, describing a series of conga lines, pat-a-cake, and red light–green
light games that came directly from Ceremony of Us.96 “We were idealistic.
We wanted everyone to love each other,” Annie Hallett, one of the San Fran-
cisco dancers, said years later, ascribing a chaste innocence to the aªection.
“Everyone was smiling and hugging—it was the sixties.”97

The five months of the Ceremony of Us workshop gave Ann a fresh under-
standing of just how complex and layered the interweavings of each indi-
vidual’s political, racial, and cultural history are in the performance work
the group fashions. This realization prompted Ann to rethink how to pre-
pare individuals to perform and how to lead them to discover, within their
own lives, the material for their performances. She spent the summer of
1969 tracing how the personal might evolve into the political and social for
herself as well as her dancers. In July Ann held the first of dozens of mul-
tiracial workshops in which she probed these issues and tested means for
doing what she now felt was her raison d’être as an artist—“trying to con-
nect dance to people’s lives.”98 She also began her Reach Out program, a
multiracial ensemble of dancers, funded by the National Endowment for

284 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

the Arts’ Expansion Arts Program.99 This innovative program would con-
tinue for the next twelve years, until the government funding ended in the
mid-1980s with the Reagan administration’s cuts.
In a letter written in late August 1969, at the end of her first multicul-
tural summer workshop, Ann reported to the people who had donated
money to support it that the twenty-six participants, all in their twenties,
included ten African Americans, one Asian American, two Latinos, and
thirteen Caucasians. Calling the work they did together “a natural theater
of life” and “humanistic art as social action,” she posited the workshop as
a critical social intervention, a laboratory, and a model for new solutions
to social problems:

Staª and administration were all white (but this will soon alter as a result
of the workshop training). The extreme polarities that were manifested
in our group [were] a microcosm of our present society. We were black/
white; rich/poor; ivy league education to ghetto streets; the mystic drug
oriented hippie to the hard core realist. Breaking down barriers that have
separated us for too long and building a common trust became the task
of this group. Using the media of movement and the arts, we explored
and discovered new ways to meet the staggering challenge of these differ-
ences that aªect us all.100

The Reach Out program extended the eªorts in the summer workshop.
This outreach program (its title an inadvertent tribute to Ann’s humorous
penchant for malapropisms) aimed both to recruit minority students and
to place these students as teachers and administrators. As if returning to
her own roots in H’Doubler’s program for developing dance educators, Ann
began a teacher training program for the minority dance students she re-
cruited. The year-long Reach Out training and apprenticeship began with
students assisting Ann for six months in her dance studio teaching. Then,
for two months, teams of two students shared the teaching of a whole class
while a third one watched and commented afterward as an evaluator. Each
student was given $50 weekly for expenses and free housing was provided.
The staª used the old Victorian Phelps House (now a San Francisco land-
mark) behind 321 Divisadero, which the Dancers’ Workshop rented for $275
a month. (Ann had a room there as well for times when it was more con-
venient to stay there than to drive back to Marin.) Others associated with
the studio lived, sometimes with their partners, in another house down the
street. These living situations were practical, since the rental houses were

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 285

 next to the studios. Most of the black dancers who began working with
Ann were men, and some of them paired oª with white women from the
studio, so the arrangements came to be ideological and romantic as well.
The spillover from life inside the studio to life outside underlines just how
theatrically unmediated the physical and emotional material was that Ann
was drawing out of these performers.
As Ann explained the program, “I was training these minority dancers
so they could go out into their own communities to teach and network with
community groups to spread dance back into their own neighborhoods.”
At the end of the apprenticeship program, Ann helped the trainees find
jobs with community groups and correctional centers. In terms of the classes
she oªered, Ann said, “I always wanted to invest in people’s own creating.
I never allowed people to imitate me.” When choosing the stylistic forms
for her curriculum, Ann noted, “I wanted them to stay in the black tradi-
tion.” Ann also arranged for the black dancers to take classes with Ruth
Beckford, a former student of Katherine Dunham who was the only black
dancer teaching in the Bay Area at the time and who had stayed in touch
with Ann since performing with her in the late 1950s.
Several of the students who were particularly good at street dance, in-
cluding Jasmine Nash, Xavier’s sister, began teaching classes in street dance
at the studio. “Ann had been inviting me to come over [to the Dancers’
Workshop studio] and share some of the dances that I knew and I hadn’t
done that,” Jasmine said. Then one day she peeked through the door at
Ann’s class and decided she was intrigued enough by what she saw to give
it a try. “So I began teaching these dances that young people, teenagers and
younger, create all the time in high school and junior high school and at
home, but they weren’t valued. And it really wasn’t until I met Ann that I
got in touch with the value myself and was able to teach that and translate
it.”101 Through Jasmine Nash and others, Ann oªered classes in street dance
for white dancers decades before hip-hop made it into modern dance
schools. She was finding not just art, but dance culture where no one else
had looked.
While the traditional dance world may have been skeptical about Ann’s
work at this time, the funding community embraced her enthusiastically.
In May 1970 she hosted a press conference at the Dancers’ Workshop stu-
dios to announce the receipt of a $25,000 matching grant from the San
Francisco Foundation to support what she was now calling her “humanis-
tic theater” and “working studies in racial harmony through dance.”102 She
told the assembled press that an anonymous donor in the East had already

286 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

matched the foundation money with a $25,000 private donation.103 Ann
explained to the assembled journalists that the newest binary she was work-
ing to shatter was that between “a professional company and a training
school situation,” and that her target population of performers was now
“Blacks, Whites and Asians.”104 After setting up a miniature mazelike en-
vironment in her studio for the bewildered press to negotiate, the dancers
served them a lunch of “Chinese meat buns, fried chicken à la Midwest,
potato salad with a touch of kosher pickle and peach cobbler à la Soul.”
Just as in Ceremony of Us and Lunch, Ann freely traversed the fresh and the
curiously clichéd as she mined cultural memories in her quest for a socially
relevant aesthetic framework.

As Ann’s multicultural training program developed, she turned her focus

in performance to the larger topic of social justice, creating four consciously
activist works in quick succession: The Bust (1969), Blank Placard Dance
(1970), New Time Shu›e (1970), and Kadosh (1971). The Bust (which got
its title only later) was a curious event. It began as an improvisatory street
happening, what Ann described as a “St. Vitus Day Parade” project of the
student composition class. It was performed by twelve members of Ann’s
new multiracial company. Paul Ryan, a friend of Ann’s, filmed the event
by closely following the dancers as they skipped, crawled, and rolled down
Haight Street on the afternoon of December 17, 1969. In the twenty-minute
film there are glimpses of Ann wearing a black cape over her shirt and pants,
at times with sunglasses and a scarf over her Afro-like “natural” hair. But
it is the white women who are the most raucous performers. They bellow,
claw at the air, and swing their limbs wildly while the three black men re-
peatedly attempt to swaddle them in lengths of brown butcher paper. As
the white women dancers throw themselves to the sidewalk and crawl on
all fours across the busy Haight Street intersections, biting the lengths of
paper like leashes held in their mouths, the black men alternately bind them
in the paper and roughly herd them around. The film thus presents a strange
vision of racialized victimization and willing white female subjugation to
black males that is paradoxically made less distressing by the presence of
the men with cameras (who are included in the film). This act of docu-
menting the making of the film also puts the frame of performance around
the actions of the dancers and immediately signals that their actions and
cries are performative, not actual, and that this is art, not unmediated abuse.
The role of spectatorship is thus modeled for the viewer and cast as a pre-

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 287

 pared part of the performance. The presence of the men documenting the
work suggests the manner in which viewers should react to this scene, as
well as signaling that this craziness is virtual and theatrically deliberate.
At several points in the film the camera pans past the drivers and pas-
sengers in the cars and buses traveling along the busy boulevard and cap-
tures their reactions. Their expressions mostly register surprise and amuse-
ment, but in one instance a black woman with a small child quickly locks
the car doors, seemingly in fear. In the final minutes of the film, an addi-
tional layer of spectatorship is added as uniformed members of the San Fran-
cisco Police Department Tactical Squad arrive and begin assisting the
women performers to their feet. Two of the men and one of the women
are then put into a police wagon to be driven to the station for booking.
Throughout the police roundup, Ann stands calmly outside the action, oc-
casionally stepping up to an o‹cer to explain a few things to him and then
respectfully stepping back. Sergeant Donald Goad later reported that he
responded to reports that a crowd of people were “exposing themselves”
and found that “two of the girls were rolling around on the ground on their
backs very slowly as if under the influence of drugs.”105 Two weeks after
the arrests, on New Year’s Eve, Ann staged a benefit party at the Divisadero
Street studio to earn back the $2,265 bail charges paid for the three “busted”
dancers.106
Paradoxically, in the film, which goes by the title The Bust, everything
seems chaotic, in visual and emotional disorder, until the spectacle ceases
to be the performance and becomes the arrest, when the “event” becomes
most tightly focused and scripted. The arrest seems a matter-of-fact con-
sequence of and yet an extreme reaction to the infraction of creating a public
theater improvisation or, as Ann explains in the film, “doing a little street
theater downstairs.” ( Years later Ann acknowledged that the easiest refer-
ence people could make when they saw this performance was the uncon-
trolled behavior of stoned kids in the Haight-Ashbury area. “The police
decided we must be freaking out on drugs and arrested us,” she said.107) As
the film shows, the final “performance”—a spontaneous collaboration be-
tween Dancers’ Workshop and the Tactical Squad—drew an ad hoc clus-
ter of black residents from the neighborhood, who gathered to watch the
curious spectacle of these young folks nonchalantly inviting arrest. The spec-
tators’ expressions are inquisitive and amused. What kind of decadence is
it for middle-class whites to do something so crazy as to deliberately court
arrest by this kind of art making? As the police drive oª with her dancers,
Ann turns to the camera and explains that this is part of a “class presenta-

288 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

tion dealing with the community” and “a theatrical protest against all the
killings in the world today.” She says simply, “We were interested in how
the community would respond.”
A more stylized protest, created in early 1970 and referred to simply as
Blank Placard Dance, was Ann’s performance riposte to the arrest filmed in
The Bust. As a gesture, it was pure 1960s in its simultaneously active and
passive posture. Ann and her dancers, all dressed in white, marched through
several downtown streets in San Francisco carrying placards. It looked like
a typical protest march. Yet as soon as one looked at their placards, the or-
dinariness gave way to puzzlement. There was no message on any of the
placards they waved in the air. One is conditioned to reading such white
rectangles as spaces for blunt warnings, not the ruminative ambiguities of
art.108 Everything and nothing might be protested here. Ann captures a clas-
sic cyclical 1960s attitude—provoke authority and then wait for a reaction
and react to that.
In Blank Placard Dance it is possible to see the intersection of a number
of Ann’s concerns about memory, performance, and community behaviors.
Happenings and street theater are the most closely related performance gen-
res, but the kind of socially activist art initiated by Ceremony of Us is also
evident. Layered on that is a questioning of behaviors framed as if a psy-
chologist or social scientist were setting up a research project. The marchers
in Blank Placard Dance stay the requisite ten feet apart, so they do not con-
stitute a demonstration as defined by the law, and thus avoid being arrested
again. “My idea,” Ann has said, “was that there were so many protests go-
ing on and this way each person watching us could just imagine whatever
protest slogan they wanted on the placards.”109 Ann’s dance thus became a
performed statement about both those who protested through public
demonstration and the institutional practices that controlled them.
Interestingly, on February 21, 1965, five years before Ann created Blank
Placard Dance, Candid Camera aired a vignette called “Picketing Against
Everything with Nothing.” Filmed in the Bronx, New York, this episode
featured three men in suits and overcoats walking in a small circle on a side-
walk in front of a huge snow-covered empty lot. The circling men carried
big placards, all blank, while a fourth distributed blank handbills to
passersby and pleaded with them to please join the picket line. Candid Cam-
era director Allen Funt’s concern here was to activate social science rather
than aesthetic strategies, but viewed side by side with Ann’s dance it is cu-
rious how these issues overlap. As the psychologist Stanley Milgram has
noted, this and other Candid Camera episodes do several things that mark

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 289

 them as participating in the methodology of the social sciences.110 Most
relevant to Ann’s work is the technique of focusing on a behavior embed-
ded in the stream of everyday life and then, by disrupting the setting for
this behavior, revealing our habits of vision. Whereas Funt is interested in
revealing (and ridiculing) human behaviors and the desire to conform and
not stand out, Ann’s work champions the nonconformist impulse and al-
lows individuals to feel comfortable being iconoclasts and standing out for
the right (art) reasons. By thrusting blank handbills into the hands of
passersby and recruiting people, huckster-style, oª the street to walk the
picket line, Funt orchestrates a complex ruse to coerce people into looking
foolish by tricking them into obedience. This could be a recipe for totali-
tarianism whereas Ann’s use of these same props becomes, in the best in-
stance, a rehearsal for democracy.
Several months after Blank Placard, Ann turned to what can be seen as
a middle piece in a trilogy that includes Ceremony of Us and Kadosh, works
she identifies as focusing on the “relationship of the individual body to the
collective body, and the interrelationship of communities.”111 In early June
1970 Ann received a letter from a black inmate in Northern California’s
Soledad State Prison, a heavy security prison known during that period for
its racial trouble and tensions between guards and prisoners. The writer,
Stanley Goree, had read an article in the Oakland Tribune about Ann’s mul-
tiracial company, and he wanted to invite Ann to perform in the prison as
the guest of a newly formed group of black men organizing for more op-
tions for educational skills:

I dig the things your dance group is doing, and as I read the article I was
thinking how beautiful and realistic it would be if you could do a show
for us here in one of the state’s tightest iron boxes. There has never been
anything hip here, ever. Would you consider bringing your dancers here
to entertain us? And simply to visit with us? To do a show for the Black,
Brown and White inmates (scratch inmates and insert humans) who believe
in unity and brotherhood against a common enemy.112

Ann was delighted with the invitation. She saw in it the opportunity to
extend the notion of performing about racial communities that she had be-
gun with Ceremony of Us. Her personal writing from this period indicates
that rather than slowing her down, the Watts conflicts had only inspired
her to take on with more urgency the cause of addressing racial and social
tensions through dance. The possibility of pursuing this in the high-risk

290 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

environment of a men’s prison excited her. As she wrote in a diary about
her performances around that time:

No performance has taken place at Soledad without the prisoners them-

selves being seated in the hall in a segregated fashion, Black, Chicanos,
Whites in their own territories. No performance has taken place at Sole-
dad in which the prisoners have not walked out in large numbers during
the performance. We were shown special exit doors to use in case of a riot
during the performance for our own safety.113

The idea of wresting a social success out of this climate of hopelessness re-
inforced Ann’s belief in the power of her art. In August Ann’s managing
director, Ken Margolis, signed a contract to perform the work Ann was call-
ing New Time Shu›e on October 3 in the prison. For the Soledad experi-
ment Ann was joined by several new minority dancers she had recruited
from Watts and Oakland.
The racial polarization in the prison was intense, so Ann commenced
New Time Shu›e by addressing the sharply segregated units in the hall. She
mirrored on stage the divisions and then amplified the distinctive racial iden-
tities through improvised songs, rhythms, and movements. Even her ac-
count slips into the rhythm and slang of the various groups as she describes
them:

The black guys in the group do a black rap and jive that sends the black
inmates howling. Alicia, a [Chicana], carries on a dialogue in Spanish
with the Chicano prisoners, Pamela does an Asian song and a white dude
comes across as a hippie type. The experience is less a performance than a
confrontation between our two communities—the workshop community
and the prison community.114

After addressing the racial groups in the hall in their individual perfor-
mance style, the room as a whole was coaxed into a collective clapping and
singing jam as the Dancers’ Workshop dared to come out into the audience.
As Ann described the experience to Margaret H’Doubler, when her mentor
from Wisconsin came to California to teach master classes at Mills College
later that year, in New Time Shu›e her formula for dancing (and singing)
across racial divides worked, and by the performance’s end the prison hall
was a changed place. The result, Ann reported, was hailed as “the inmates’
first positive interaction with each other.” It was also a learning experience

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 291

 for Ann. “I was the only white person [among the female performers],” Ann
told H’Doubler. “And I can’t say I’m white because I’m Jewish,” Ann con-
tinued in a reference to the way she had begun to consciously cultivate her
ethnic identity. “White middle class society is so secure. I just have a little
inkling of what it is to be a minority in this society, and in very subtle ways
to not conform to White Anglo Saxon culture.”115
After one additional workshop at a women’s correctional facility on the
East Coast, Ann would never again work with incarcerated populations,
yet she would take this belief in the communally curative force of dance
into marginalized and at-risk groups in other ways. “We are saying by our
rhythm and movement and the way we inter-relate: ‘Look, we can get it
together and have a good time; you can too, and look what is possible on
the outside. Life doesn’t have to be a nightmare.’”116
About two months after New Time Shu›e, in early December 1970, Ann
was visited by the fine arts committee from Temple Sinai in Oakland. Un-
der the leadership of Rabbi Samuel Broude, the adventuresome head of this
Reform synagogue, Temple Sinai had begun to include monthly perform-
ing arts performances as part of its Friday night Shabbat services, in place
of the customary Sabbath sermon. After watching a rehearsal of the multi-
racial group the committee decided to commission its first dance work for
the synagogue from her. “The fact that this was an integrated group was a
plus,” Broude remembered, “because in addition to expressing the Sabbath
we were saying here’s a social motivation.”117 For the next two months Rabbi
Broude made weekly visits to Ann’s studio, where he would oªer impromptu
explanations of the meaning and background of the Jewish prayers that were
part of the Friday night services.
During this period Ann seemed to be reidentifying with her Jewish her-
itage as a cultural tradition, just as she had prompted the black, Asian, and
Latino dancers in her group to do with their heritages. Jasmine Nash re-
called with amusement that at the same time that Ann was generously spon-
soring her multicultural dancers in Werner Erhard’s est training seminar
for minorities, she tried to talk her way into this large group awareness pro-
gram as a minority—Jewish.118 The est staª was not convinced. “It became
very apparent to me that dance had been dominated by an Anglo-Saxon
culture,” Ann later told an interviewer. “I was just astonished at the prej-
udices that I didn’t even know I had. I didn’t know a damn about this scope
of movement on an ethnic level,” said Ann, who had let her own curly red
hair grow into a soft, full Jewish “Afro.”119
In Kadosh Ann brought her focus on prompting dialogues among com-

292 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

munities home to her own Jewish background. She was trying to use dance
aggressively to bridge cultural diªerences and to foster an empathetic un-
derstanding of others’ feelings by physically trying on their gestures,
rhythms, and rituals. Kadosh began with Ann and her dancers davening,
moving in the rhythmic swaying characteristic of Eastern European Jews,
like Ann’s grandfather, deep in prayer. The dancers streamed down the aisles
of the sanctuary toward the raised bima, where the rabbi and cantor stood.
The dancers then began hurling a litany of unanswerable questions at the
rabbi, demanding to know how it is possible to celebrate Sabbath joy when
there is so much pain and suªering in the world, and why people are afraid
to touch one another, and why six million Jews were murdered in the Holo-
caust. Then the dancers tore their clothes and fell to the ground in violent
twisted gestures of broken limbs, extinguishing the lit candles they held as
they collapsed. Rabbi Broude said he cried at this portion of the service,
because the visualization of the text that he knew so well was made freshly
vivid with this enactment.
In the darkened sanctuary the rabbi began to recite the Kaddish, the He-
brew prayer for the dead, and the dancers gradually stood up. Each one lit
a Sabbath candle, and their gestures and their mood began to escalate into
joyfulness. “Little by little it crescendoed to where it was very joyous,” the
rabbi recalled. “We had an elderly couple from the congregation, Ed and
Amelia Kushner. They came in from the entrance to the sanctuary and down
the middle aisle with myrtle branches, a sign of life and renewal. So the
dancers started dancing around because by this time their joy had led them
up on the bima.” Then, in a gesture echoing the conclusion of Ceremony
of Us, the dancers joined hands with willing members of the congregation
and led them up the aisles and out into the street in a weaving line dance
that continued around the corner and into the social hall next door.
Neither fully symbolic nor fully literal, Kadosh showcased Ann’s fusion
of the real and the imagined as an artifact of cultural memory. When asked
if he thought Ann’s goal was to actually move the congregation to social
action, the rabbi demurred. “I think the idea was to enable us to get into
this spiritual place, to have a taste of the messianic.” Rabbi Broude said
that for him the only surprise was how emotionally moved he was by the
performance. About half the congregation was equally moved, while the
other half was outraged. “I don’t know if anybody was neutral,” Broude
said. “Half thought it was fantastic, and half thought it was terrible!”
The subsequent issue of the Temple Sinai newsletter printed several im-
passioned reactions to the dance—members who were upset that shirtless

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 293

 men had danced on the bima and others who were touched to see a black
man repeating the words of a Hebrew prayer over and over with real pas-
sion. “I am stirred by this new way of expressing brotherhood,” member
Susi Oppenheimer wrote. “As an aftertaste it left me with the feeling of
being part of the community of all men. So wasn’t it worth having?”120
The aesthetic impact of Ann’s socially conscious dances reverberated be-
yond the performance, publicly constructing allegories that might literally
reveal the relational nature of all communities.
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Ann was gesturing toward mak-
ing her art more inclusive by broadening the categories of who performed
it and by drafting, initially fleetingly, spectators as participants. She was mov-
ing beyond simply espousing the idealism of democracy through the im-
plied egalitarian narratives of her dance events, something that had a prior
history in American modern dance between the wars. Rather, she was mov-
ing toward creating dance that could be performed by hundreds of non-
dancers. Her increased social activism was only one aspect of this shift. An-
other came from the unlikely arena of the human potential movement and
her earlier work with Fritz Perls. Decades later Ann commented that for her
the most profound idea of the sixties was: therapy isn’t just for “crazy” people.
She eªectively came to rewrite that as: dance isn’t just for dancers. Her fa-
vorite Gestalt aphorism was “emotions are facts.” Ann wanted to integrate
these “facts” of the common person’s emotions into dance. Not because she
was doing therapy, she insisted, “but because it was a necessity in the art
process.”121 Real emotions, just like real bodies and identities, had been ig-
nored for too long.
During this late 1960s and early 1970s period Ann was recruited by George
Leonard, vice president of Esalen, to help him orchestrate the opening group
improvisations at several weekend workshops conducted by Esalen around
the United States. “She was a very important person in the field,” Leonard
later said, describing how he and Ann directed the hundreds of workshop
participants who gathered in hotel ballrooms in Texas, Nebraska, and
Hawaii to sample the Esalen approach. “She brought dancing and the whole
somatics movement” into the human potential movement, Leonard indi-
cated. “She had great spirit and energy and showed that the body has a wis-
dom and is not a dumb mechanism.”122 In turn, for Ann, the crowds at
these gatherings opened the possibilities for orchestrating mass movement
that was individualistic and social without being uniform or fascistic.
At the same time that Ann was pushing for the formation of new, inte-
grated communities, she discovered firsthand that there could be a dark side

294 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

to all this openness. The incident, which occurred at the end of 1970, would
eventually help lead Ann into a focus on healing, both physically and emo-
tionally. It involved Sir Lawrence Washington, a young football player at
Merritt College in Oakland whom Ann had seen in a dance class and re-
cruited to join her Reach Out group. “I had never known a white person
before the Halprins,” Washington recalled. “And here she was inviting me
into her school and home. They [Ann and Larry] were the first white people
I trusted. I loved them both.”123 At the end of 1970, in a workshop, Wash-
ington had drawn a portrait of himself with a large helmet on his head and
his body bleeding and pierced by arrows. He depicted half of himself as a
dead tree with an arm and a leg chained to the edge of the paper. Later that
evening, when the workshop held a New Year’s Eve party in the Divisadero
Street studio, a rowdy group tried to crash the party. As they climbed the
stairs to the studio, Washington and two other Reach Out dancers tried to
turn them back. Washington was hit on the head with a wooden table leg
that had a long screw protruding from it and was knocked unconscious.
He underwent emergency surgery and spent the next several weeks in the
hospital, paralyzed in his right arm and leg, the same ones he had drawn
in chains earlier. It was months before he recovered, and during that time
Ann visited him regularly in the hospital. She continued to be troubled by
the strangely prescient quality of his self-portrait. During one visit to his
hospital room, Ann brought Washington’s self-portrait and asked him to
indicate to her what she should do to modify the image. He gestured for
her to sever his chains. “I did and after that, he began to improve,” Ann
said. “[Soon] he was dancing with the multiracial company on its first tour
to the East Coast.”124

In the summer of 1971 Ann appeared for the first time as a guest artist at
the American Dance Festival. The festival, held at Connecticut College in
New London, was the successor to the Bennington summer program and
the most distinguished summer center for modern dance in the nation.
Ann’s performance was scheduled for the last weekend of the six-week fes-
tival. She led up to it by conducting two parallel workshops, one in San
Francisco with her Reach Out company and one in New London with the
festival students, modeled on her approach to Ceremony of Us almost three
years earlier. Ann brought the two groups together in New London the week
before the performance to explore jointly a series of improvisatory situa-
tions around the idea of an East Coast and a West Coast pack of animals.

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 295

 John Muto, a Dancers’ Workshop staª member, designed an elaborate score,
printed in the program, that detailed the progression over the evening from
random and individual placement in space through meetings at a watering
hole, hunting, courtship, and fighting, into a resolution with the forma-
tion of a unified herd.
Ann approached the animal imagery with sincerity, believing it could be
a path into what she called “the emotional body” of each individual. She
was trying to find a bedrock issue that each performer could respond to as
intensively as the Ceremony of Us dancers had addressed race. The result-
ing dance, called alternately Animal Ritual or West/East Stereo, was based on
Ann’s belief that group situations provided a special reality where the self-
imposed limits of physical and emotional blocks could be surmounted. She
saw this as an aesthetic goal, although it could just as readily have been per-
ceived as a therapeutic one. And that is where some took issue with Ani-
mal Ritual, calling it a public exercise in sensitivity training and an encounter
group rather than art. Ann steadfastly insisted she was engaged in an ex-
periment to find out what this work could accomplish in the way of indi-
vidual and social change, and she deliberately chose the term ritual as a way
of sidestepping the view of art and therapy as mutually exclusive categories.
Throughout her career she has always shunned the appellation therapy or
therapeutic in conjunction with her work.125
On a personal level, Ann was working at this time with diªerent thera-
pists, trying to push past her own physical and emotional limits in private
sessions with the psychotherapist John Rinn and the physiotherapist Ida
Rolf. Rinn, a student of Ann’s who was married to Mills College dance in-
structor Rebecca Fuller, collaborated with Ann on relating to sexuality, sen-
suality, and intimacy, and negotiating the distinctions between them.126
They worked together on creating sound and movement exercises to push
past physical behaviors, releasing feelings along with muscles. Much of this
was focused on interior changes, the kinds of alterations that felt more dra-
matic, and interesting, than they looked. With Ida Rolf, Ann underwent
the intense and often very painful process of “Rolfing,” a deep massage of
the fascia muscles of her body intended to recenter and better align her in
relation to gravity. Ann later said this work “alters the body drastically, but
in so doing, also alters your capacity to feel and increase[s] energy. Obvi-
ously, such increased capacities are invaluable to the performer.”127
In performance, Animal Ritual seemed to hover between dance and a salu-
tary rite, without becoming particularly compelling as a spectator event.

296 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

Several East Coast dance critics remarked on this, puzzling aloud about what
frame to use when looking at Ann’s dance. Marcia Siegel, writing for the
Boston Herald Traveler, wondered if the work should even be reviewed since
it seemed shaped so much more for participation than audience con-
sumption in any traditional sense:

What’s really going on here, I kept wanting to know. I suspect the animal
imitations were the least real thing about the piece, serving as a convenient
disguise for the displays of power, hostility and perhaps exhibitionism that
almost all the participants were engaged in.
Ann Halprin seems caught somewhere between art and therapy, and
what she needs for herself is probably diªerent from what she intends for
the members of her company. West/East Stereo [or Animal Ritual ] made
me wonder if the artist has the right to expose a real therapeutic situation
to an audience, of if the therapist has the right to interfere with the ther-
apeutic process in the interest of eªective theater, or indeed whether a
therapeutic change can take place at all in the presence of spectators. If
Ann Halprin gets a consistent answer to these questions, she may really
come up with something.128

The Animal Ritual Siegel describes teeters on the edge of uncontrol, an Apart-
ment 6 without the complexity of developed relationships or the formal brac-
ing of a clear structure for the improvisation. Hostility and exhibitionism
may become placeholders for ideas, or they may appear simply as unmedi-
ated emotions tapped, but not reimagined or reshaped, for performance.
Robert Pierce, another critic who was in the New London audience,
voiced a diªerent impression of the piece: “Although the action on stage
was similar to what you might find in a jungle, Ann’s interest was in basic
human reactions, instincts and rituals. . . . While they were portraying
animals, the dancers reacted to each other in ways not permitted in a civ-
ilized, highly socialized and restrictive society.”129 Indeed, the animal be-
haviors were a frame within the frame of performance, sanctioning essen-
tially whatever aggression, sexuality, hostility, and mock fornication the
performers brought forth—and they brought forth a lot. No one seemed
to notice the paradox of a “natural” human dance based on make-believe
about what other species might do, perhaps because it was so transparently
just a device for sanctioning “liberated” (unsocialized) behaviors.
Ann’s strategy here was collective memory as invention or, as Siegel saw

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 297

 it, an event “caught somewhere between therapy and art.” Ann’s Apartment
6 had, of course, already grafted intense therapeutic-type exchanges onto
the stage, and therapeutic change as a spectator event had been pioneered
in Fritz Perls’s group Gestalt sessions. What Animal Ritual revealed as much
as anything was both how stubbornly Ann clung to a path of exploration
and how unabashed she was in allowing both the trials and the failures of
her work to unfold in full public view. Perhaps the dance deck had given
her a falsely cloistered sense of public space and the seemingly infinite pos-
sibility of trying and discarding performance material. Much of her work
of this period was performed on this high wire of constant and full expo-
sure, and the missteps, like Animal Ritual, could be embarrassingly public.
Ann and her company of African American males, which is essentially
what Reach Out became as the women dancers left one by one, also pre-
sented a participatory Animal Ritual downstairs at New York’s City Center
as part of their trip east. Larry’s uncle Sydney Luria, his wife Lucille, and
the dance writers Jack Anderson and George Dorris were among those who
attended a workshop Ann also gave in the Open Center in New York, a
New Age space. All four came away perplexed. Uncle Sydney and Lucille
had gamely come with a cardboard box, since the performance announce-
ment specified that participants were to bring an object to help carry out
the theme of the evening—the creation of an environment. Others arrived
with a range of amusing and dangerous objects, from armfuls of tennis balls
to a board covered with sharp nails that would shred the foot of anyone
who stepped on it. Ann instructed the men and women to retreat to sep-
arate rooms and decide collectively what they wanted to do to carry out the
evening’s theme. The men created a dense tunnel-like structure, which they
instructed the women to crawl through. After this Ann, speaking through
a megaphone, instructed the fifty participants to take oª as much of their
clothing as they felt comfortable removing. “Then we did some rolling on
the floor, but not with the person you came with. I said to my wife later
that if a client had been there I would have had no [law] practice left!” Syd-
ney, a prominent attorney, laughed.130
Jack Anderson and George Dorris recalled watching the evening unhinge
when a group of the participants, men and women, charged in and smashed
and ripped apart the whole carefully constructed environment made by the
others. The next day Anderson ran into Ann, who confided that, unan-
nounced, a psychotherapist had sent his encounter group into the work-
shop without telling her about the psychological disorders of his pa-
tients.131 She was very upset by what happened, but powerless to do more

298 CEREMONY OF MEMORY

in the midst of the workshop than try to contain the damage and keep things
going. She certainly had limits in mind, even if no one else could see them.
The era of simple faith of the early 1960s had already ended for her, as
it had for the nation, with the assassination of John Kennedy, followed five
years later by the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy,
killings that shook the national trust in individuals’ ability to self-regulate
in an open democracy. The Death of Mr. Hippie, carried out in a flashy
mock funeral in the Haight-Ashbury district in October 1968, a few blocks
from Ann’s studio, had buried innocence along with the e‹gy. Now the
increasing violence and aggression, evidenced by the party and workshop
crashings in San Francisco and New York, were shattering the freedom of
Ann’s stage and her allegiance to the idea that collective action led to col-
lective good.

CEREMONY OF MEMORY 299

 NINE

Illness as Performance
1972– 199 1

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is

born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom
of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner
or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as
citizens of that other place.
susan sontag
Illness as Metaphor

dance, more than any other art form, is weighted toward showcas-
ing the kingdom of the well. Both those who create and those who per-
form dances are presumed to be healthy, the carriers of what Susan Sontag
calls “the good passport.” Using the body as an art medium usually depends
on physical control and stamina—signifiers of wellness. The more visible
the body, as in athletes or dancers, the more developed and refined this con-
trol tends to be, conveying an impression of underlying health. The king-
dom of the sick is hidden, and for certain types of illness it is a kingdom
of the shamed.
As 1972 began, Ann continued to map psychological well-being and health
through choreography. This was generally as close as contemporary dance
had come to portraying the kingdom of the sick. For dance, the psycho-
logical was the most comfortable dimension of the unwell because “ill-
nesses” of the mind rarely disfigure the body the way other diseases can.
Ann was finding her way by using the investigative and therapeutic tools
she had learned from Fritz Perls and other alternative therapists to track
psychological behaviors into performance states. Since the symptoms of
psychological disturbance often play out as exaggerated behaviors by bod-
ies that are otherwise unmarked, they are well suited for expression in dance.

300
Physical sickness, in contrast, marks the body, often making it too vulner-
able, too uncontrollable, too inscribed to be neutral as a medium for per-
formance. What the body in disease performs relentlessly is its own citi-
zenship in the kingdom of the sick.
For Ann, the year 1972 would deepen her notions of how dance can aªect
bodies in both sickness and health, physically and emotionally. But before
she turned to explore “the night-side of life,” she helped her daughter Daria
prepare for one of the biggest traditional celebrations of wellness: marriage—
to the actor Dennis Hopper. In the early 1970s Daria had met Hopper at
the Belgrade Film Festival; soon he began actively courting her and they
moved in together in Taos, New Mexico.1 Their wedding was planned for
May 16, 1972. Drawing on Ann’s sense of theater and Larry’s sensitivity to
shaping individuals’ encounters with space, Daria and her parents designed
a muted ritual on the dance deck, more notable for who was there and the
rustic location than for any scripted performances.
The marriage ceremony, a freely adapted Jewish rite of betrothal, was de-
scribed by a reporter from the Washington Post as “one of the most unusual
weddings we could witness in America” in an article headlined “Captain
America Weds.”2 (Actually it was Peter Fonda who wore the “Captain Amer-
ica” motorcycle jacket in the 1969 film Easy Rider, in which Hopper not
only starred but made his directorial debut.) The Post reporter elaborated
that the celebrity-studded wedding commenced with the sounding of a
trumpet. On this cue Larry took Daria’s arm and, holding it high in the
air, led her very slowly down the curving steps from the house to the dance
deck as the guests, assembled as an audience, sat on the benches overlook-
ing the vista of San Francisco Bay. Ann and the rabbi were waiting on the
deck under an elaborate chuppah hung with an old prayer shawl from Larry’s
family. After the wedding vows were exchanged, the guests scattered to load
their plates with food from the tables that ringed the deck. Most unusual,
as Larry’s Uncle Sydney recalled, was that there was no dancing.3
Seven months later, in December 1972, Daria gave birth to Ruthanna,
Larry and Ann’s first grandchild. By 1974, however, Daria would leave Hop-
per and return to the San Francisco Bay Area with her daughter. “I was in
a lot of trouble, very close to burnout. I just got through by the skin of my
teeth,” Daria later told Parade Magazine, somewhat cryptically, of that
period in her life. “It took me a long time to find my way again.”4 In some
ways Daria was the first person to really inhabit the liminal qualities of Hal-
prin’s art made at the boundary of life, and she spoke with honesty about
how ill-equipped a life in her mother’s art had made her for a life outside.5

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 301

 Within a few months of the wedding, Ann, who had inexplicably begun
losing weight, would encounter the most serious health crisis of her life.
Dancing and a reinvention of ritual would be critical to her response. Al-
ready, with her increasingly frank use of race, nudity, and sexual politics in
her male and female dance rites, Ann had been extending the aesthetic use
of ritual for rediscovery. Now, however, her work would gain new impetus
from her personal experience of life-threatening illness. Urgency and des-
peration would propel her out of the “normative conditions of urban life”
into the state of “homelessness” that Marianna Torgovnick identifies as “pro-
ducing primitivism in its most acute modern forms.”6 Her dual citizenship
was activated, embracing not only the kingdom of the well, but also the
kingdom of the sick.
Ann had launched her career in the postwar period by repudiating Martha
Graham’s formalized dance vocabulary, rendering herself stylistically home-
less as a dancer in much the same way Merce Cunningham had. However,
Cunningham remained in a consistently adversarial artistic dialogue with
Graham’s work, whereas Ann’s work resonated with certain aspects of Gra-
ham’s ritualism. Roger Copeland refers to Cunningham as having “mod-
ernized modern dance by repudiating its primitivist heritage.”7 Ann also
modernized modern dance, but she did this by contemporizing its primi-
tivist heritage rather than disavowing it. More important, Ann’s later work
would do the same for postmodern dance, essentially remodernizing it by
recuperating primitivism as a response to the aesthetics of indiªerence. She
recast dance as a vital agent for community expression and social change.
For Ann, primitivism would serve as what Torgovnick describes as a frame
whose presence allows us to “recontextualize modernity.”8 Ann was draft-
ing a contemporary urban variation of the primitive through dance and in
the process she was about to reveal to the West some of its own most deeply
worked metaphors of illness.
Over the previous four decades, Ann had traced a path from investiga-
tions of the structural logic of movement, to task performance, to ritual-
ized group encounters, in which she began experimenting with dance as a
way of healing society. In all her explorations, teaching was inseparable from
performance, and the pleasures of discovery in one linked with the satis-
factions of presentation in the other. Her workshops led her to the subject
and content of her dances. She continued to care about the end product,
a dance, and she would fuss with it when a performance was imminent,
adjusting costumes, spacing, and performance tone. But her initial inter-

302 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

est lay in the early broad discovery phase and the personalized response of
the individual dancers. Here the lessons from H’Doubler’s classroom were
contemporized and writ large, giving Ann an antidote to what she had long
decried as the anti-individualism of modern dance.
In building her approach to choreography on what she did not want to
happen (lockstep duplication), as much as what she did (personalized so-
lutions), Ann was pushing dance making toward the realm of the reme-
dial. In the period following the Kennedy and King assassinations, this took
on the added valence of social honesty through allowing each individual
to tell her or his own story. Most critically, Ann was increasingly working
this way not so much because it made better art for audiences, but because
it made for a deeper and more salutary experience for the performer. In
Ann’s theater of the 1970s, performers could disclose that they were some-
thing other than robust, tireless, and perfectly formed. It would be a short
step from this to a broader agenda of using dance to heal.

For several years Ann had favored starting her workshops by guiding her
adult students through a “visualization” process, asking them to draw life-
sized self-portraits as a first step in recovering their stories.9 In Ann’s for-
mula, visually displaying one’s beliefs about oneself leads to physical re-
sponses. The direct path into one’s body/mind is through the senses and
one’s emotional reactions. The drawn visualizations serve as the maps for
this journey. Much more than just a visual approximation of oneself, the
self-portrait drawing is intended as a site plan of the psyche, synecdoche of
the anxious soul, splayed graphically across the paper. In Ann’s process, this
drawing is a critical first step in externalizing sentiment and sensation be-
fore they can be given kinesthetic form and danced as art.
The blank piece of paper Ann presented her students with for the “psy-
chokinesthetic visualizations” had much the same function as the empty
chair Perls used in his psychodrama therapy sessions.10 From their recita-
tions of dreams, Perls often encouraged his patients to produce characters,
split-oª parts of the self, which they could place in an empty chair and
then interrogate and confront. Instead of serving as a seat on which to pro-
ject one’s feelings toward the unresolved part of oneself, Ann’s blank paper
oªered a two-dimensional stage on which to visualize this hidden and unas-
similated aspect of oneself. After the visualization, the critical part was the
process the student/patient used to assimilate his or her insights. Ann en-
couraged these encounters with unassimilated corners of one’s identity to

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 303

 unfold through movement rather than spoken words. She prompted her
students to “move” what they imagined to be the emotional state of the
drawn “other self.” Like Perls, she was aiming at a cathartic experience of
insight, achieved by improvising the movement of the character in the self-
portrait. Ann had intuitively recast this part of Perls’s Gestalt therapy into
a tool for dance and a script for choreography.
Indeed, since the 1940s, when she first introduced drawing in the dance
studio as a way of helping preliterate children script plots for their dances,
Ann had trusted in a romanticized link between the heart and the hand.
She saw drawing as a way to uncover danceable subjects and content, and
she used it extensively in the Watts workshops as well as in her summer ses-
sions on the deck. In their drawings students found task movement, ges-
tural improvisations, and gentle insights. Now, however, Ann was about to
discover, firsthand, that perhaps these images could have diagnostic and
treatment uses as well. Perhaps the aesthetic could be remedial and curative.
One afternoon in the fall of 1972 Ann was leading the Reach Out per-
formers in a collectively drawn group self-portrait, in which each person
took a turn adding to one large drawing. When her turn came, she was sur-
prised to find herself drawing a dark circle the size of a tennis ball in the
pelvic area of the crayon figure, then putting an “X” through it. At first she
told herself this was just a symbolic embryo to which she was giving birth.
The image troubled her, however, because earlier in the workshop, when
everyone had drawn individual self-portraits, she had drawn a similar dark
circle in her pelvis. In the future she would often recount how her draw-
ing this image twice both surprised and frightened her. The first time she
dismissed the image:

I drew a rear view of my body with an “X” going through it, slashing
it. In the region corresponding to the pelvis—where the two lines of the
“X” met, I drew a circle like “X” marks the spot. I remember hesitating
to take the group’s time to dance my self-portrait. Then finally, with time
running short, and being the workshop leader, I allowed my personal needs
to slip by.11

When the dark circle with the “X” through it appeared the second time,
Ann responded diªerently. As with the ritualistic two stumbles that con-
demned the virgin to death in Vaslav Nijinksy’s Rite of Spring, an event that
occurs twice loses its spontaneity and takes on the force of something fated.
With her second drawing Ann dismissed her original rationalization of the

304 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

circle being an embryo and instead recalled how Sir Lawrence Washing-
ton’s self-portrait two years earlier, using this same psychokinetic visualiza-
tion process, had presaged his health crisis, and she was troubled. Ann
viewed what she called this “imagistic language” of the self-portrait as a way
of “receiving messages from an intelligence within the body, an intelligence
deeper and more unpredictable than anything I could understand through
rational thought.”12 Specifically, Ann later explained:

Now the reappearance of the dark area in the group’s collective portrait
left me feeling uneasy, and reminded me of my earlier drawing. The next
day I went to the doctor and asked him to examine my pelvic region. He
did so and found a malignant tumor of the same size and shape as the one
I’d drawn the previous day—and in the same place.13

Actually, the critical piece for Ann was not the drawing’s deformity but
rather her inability to dance this image of a figure with a mass in its ab-
domen. She said later, “It was because I couldn’t put the drawing into mo-
tion that I felt blocked.”14 For her, giving shape to a feeling or understanding
through movement was how she metabolized experience. If it couldn’t be
danced, it hadn’t been truly experienced.
The tumor her physician found led to a diagnosis of advanced colorec-
tal cancer. At age fifty-two Ann plunged into Susan Sontag’s kingdom of
the sick. In the 1970s, as Sontag describes in Illness as Metaphor, a horrible
fear and dread accompanied any diagnosis of cancer, for the disease was
thought to be uncontrollable, intractable, and incurable. “Cancer is the dis-
ease that doesn’t knock before it enters. It fills the role of an illness experi-
enced as a ruthless, secret invasion,” Sontag cautions.15 As Sontag explains,
at the time cancer was seen in terms of a metaphoric battle waged inside
one’s own body, a fight against a sickness known for attacking parts of the
body that were the most embarrassing to acknowledge—breasts, prostate,
liver, colon, and, at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of shame, the rectum.
Adding to the cancer’s assault on her body was the fact that the only cure
was mutilating surgery. Ten days after she received her diagnosis Ann had
a length of her lower intestine removed as well as one ovary. She came out
of surgery with a colostomy, what is described in medical literature as “an
artificial anus on the abdomen.”16 At Ann’s request, her physician used her
navel as the new exit point for her colon rather than opening a new inci-
sion in her abdomen—a practice that has since become routine in this kind
of cancer surgery.

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 305

 Ann remained in the hospital for three weeks following her operation.
Not only was she was in considerable pain, but she was frail, having lost
twenty-five pounds, and her spirits were low. As she later wrote, she wanted
to get out of her body, to crawl out of her skin, the room, the hospital, the
world. She raged silently in her mind against Fritz Perls, angered that he
was no longer alive to help her through this. Then one afternoon Ann’s
mother, Ida, came to visit. She sat simply and quietly by Ann’s bedside,
holding her daughter’s hand as Ann sobbed. “Connecting again to my feel-
ings of love was the beginning of my restoration,” Ann said of the epiphany
this quiet act of handholding brought her.17
Ann’s body had been irreparably changed, as had her relationship to it.
Several months after the cancer surgery, she began to work with Robert Hall,
a Gestalt therapist who had been a protégé of Perls, in order to focus on
the emotional residue from her operation. One day she recounted to Hall
a dream in which she was back on the operating table and a team of six
faceless physicians were mechanically cutting away at her body, removing
hunks of her anatomy. “Please don’t harm my body. Dear God, please don’t
harm my body,” she screamed furiously as they continued cutting. “This
is my dancer’s body and if you harm it, what will become of me?”18 She
railed against this fate as she had raged against Perls’s absence. Ann was re-
alizing just how deeply set in her body her identity as an artist was and how
any strategy to reclaim it would have to be physically based as well.
For the rest of her life, Ann now needed to monitor carefully what and
when she ate and drank as well as to irrigate her remaining colon daily. She
never complained about this routine, but she was dismayed that the sur-
gery had severed part of her psoas muscle, critical for abdominal strength.
Two or three times a year she suªered painful spasms that usually resulted
in her being rushed to the hospital to have a blockage opened. Her main
regret was that she hadn’t insisted on a reversible colostomy, which would
have made the rerouting of her colon through her abdomen only tempo-
rary, as became the practice soon after her surgery.
Once Ann had recovered from the surgery, her doctor informed her that
she could dance again and that if the cancer did not recur within the next
five years she could consider herself healed. To mark her return to health,
Ann now changed her name to Anna, as a way of returning closer to her
given name of Hannah. Within a few weeks she returned to teaching, but
it would be nearly twenty years before she took to the stage again publicly
as a performer. As her strength returned, Anna studied her students’ self-
portraits, and now she noticed how the images tended to polarize into a

306 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

dark side and a light side, the repressed and the accepted halves of oneself.
Intuitively, she was now beginning to search for a means to link dance to
rejuvenation and to unify the body severed by disease.

Three years after her surgery, in 1975, while on an individual retreat at the
oceanfront weekend home and studio she and Larry maintained at Sea
Ranch, Anna once again drew an image of herself that she was unable to
dance. This time, however, what blocked Anna was that the portrait was
too young and too healthy. “When I looked at the picture after drawing
it,” she later explained, “I knew I couldn’t even begin to dance it; it just
didn’t feel like me. I turned the paper over and furiously began to draw an-
other image of myself. It was black and angular and angry and violent. I
knew that this back-side image of me was the dance I had to do.”19
As Anna was drawing this “shadow side” of herself on the back of the
paper, she became aware that she had begun bleeding internally, one of the
emergency signs of the cancer’s return. She returned to Kentfield and called
her doctor, who asked her to come in immediately. She asked him if she
could wait one more month before undergoing another colonoscopy. Now,
she decided, she needed to dance.
On a quiet afternoon in 1975, after summoning a small group that in-
cluded Larry, other family members, students, and friends, she ushered them
into the big empty studio at 321 Divisadero Street and shut the door. Anna
then commenced what would come to be known as her “Dark Side” or “Ex-
orcism” dance. Wearing a loose and flowing tie-dyed caftan covered by a
full-length, hooded black cape, she stood in front of her life-sized sketch
of herself, with her back to her ten witnesses, and danced. The number of
viewers was a minyan, the minimum required for a Jewish prayer session,
the number necessary to get God’s attention.
At the last minute Anna asked her friend the filmmaker Coni Beeson to
document the dance. The resulting film opens with an image of Anna,
shrouded in her hooded cape, standing before her drawing of a towering
monster woman, who is nude except for black corset-like armor, high black
boots, and bikini panties. It is not di‹cult to read a highly eroticized fe-
male into the image of a dominatrix-like woman Anna has drawn, some-
one who scripts and choreographs dangerous sexual encounters. In the film
Anna crouches in front of this drawing and raises her hands upward as she
emits a strange guttural groan that grows louder as it rises from deep inside
her. As she battles with her malevolent and repressed side in her “Dark Side”

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 307

 dance, Anna literalizes the common metaphor that cancer is a fight waged
inside one’s own body. Unleashing waves of pent-up feelings, her dance
seems to echo Sontag’s conceptualization of cancer as a disease that is the
result of repression.
The film is di‹cult to watch as Anna howls, shrieks, and sobs at her own
image while intoning Kaddish, the Jews’ ancient Aramaic prayer for the
dead. In essence, the one praying in Kaddish is holding an audience with
God, and at the conclusion of the prayer one is supposed to step back re-
spectfully, signaling an end to this act of holding God’s attention as a wit-
ness. Anna’s emotional outpouring is raw and unmediated. As she recites
the sacred prayer text of Jewish funeral services, asking God to remember
and hold dear the departed, her hands claw desperately at the air. The fu-
neral here seems to be for her “dark side”—for ego satisfaction, carnal plea-
sures, and vanity—anguish overtakes her as she tries symbolically to flush
this part of her character and the cancer out of her body. “When I did it I
was overwhelmed by the release of rage and anger. I kept stabbing at my-
self and howling like a wounded animal,” Anna wrote later. “Witnesses said
it sounded like I spoke in tongues,” as if she were channeling a side that
had not been allowed to speak.20
Anna’s cancer had presented her with the ultimate challenge to her faith
in the body as the basis of performance truth. By detonating her emotions
in her dance, Anna hoped to purge herself of her disease itself, in line with
beliefs at the time that cancer stemmed from “insu‹cient passion” and “the
wages of repression.”21 Releasing emotions, especially anger, had also been
seen as an important stage of healing in Fritz Perls’s Gestalt sessions. Anna
recalled how he had often pretended to fall asleep in the midst of a therapy
session with a patient specifically to provoke the patient’s anger. Perls saw
anger as a necessary step toward liberating emotions, and he could be cre-
ative, even theatrical, in prodding patients toward this liberation.22
In unlocking patients’ suppressed emotions, Perls had urged them to move
through a range of actions, as though they were both victim and victim-
izer. Anna, who had been very influenced by Perls’s concept of polarities,
knew she had to find the other part of her self-image—what Perls some-
times called the mother and father parts.23 She did not end her dance with
the “dark side.” She turned her portrait over, removed her black cape, and
began to dance the “healthy” side. Borrowing from a wide range of aes-
thetic and therapeutic traditions, she imagined the cancerous part of her
body cleansed by the flowing “waters” of her movements and her breath.
As she explained, “I had an image of water cascading over the mountains

308 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

near my home, and that the water flowed through me and out to the end-
less vastness of the sea, taking with it my illness.”24 When Anna finished
dancing, she felt drained and also strangely purified.
After the dance Anna went to see her doctor, who ran several tests and
determined that the bleeding had stopped. In 1977, after two more years
without symptoms, she was pronounced cancer-free. From her personal ex-
perience, Anna had discovered both the performative and the salubrious
qualities of dancing near death. Her cancer went into spontaneous remis-
sion, spurred, she believed, by this intensive process of visualization and
physical enactment of the images. The supposed incurability of colorectal
cancer made her dance-activated remission all the more remarkable.
For Anna, her battle with cancer was about more than her own healing.
“The experience of cancer shook me up philosophically,” she said later. “If
I was devoting my whole life to doing this work was it just an ego trip or
was it connected to life?”25 Her sense of anguish grew as she thought of the
six million Jews lost in the Holocaust. This survivor guilt for a globally scaled
horror would become a springboard for Anna’s next body of work—the
massively scaled Citydance, In and On the Mountain and its sequels, in-
cluding Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance. On a much broader level
than before, she began not only including non-dancers and non-dance el-
ements, but also deploying emotions in a way that ruptured the traditional
social frames used to hide them.
Most important, Anna’s emotional journey to her own heart of darkness
signaled an important aesthetic breakthrough. In her “Dark Side” dance,
she had envisioned and performed her vulnerable self, the monstrous side
that is usually repressed in each of us. Margaret Shildrick, a leading bioethi-
cist and theorist of the body, has identified this contact with the liminal in
each individual as “embodying the monster,” a practice of acknowledging
the insecurity of the borders that frame normative identity. “Monsters evoke
opposition to the paradigms of a humanity that is marked by self posses-
sion,” Shildrick explains. “The monster is not just abhorrent, it is also en-
ticing, a figure that calls to us and invites recognition.”26
As Anna’s dream about the operating table expressed, for a dancer, the
monstrous is associated with physical disfigurement and illness, changes to
the corporeal self the dancer cannot control in a life premised on willful
physical control. Anna’s self-portrait dance sought to emotionally exorcise
the malevolent half of herself by actually performing with her surgically
disfigured body. Through dance, she confronted the transformation of her
once healthy body into one that was diseased, damaged, broken. As

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 309

 Shildrick cautions, the diseased or damaged body forces itself into our con-
sciousness, our perception, as “other,” and this is compounded by the fact
that, historically, moral deficiency has been linked with non-normative bod-
ies.27 One of the realities of Anna’s post-colostomy body was the possibil-
ity of real leakiness, a term that has strong metaphorical associations with
bodily degradation and vulnerability. By addressing her “dark side” directly,
Anna reversed this shaming process. She faced her monster within and all
the enticement of its open sexuality. Through a spontaneous choreography
of the grotesque, she reclaimed new moral strength in her dramatically al-
tered form.
For Anna, the extreme challenge of a life-threatening illness became ad-
ditional corporeal knowledge to be assimilated into her conception of dance
teaching and performance. Through her “Exorcism” dance, she inaugurated
a radical practice that would eventually grow into the major concern of her
remaining career—the acceptance of a diªerent body, the body recontoured
by disease, as the subject, the medium, and the messenger of her dance.

As she began to expand her own personal experience with illness into heal-
ing dances for larger communities, Anna was certainly aware of Larry’s
evolving work with collective creativity. In 1976 he closed his large o‹ce
practice, Lawrence Halprin and Associates, which had grown to nearly sixty
members after more than twenty-five years of continuous operation. Larry
and Sue Yung Li Ikeda, a fellow architect from his o‹ce, established Round-
House, described as “a studio/thinktank,” with the mission of exploring
modes of collective creativity and collaborative processes by which indi-
viduals from diªerent fields could jointly discover solutions to significant
urban problems through workshops, films, and designs.28 With the assis-
tance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Larry went to
film school in his quest to explore new areas of design and communica-
tion. Then, on behalf of RoundHouse, Larry and Ikeda traveled to
Cadaques, Spain, where they made a surrealist film about Salvador Dalí,
Le Pink Grapefruit (1976), as preparation for Larry’s design of a proposed
museum in Cleveland, Ohio, to house Dalí’s work. In 1978, however, Larry
and Ikeda dissolved RoundHouse, as the developer Gerson Bakar had wooed
Larry back to landscape architecture, inviting him to do the site work and
gardens for Levi Strauss’s San Francisco headquarters.
Larry was restlessly searching for new models of collaborative design, on
a scale that could ensure his hands-on, day-to-day creative involvement.

310 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

In sampling alternative approaches to linking individuals and their envi-
ronments, Larry taught a ten-day workshop in 1977 for twenty-eight stu-
dents from the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental
Design at sites in San Francisco and Sea Ranch. He discovered what he saw
as archetypal design themes in the gendered spaces the workshop members
created—womblike hollows on the beach by the women and a high look-
out by the men—architectural forms that were in many way counterparts
to the movement designs the dancers in Anna’s workshops were generating
in the same environment.
Larry was also involved in another major design project. In 1976, after
fifteen years of work, full of intense controversy and fierce competition, he
had been o‹cially commissioned as the designer of a national memorial
for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Washington, DC. This project would be
the major work of his career, a massively scaled design experience that brings
nature back into a park in the midst of a densely urban setting and turns
spectators into performers crossing the landscape as they wind their way
through the four magnificent outdoor “rooms” of the memorial. Here
American history and the achievements of an American hero are displayed
as a geography of texture, light, sound, and motion stretching over a seven-
and-a-half-acre site along the Tidal Basin and the Cherry Walk. The critic
Phyllis Tuchman described the memorial design as “creating a spatial ex-
perience in the landscape.”29 Although nearly twenty more years would pass
before the FDR memorial project received enough funding to be built,
Larry’s selection as its designer in 1976 assured the scale of his legacy as an
artist, not to mention the indelibility of his gestural writing with bodies on
landscapes. In this grandly scaled work he succeeded in embracing both
ends of the continuum on which all of his work, and to a great extent Anna’s
work as well, was located—between the majesty of secular public space and
the sacredness of memorial space. The manner in which Larry’s plan for
the FDR memorial actually orchestrated a slow-paced contemplative ex-
perience for the spectator suggested a hybrid art genre of processional cho-
reography and landscape as both a historical and an experiential text.
Larry’s involvement with moving people through urban spaces had an
immediate impact on Anna, who was about to launch her own grand-scaled
artwork for a metropolis, Citydance (1976–77). In name as well as scale,
Citydance would evoke Larry’s “City Spirit” program from 1974, a project
to encourage and stimulate community organizations to create open fo-
rums on the uses of art as a creative force in their communities. Even ear-
lier Larry had created two much more specifically choreographic city-scaled

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 311

 scores for workshops in San Francisco. “City Map,” from 1968, is a set of
written and visual instructions for events around the city filling the first
day of a twenty-four-day workshop. As Larry discussed this, “It was a score
designed to sensitize people to a given environment and to other people’s
activities within it.” In 1969 Larry planned “September 1970,” an event in-
tended to “use the entire city of San Francisco and its population as an art
medium.”30

Citydance, which began with workshops in 1976 and was performed in the
summer of 1977, was the largest dance of Anna’s career to this point.31 In
addition to Larry’s scores, a distant precedent may have been the 1962 City
Scale, a big environmental happening in San Francisco by Ken Dewey, An-
thony Martin, and Ramon Sender of the Tape Music Center, which began
at the center’s original home on Russian Hill and spilled across the city with
numerous scripted events.32 Anna vaguely remembered having attended it
because two of her dancers, John Graham and Lynne Palmer, reappeared at
various times during the evening as a man giving a woman driving lessons
in a crowded intersection. This was task performance on an automotive scale.
In another scene, a car ballet, cars with colored gels on their headlights, as
well as two pairs of lovers stationed at diªerent points on the neighborhood
streets, could be seen by the audience from a small park overlooking North
Beach. The audience then was driven in two trucks to a book-returning cer-
emony at City Lights and a viewing of a bullfight movie through a lens that
distorted all the figures. Finally (by now it was close to midnight), the au-
dience was trucked to a park at the top of Potrero Hill, where two large
weather balloons awaited their playful involvement. Their screaming arrival
seemed to break up an imminent rumble between two teenage gangs.33
Citydance was a more individually open performance that turned the en-
tire city into a conceptual stage on July 24, 1977, from 5:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
The city’s inhabitants, prompted by a core of Anna’s dancers and students,
became the dancers for this performance. In her notes for Citydance, Anna
described it as three layers of simultaneous performances: The first involved
the journey along the miles-long path from the start at sunrise atop Twin
Peaks, through various designated sites in the city, to the waterfront finale
at Embarcadero Plaza. The second was the enactment of the “scored” ac-
tivities at each of the nine stopping points on the journey, and the third
encompassed the individual dances each person performed within these two
larger circles of activities.34 This triple framing ensured that no matter what

312 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

one was doing, it could be constituted as performing. As Anna later re-
ported, “Children play-performed at South Park; a healer enacted a ritual
at Twin Peaks; a poet created a thread throughout—reading at every epi-
sode; bums and crazies joined in at Market Street; dancers from the Mo-
bilus group gave performances at the cemetery; and individual dancers and
actors appeared in masks and costumes, contributing their individual
pieces of theatre unexpectedly and eªectively.”35
Anna called Citydance her bicentennial gift to the people of San Fran-
cisco, and she led up to it with nine free monthly evening workshops at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In these workshops she oªered a
redefined role for spectators, recruiting them as “witnesses,” which she out-
lined as “observers who ratify and confirm our desires, or energies and suc-
cesses and failures. By witnessing our successes as well as failures [they see
that] both are the same . . . for we learn by what we were not able to ac-
complish as much as we learned from what we were able to do.”36 These
two roles of witness and participant were also available at the performance
itself as some citizens spontaneously joined in the passing parade of dancers
and others watched them from sidewalks as the dance wound its way
through the city’s various neighborhoods.
Citydance was the inverse of how architects and designers work with space.
Instead of building structures, paths, and environments and then waiting
for passersby to animate them, Citydance claimed the city as a “found” stage
in the Duchampian sense of the term, and its residents’ actions immedi-
ately became “found” choreography, which was enhanced as they negoti-
ated their way through a day in their life in the city. However, it was not
the aesthetic references that interested Anna in Citydance as much as the
ritualistic and communal possibilities. She focused on the dance’s capacity
to suture art more closely to daily life and awaken people to their connec-
tions to one another as inhabitants of the same city.

The Citydance events may be experienced on many levels, including

recreation and entertainment. In addition, they are artistic experiences—
changing our perspectives toward our environment and selves. We experi-
ence ourselves as dancers through awareness of our movements, and our
city through awareness of our movements within it. The events may be
used to facilitate self-study, recognizing that we reveal ourselves through
our movements and they may also be viewed as a spiritual experience,
viewing the ritual as an historical community means of integrating self
with community and environment.37

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 313

 Citydance invited people to find collectively their own path through an
urban stage/environment. Earlier in her career Anna had taken small tasks
from daily life and asked performers to explore these little actions as dance.
Now in Citydance the tasks involved hours and miles of walking, carrying,
holding, and watching. Hundreds of performers enacted these tasks, and
thousands of people saw them. Anna increased the scale of her work in City-
dance in part because this was a way to increase the reach and impact of
dance. Instead of waiting for audiences to come to her, she was bringing
the dance to them, so that by virtue of going about their daily lives, they
became both her viewers and her performers.
In the 1960s and 1970s the customary reason large groups of people gath-
ered and marched in the city’s public spaces was for social protest. Anna’s
goals in Citydance were less overt, but she did have a purpose in having
people move together. “All the folks in our city, as in all places in the coun-
try and the world at large, have the capacity to experience their lives as a
dance,” she said in a prepared statement she read at one of the workshops
leading up to the event. “I think dance, in its seminal beginnings, was meant
to have a purpose, and the purpose was a direct link and tie-in with the life
of the individual, the life of the family, the life of the community. My con-
cern is to renew and rea‹rm these seminal purposes of dance . . . to give
greater harmony and wholeness to our lives.”38 Because Citydance took place
soon after the assassinations of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and
supervisor Harvey Milk, Anna’s intent was also to help reunite a city that
was angry and divided over these murders. “I wanted to bring back a sense
of trust and enjoyment to the city,” she later said.39
Anna had embarked on a changed path in dance now that she was back
from her brush with death. She was spurred by a new spirit of Tzedakh, the
Jewish tradition of doing good deeds by giving to others, as part of living
a righteous and thankful life, and her dance had grown significantly more
inclusive in the process.40 When she was convalescing from her cancer sur-
gery, Anna had had a spiritual experience. She was lying in her bed over-
looking the redwood trees in her yard when a black raven flew in and sat
on her bed. In Jewish legend this bird is the herald of death, and Anna,
feeling that he had come to take her, began to protest. She insisted that she
still had work to do and the bird agreed to let her stay if she devoted her-
self to using dance to promote personal, social, and environmental har-
mony.41 Initially, she channeled her relief at surviving into Citydance, as a
big, fun, participatory event for anyone who wanted to join in, drawing on
the experience she had gained with the Esalen workshops with George

314 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

Leonard. By 1981 she had begun an annual public healing rite that would
come to be called Circle the Earth as her gift for having her life spared.
Most critically, Anna had recovered a meaning in life through this bar-
gain she made with death’s messenger, the crow. While physicians’ view-
points and popular belief divulge widely on the role visualization and op-
timism play in healing, the one point on which they agree is that those who
manage an illness like cancer most successfully do so by using it to find
meaning in their lives. Anna used her cancer to find meaning in her dance
as well. Citydance was the first installment of that reconnaissance. It would
be another five years before Anna found a social issue around which she
was again compelled to construct a public dance.

During her three-year experience with cancer, Anna had read about alter-
native medical and healing practices, both ancient and contemporary, across
a wide range of cultures. She now saw her role as an instigator of commu-
nal rites and her work as community ritual. With Daria she cofounded the
Tamalpa Institute in Kentfield in 1978 with the goal of creating a nonprofit
research and educational arm of the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop and
oªering training in a creative process integrating psychology, body thera-
pies, and education with dance, art, and drama, as a path toward healing
and resolving social conflict. They initially assembled a group of twenty-
eight students and staª for a new, condensed ten-week intensive training
program. Participants in the training program met for eight hours a day,
five days a week, at Anna’s Kentfield studio and dance deck. Classes con-
tinued on Yom Kippur and Thanksgiving, with special prayer and food rit-
uals incorporated into the activities on these days. Not just the time, but
also the content of the program was intense. Anna, Daria, Jasmine Nash,
Norma Leistiko, and G. Hoªman Soto took turns leading the participants
through scoring, visualizations, warrior dances, and more, moving from a
concern with self to relationships and finally groups. Daria describes the
Tamalpa training as providing a stronger structure for the emotional and
psychological elements stirred up by Anna’s dance teaching of the mid-
1970s. As Daria explains:

I felt so strongly that the ways in which the work had been so provoca-
tive needed to be reframed. There needed to be a more conscientious
responsibility taken for the places participants were being taken. There
were aspects of Anna’s work that others of us like Norma Leistiko, G. Hoª-

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 315

 man Soto, and Jasmine Nash, who had been teachers in Dancers’ Work-
shop, were modifying and adding to. So Tamalpa Institute was a coming
together of two quite diªerent perspectives and orientations. The result,
which took many years of tumultuous confrontations and transforma-
tions, was a real training program and a successful “grounding” of Anna’s
absolutely unique experimental work. Tamalpa led to the reconciliation
and “proper” bridging between life and art that was Anna’s original vision
and hope.42

Anna’s teaching practice, begun some thirty years earlier as an anti-estab-

lishment gesture, was now institutionalized.
One morning, in the middle of the fifth week of the intensive training
program, Anna announced that her theme for the day would be “Rela-
tionships through Looking at Bodies.” After the group assembled at 10 a.m.
she stepped forward matter-of-factly, removed her clothes, and showed
everyone the colostomy opening in her navel. She asked Peter Land, the
resident photographer for the workshop, to take a close-up of it. “Don’t
feel sorry for me,” she told some of the more squeamish ones, “it doesn’t
hurt.”43 Although she no longer had pain from her surgery, Anna was still
in the process of reclaiming her injured body as her medium of teaching,
and this full disclosure of its external wounds was as much for her accept-
ance of her new self as for giving her students a new way to regard their
bodies as unmarked canvases for their art. She was reversing the practice of
keeping the diseased or mutilated body hidden and making it instead a fo-
cus of spectatorship, and thus an art medium once again. At the same time
she was trying to invite a regard for the body that wasn’t always sexual. “I
wanted to create a more trusting environment for the women and men,”
Anna said later. “I especially wanted to make the women feel they were not
sex objects.”44
Anna turned to the group and asked the students to undress and find a
partner. She then led them on a tour, at first visual and then tactile, of each
other’s bodies. “The objective is not to get into your feelings,” she cautioned
those who started hugging. “It is to look at your feelings. Notice them, and
then go on.” In her notes on the training, the Reverend Sandy Park, one
of the participants, recorded the curious bluntness of Anna’s instructions
for this body survey. “Don’t stroke. Touch objectively,” Anna commanded.
“Select a hairy spot, or a rough spot. Touch. Hold. Let go. Absorb. Breathe
into your rib cage if you’re anxious. . . . Your hand is like a stethoscope.
Palm gives information. Take your time. Look at some place you’ve avoided.

316 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

Touch there. Guys, if you’ve got a hard-on that’s fine.”45 Anna’s instruc-
tions carried an est-like edge of confrontation, as well as a teasing interro-
gation of some of the body’s most private recesses.
Next came a curious piece of choreography emphasizing the spectator-
ship of body parts. Anna ordered the men to line up “according to penis
size” and the women to “move down the line looking at each penis.” Sound-
ing like a drill sergeant, she said, “OK guys, stop chattering. This is an ini-
tiation. You won’t get this opportunity again. This is a trust opportunity.
Don’t miss it.” The women were then instructed to line up according to
“boob size” and it became the men’s turn to eye them and then touch three
places on each woman’s body. “You’ve performed a beautiful ritual. Give
yourselves a hand,” Anna told everyone at the conclusion of the exercise.
Reminded of this episode in her eighties, Anna laughed with rare em-
barrassment. “I was trying to disengage personal sexual response and to free
people to work with the body without censoring. I wanted them to begin
to appreciate the body objectively. I wanted to neutralize the body,” she ex-
plained. “I wanted to say, ‘Look, if I can accept [my colostomy]—you can
accept your bodies.”46
The exercise’s concluding acts of self-exposure closed the circle that had
begun with Anna’s displaying her “new” rectum. She had long sought emo-
tional health through dance and now, she was suggesting, a physically re-
paired body might also be claimed, virtually, through dance. The quest for
health, individual and collective, and the acceptance of a diminished body
had already been launched as a topic of Anna’s work and now it was part
of her workshop pedagogy as well. It would become, in one way or another,
the subject of every dance she would make for the remainder of her career.
Drawing on her own desperate and spontaneous reaction to her illness
and systematizing this experience, Anna developed a method for dealing
with emotions and real-life crises like terminal illness. She began working
with a five-part process she developed with Daria to aid others in “looking
at their dark side.” First, using movement, visualization, and free-association
writing, people identify their issues, their shadow side. Then, with move-
ment and sound, people confront this material, exploring it. As they express
the issues they have identified and visualized through physical movement,
they release destructive patterns and open up for new creative possibilities.
After release comes change, as people tap into their energetic forces and re-
direct these forces for healing. Finally, in a stage of integration, people take
their experience in this process and apply it to their lives. They can repeat
this process whenever necessary to look at a new or old issue that surfaces.47

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 317

 With this process, Anna essentially recycled her own “exorcism” dance into
a patterned process others could trace.48 By emphasizing the dimension of
healing, she expanded the integration of life and art at the core of her ear-
lier Reach Out workshops. As she later described this way of working:
“When our dances are connected to our real life issues in this manner, it is
called the Life/Art Process. This method of working with dance seeks to
access the life story of each person, and then use this life story as the ground
for creating art. This is based upon the principle that as life experience deep-
ens, personal art expression expands, and as art expression expands, life experi-
ences deepen.”49

In the spring of 1981 Anna gave the first performance of a communal dance
that would evolve into Circle the Earth, her signature statement about the
dancer in everyone, collectivity, and health. In this work Anna inaugurated
a new kind of tourism of the kingdom of the ill. She began to make dances
whose content concerns critical social issues and which collectively consti-
tute audiences as witnesses, students of information whose presence serves
the performers and, by extension, gives a civic dimension to their issues.
This undoes the customary relationship in which the performers provide
scopophilic pleasures to the audience. As Anna later explained to Richard
Schechner: “I don’t want spectators. Spectators imply a spectacle that takes
place to entertain and amuse and perhaps stimulate them. I want witnesses
who realize that we are dancing for a purpose—to accomplish something
in ourselves and in our world. . . . The role of the witness is to understand
the dance and support the dancers who have undertaken the challenge of
performing. Spectators often come with their own personal aesthetics. They
sit back and watch and judge to see if what is done lives up to their pre-
conceived notion of a particular, very culture-bound idea of a certain kind
of ‘art.’”50
In 1980–81 Anna and Larry had taught six joint workshops, called “Search
for Living Myths and Rituals through Dance and the Environment,” at the
College of Marin. They wanted to involve residents of Marin in an explo-
ration of movement combined with environmental awareness, leading to
an artistic statement about their common vision through performance. Cu-
riously, when asked to draw during the workshop process, the participants
repeatedly came up with images of Mount Tamalpais, the central moun-
tain in Marin. At the time the mountain, which towers over the Marin land-
scape, was closed to the public because since 1979 seven women had been

318 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

murdered on its trails and the murderer, dubbed the “trailside killer” by the
media, was still at large. As Anna later explained, “When we noticed this
recurring image we knew we had found the myth we were searching for.”51
The focus among the workshop participants then became the enactment
of a ritual to reclaim the mountain.
On April 10, 1981, the workshop participants, including several Tamalpa
trainees, presented a two-day ceremony/performance called In and On the
Mountain. It began in the College of Marin theater in the evening with rit-
ual enactments of the murders, as family members of the dead women and
others from the community watched as witnesses from the audience. The
frame of a formal proscenium theater was a strange setting for this event,
which was visually chaotic and scaled more as an intimate exchange than
as a large-scale statement for spectators. Pieces of the performance clearly
echoed Anna’s earlier works—a “water dance” by the women resembled
the original improvisatory structure of The Bath, the animal dances of the
Male and Female Ritual resurfaced as the dancers enacted the creatures liv-
ing on the mountain, and the rolling scaªold from Parades and Changes
was pressed into service as a sliding stage for various dances evoking the el-
ements of wind, fire, and earth. Although a proscenium stage served as the
venue for the first segment of In and On the Mountain, Anna was already
shifting into a mode where the real recipients of the dance experience were
the performers themselves. As if confirming this, the performance contin-
ued throughout the night, long after the audience left, as the participants
slept in a “dream wheel” formation, with all their feet pointing toward the
center of an imaginary wheel and their heads positioned outward. The sug-
gestion was that they continued dancing in their sleep, or that the act of
sleeping itself could be framed as a section of the performance, as their in-
voluntary sleep movements within the larger frame of this formalized
arrangement of their sleeping bodies.
The next morning, after a brief “sunrise ceremony,” the performers and
audience members (or witnesses) were bussed to the top of the mountain
and began walking down the trails, leaving oªerings at the site of each mur-
der. Someone brought a tree to plant, another brought poetry about the
mountain to read, and several members of the Pomo Indian tribe as well as
local families with children joined in the free-form dancing downhill. Be-
cause the killer was still at large, the police and sheriª ’s deputies were on the
ground and helicopters kept watch from the air, stretching the scale of the
performance into aerial space (and including the criminal justice system).
Circumstances soon suggested that it swelled into community space as well.

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 319

 Thirty-six hours after the performance, an anonymous phone call helped
police pinpoint the killer, and three days later he was caught.52 Without
this final act, Anna’s In and On the Mountain might have remained just a
broad dramatic gesture. But she found it di‹cult to dismiss the suggestion
of a causal link between the dance, the tip, and the capture. “I have never
said we caught the killer,” Anna clarified, acknowledging it wasn’t that the
dance had magical qualities, but rather that “the dance focused the mental
intention of the community toward solving the problem.”53 From the un-
solved murders of several strangers, Anna would move toward a focus on
individuals’ own impending death, creating collective dances that harnessed
this deep attention as a means of healing. Soon she would turn this energy
inward on a microscopic level toward visions of cellular battles with can-
cer and AIDS.
Later that summer, when Don José Mitsuwa, a 106-year-old Huichol
Indian shaman, visited Tamalpa Institute to present a deer dance, Anna
asked him about a possible link between the dance and the capture of the
murderer. Mitsuwa told Anna there was a connection and that moun-
tains were among the most sacred places on earth, but that the rite she
and her students had done needed to be repeated for five years in order to
complete the purification. Anna complied, and the repeat performances—
Thanksgiving (1982), Return to the Mountain (1983), Run to the Mountain
(1984), and Circle the Mountain (1985)—each focused on the theme of life
against death and each did so by enacting outdoors the big emotions of
loss, recovery, and reconciliation.
Anna did not end the rite with the fifth year. Instead, she continued with
Circle the Earth through 1991, conducting a week-long workshop each year
that culminated with a performance on Mount Tamalpais. Gradually she
shifted the scale and ambitions of her ritual from returning peace to the
mountain to reestablishing harmony to the individual participants and their
communities, and eventually to easing global tensions. By 1987 Anna’s stu-
dents would eªectively universalize this “peace dance,” calling it the Plan-
etary Dance, as they organized local performances of the “Earth Run,” a
segment of the old Circle the Earth ritual, in countries from Australia and
Japan to Germany and England. In 2005 Anna celebrated the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Planetary Dance, tracing its beginnings to the original
In and On the Mountain performance.
Yet the all-inclusive rhetoric surrounding these group experiences can
mask the genuine set of standards and expectations Anna brings to the work.
The challenge of peeling back to what she calls the “unarmored” performer

320 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

is substantial. The critical element for her has been how to collectivize the
performers’ sensibilities so that they learn how to express themselves as one
person. A case in point was the Planetary Dance held on Sunday, April 30,
2000, at Santos Meadows, near Muir Woods, in Northern California. About
130 people gathered in an open grassy field, most of them graying fifty-year-
olds who participated enthusiastically but with little initial sense of how
deliberately structured even the loosest-appearing of Anna’s community
dance rituals are. As the participants half-walked, half-jogged around the
circular path marked oª in the meadow, embracing the four directions of
north, south, east, and west, Anna cast a critical eye on the circling per-
formers, waiting for what she calls their “self-expression to burn oª.” “This
is a rare opportunity to express ourselves as one person,” she told the group.
“Let’s seize this!” When a man asked how they could all become one body,
Anna answered, “It’s simple—just pay attention. Pay attention to all of your
senses. Look at the person in front of you and behind you. Listen to the
drum beat, and you merge with all of that.” One man then ran the circle
holding his baby aloft, and Anna commented on how sweet it was. “Can’t
we dance for the child within us?” he asked. “No,” she responded, “that’s
still dancing for yourself.” Anna assigns herself the role of Koshare, the per-
son in Native American culture who tells performers when they are stand-
ing out too much as individuals. As Anna told her crowd, their quest was
to become one body as Native people do and to do this they needed to get
back into the spirit of the dance: “Where people dance for hours . . . there
is another force that becomes alive so you dance for all people.”54
“I dealt with my cancer privately in my training program for ten years
and then came out with In and On the Mountain, which I didn’t like,” Anna
confided several years after its performance. “I liked what I was trying to
do, but I didn’t like the way I did it.”55 After the fifth-year performance on
the mountain, Anna reflected: “As a choreographer who has been making
dances most of my life, this has become my challenge and personal crite-
rion: to make it simpler and simpler for people to experience the fullness
of their own nature, the humanity in the movement.”56 For Jamie McHugh,
who served as Anna’s assistant from 1986 to 1991, it was precisely this sim-
plicity and its attendant satisfactions that drew him to her work from his
background in modern dance. “[Her] simplicity honors the complexity of
each person’s individual experience while also connecting them to the power
of the group,” he explained.57 The “power of the group” here refers to what
Richard Schechner has defined as “the experience of group solidarity, usu-
ally short-lived, generated during ritual.”58

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 321

 Although she had been using the word ritual for decades, it wasn’t until
Circle the Earth, immediately following the Mount Tamalpais performances,
that Anna finally found a balance between e‹cacy and entertainment, the
critical dyad Schechner identifies as the polarity on which ritual and the
performing arts are constituted. The more Anna articulated the purpose of
Circle the Earth as functional change, the more her means of generating
movement aligned with the kinds of attributes Schechner has associated
with ritual, including providing a link to the transcendent, a sense of time-
less time (an eternal present), a trancelike experience for the performer, a
downplaying of virtuosity and an enhancement of the possibility for self-
transformation, audience participation, and collective creativity.59 Yet as she
has clarified for Schechner, “The people enact in ritual what they want to
have happen in their lives. . . . E‹cacy in this sense is not cause and eªect.
The purpose is to awaken people to peace [or another issue] and move them
to action.”60 Later, in her manual for people with cancer, Dance as a Heal-
ing Art, Anna refined her conception of ritual: “Ritual is another word that
needs a new definition. . . . Ritual, as I use the term, refers to an artistic
process by which people gather and unify themselves in order to confront
the challenges of their existence.”61 McHugh has elaborated: “Circle the
Earth is not a substitute for direct action in the world. . . . How people ap-
ply this experience in their lives becomes the acid test of its success.”62 Both
Anna and McHugh have described the performance of this ritual dance as
a “prayer,” underlining its spiritual dimension. From her earlier work in
stripping movement down to simple task performance, Anna has evolved
toward a way of bringing the sacred back into the everyday. With Circle the
Earth and the Planetary Dance, using a deliberately accessible movement
vocabulary, often as simple as walking or running, she invited anyone to
enter into what she has called “the magical and transforming power” of
dance.63

In her workshops during the late 1970s and 1980s, Anna had begun taking
her personally desperate and spontaneous reaction to her own cancer and
recycling it into a patterned process others could trace. In the later 1980s
she would draw increasingly on her credentials as a shaman for people in
life-threatening situations. Anna shifted from using untrained dancers from
the general population in her collective dances to a focus on a less visible
segment of society—the ill—and she shaped the movement vocabulary
around the task of recovering health. Two diªerent workshop experiences—

322 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

with cancer and HIV-positive patients—ensured Anna’s continued alle-
giance to what she understood as bodily wisdom, and particularly the power
of the communal body she constituted through performance, in combat-
ing challenges.
In 1987 Anna was invited to work with the Cancer Support and Edu-
cation Center, a support facility for individuals with cancer in Menlo Park,
a suburb some thirty miles south of San Francisco. Magdalen (Maggie)
Creighton, one of Anna’s former students from the late 1960s, had founded
the center in 1982 and she ran the program there. Twice a month Anna
would commute to the center, traveling about one hundred miles round-
trip, to work for half a day with a group of patients. For two years she did
this regularly, often visiting her mother at her home in nearby Woodside
on her way to the afternoon cancer workshop.
At the center Anna would lead cancer patients through a series of body
awareness exercises and then ask them to draw their images of themselves,
including the “dark side,” just as she had done in confronting her cancer
when it returned. Systematizing her own intuitively shaped response, Anna
led them into finding movement tools for expelling some of their anger
and fear about having cancer and for visualizing their body’s resistance. “We
were working on the core issue with Anna,” Creighton explained. “People
were surprised when we wanted them to act things out, to actualize their
energy toward healing. But Anna helped them so much in being able to
become aware of how they blocked energy.”64 Anna persuaded each per-
son, no matter how restricted their physical ability, to move in some way,
even if only while seated in a wheelchair, so that the body’s capacity for
shaping, rather than just being shaped by illness, was activated. “Words
didn’t do it—moving it out did,” Creighton noted. “The patients were ac-
tually imagining that they were their white cells assertively destroying can-
cer.”65 Anna had come to view her psychokinetic visualization process as a
contemporary way for people to identify, delineate, and then purge anxi-
eties about critical illness. She encouraged the cancer patients to release their
fears in order to make themselves emotionally available to “the healing power
of the flip side of the destructive force.”66 Face death, but choose life was
the implicit but steady message.
In one session at the center, for example, Anna focused on the partici-
pants’ taking passive or active roles in a relationship as a means of prompt-
ing them to see how relationship or old family issues might be reflected in
their feelings about their illness. After each participant took a turn at be-
ing led with eyes closed by a partner around the room or doing the lead-

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 323

 ing (with eyes open), she asked the class to make a drawing of what the ex-
ercise had been like for them. As Anna described in her manual Dance as
a Healing Art:

Virginia has been struggling with cancer in the bridge of her nose and
has suªered terrible headaches and eye problems for several years. Her
drawing was a large face with closed eyes and an open mouth with the
word “ah” coming out of it. She also drew clouds floating across her
forehead. After the exercise she said she felt so released, tranquil and soft.
She loved being led with her eyes closed and had not felt so good in years.
Her partner, Janice, drew a picture of two figures. One was a frail young
girl with a large red heart for a torso dripping drops of blood. She called
this figure “bleeding heart.” The second figure had wings. She called her
“guardian angel.” . . . Janice could feel on a deep movement level that she
was being led by a guardian angel.67

In another session, Anna guided participants in a series of movement ex-

plorations; then, after a break, she asked participants to clear their minds
and draw an image. Next they were to “write a poem, a chant, a single word,
or a sentence” and share that with a partner. Then they took the image into
improvised movement and finally recounted their experience. Dennis, a fa-
ther of two young boys, was having a di‹cult time with his cancer, which
had spread throughout his body. Yet the word he had written was “grati-
tude,” and his dance conveyed a deep sense of reverence and gentleness. In
both instances Anna’s focus was to help people bring awareness back to their
bodies and to resensitize them to the manner in which movement sutures
sensing to feeling and emotions.
A year after Anna began teaching in Menlo Park, the center started a new
program, “Moving toward Life,” created for Bay Area people who were HIV-
positive. The staª at the center invited Anna to work with this new popu-
lation, and in late 1988 Anna began a ten-week pilot movement program
just for men and women who were HIV-positive, or who had AIDS or ARC
(AIDS-Related Complex). Not only were the health issues diªerent, but
the population of the HIV-positive contrasted dramatically with the can-
cer patients at the center. Instead of mostly older and middle-aged white
women, the AIDS group, which soon became known as the Steps Theater
group, was made up almost exclusively of attractive, fit-looking young men
from various racial backgrounds. Most were in their twenties and thirties.
For a choreographer, even one as untraditional as Anna, young men were

324 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

usually the most enticing, but most elusive, population to work with, and
now men were suddenly calling, begging to work with her.68 After her first
workshop with HIV-positive people Anna noted another quality that made
this work so rewarding for a dancemaker: “I have found in these groups
something I have never found before—100% commitments.”69 She had
also found a social issue that needed no justification about its importance.
Influenced by her work with the AIDS group at the center, Anna de-
cided to change Circle the Earth in 1989 into a public ritual by and about
individuals with AIDS and cancer. The event Circle the Earth: Dancing with
Life on the Line was born. Participants have remarked on the uncanny cor-
respondence that emerged between feelings and forms in the movement
images the group spontaneously generated. Describing what became known
as the “Monster Dance” score, McHugh said:

We were to hold up our partner’s drawing of their monster as they ad-

vanced toward us in their dance of ugliness, anger, rage and darkness,
and then comfort and restore them after this confrontation. As I held
my partner in the aftermath, amidst the tears and sobbing, I felt myself
slipping back through time, back through all the many battlefields in
history. I imagined the wailing and keening of women the world over,
grieving for dead sons and lovers and fathers and brothers. . . . That all
of this would emerge through a simple movement structure was very new
and exciting for me.70

McHugh, impressed by the “chillingly strong archetype” that emerged, saw

Circle the Earth as a ritual that re-created a dual sense of tribal and dance
experience, re-forming “ancient consciousness in a contemporary being.”
When the “Monster Dance” was performed publicly, each member of
the audience was instructed to take a simple white cardboard mask from
under their seat and to hold it up to their face as a means of protecting
themselves against the dangerous things being cast oª by the performers.
The eªect on the spectators was immediate, because it not only became
very di‹cult to actually see the dance, but they too became performers with
roles and “costumes” so specific that one was fearful of disobeying.
One of the hundred participants in the nine-day workshop leading up
to the 1989 Circle the Earth performance commented, “The score for the
week shakes up each person’s feelings to a fizz, throws us into more intimacy
than we would choose on our own, and uses the pressure of a scheduled
performance to help us loose our individual self-importance and focus on

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 325

 our common goal while still honoring our own feelings.”71 On the most
fundamental level, the workshops leading up to this and other Circle the
Earth performances not only erased the isolation and loneliness of termi-
nal illness but turned a state of hiding into a moment of bold public dec-
laration. As Anna recalled, at the 1989 performance, held in the Redwood
High School gymnasium in Marin County, several parents present in the
audience learned for the first time that their sons had HIV when they saw
them step forward at the opening and shout: “I want to live!”72 AIDS was
still a relatively hidden issue in 1989, and Anna’s presentation of a perfor-
mance by people with AIDS confronting their disease was one of the first
in a genre historian David Gere has come to call AIDS dance.73
Anna decided to deepen her work with HIV-positive performers. Her
program at the Menlo Park center was so successful that by the summer of
1989, twenty-four men from the workshop accepted Anna’s invitation to
continue the project. In the fall of 1989, under the direction of Anna, these
men formed the first all-HIV-positive dance group. They named it Posi-
tive Motion.
At about this time Anna learned that Allan Stinson, a local black actor
who had studied with her in the mid-1970s but had then moved to New
York, had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. “When I moved to New York
in 1980, Anna and I kept up our relationship. We wrote back and forth all
the time,” Stinson recalled shortly before his death from AIDS in 1993. He
described how Anna, in trying to adapt her cancer workshop model to en-
compass AIDS, came to invite him back to the Bay Area to work with her
on this project.

She didn’t know anything about AIDS and HIV. She had no reason to
because it had never crossed her life or aªected her family. But she began
to try to find out things and to understand it because I had it. And she
found out that it was around her more than she realized. . . . She was
getting attention, media attention, phone calls, inquiries. . . . AIDS was
hot in the therapeutic sense and so she was pushed, guided, and led to it
by those kinds of things.74

Stinson, with his serene presence and resonant, trained voice, became an
important link between Anna’s 1970s work about individuals marginalized
because of race to this new population marginalized because of AIDS. Anna
would eventually form an all-women’s group of AIDS patients, most of
whom were young and had become infected through drug use or bisexual

326 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

partners. She called the women’s group “Women with Wings.” With both
groups it was the larger frame of disease that was her primary focus rather
than its identity as a critical issue for gay men. “I find it ironic,” she once
remarked, “that physical closeness and touch are usually part of what goes
on when one contracts AIDS, yet the minute you are diagnosed they are
the first things you lose.”75
On June 16, 1990, after nine months of weekly evening classes, Positive
Motion made its debut at San Francisco’s Theater Artaud, a small alterna-
tive space in a renovated warehouse. The fourteen men in the group, sup-
ported by musicians Jules Beckman and Norman Rutherford, oªered an
hour-long performance, Carry Me Home. This dance developed out of the
men’s workshop experiences of their struggle to come to terms with death
in their twenties. In his forty-minute documentary video of the rehearsals
and performance, Andy Abrahams Wilson chronicles the journey of this
group of articulate, impassioned men from residents of bodies in crisis to
compatriots in a new community of hope. Anna guides the men through
her customary sequence of voicing, drawing, and moving their feelings, fo-
cusing specifically on their sentiments about having the AIDS virus. Over
the first seven months of the workshop, which the video records, many of
the men become progressively weaker and Anna gently accommodates them.
At one session she teaches the entire evening-long workshop with the men
all lying flat on the floor, their interactions quieted to slow sliding on their
backs as she instructs them to connect and move past each other “like water
over a stone.”76 For Anna, there is dance in any movement, and virtuosity
resides in the depth of the performer’s candor in acknowledging what his
body can’t do rather than straining past what it can.
Wilson documents the first time the men of Positive Motion move their
sessions into Theater Artaud. Anna goes into a spontaneous “rant,” crying
out to the men assembled around her and to the cavernous space of the
empty stage behind them:

I thought I got rid of all the decorations and all the bullshit and tiddly-
winks that went with this goddam type of theater. I’m very angry. And I
didn’t know I felt like that. And I don’t know how to transform this. So
it’s up to you and it’s up to you and it’s up to you. To be so goddamn good.
To be so real—real. To be so together. And to be so what it is you are here
for. And what it is you have to do for yourself. And what it is you have to
say to someone else. And what it is that you feel. And what it is that you
think. And what it is your spirit tells you. That we’re just going to bust

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 327

 this fucking place wide open and make it alive with some kind of fucking
life! I can’t stand this black box!77

While Anna was clearly angered at the sterile neutrality of the black-draped
space, she was also, intuitively or deliberately, modeling for the men pre-
cisely the kind of authenticity-in-the-moment she wanted them to display.
Particularly with a disease with as many social prohibitions and contain-
ment strategies as AIDS, teaching people how to peel back to the layer of
true feelings and then to disclose this publicly required an enormous leap.
She was showing them that she could jump first.
This moment marked one of Anna’s rare returns to the formal constraints
of traditional theatrical space in these middle decades of her career, and it
was not an easy fit. In particular, she must have felt the irony that she was
back in the theater now only because the subject of men with AIDS per-
forming was radical for the venue—whereas in the past she had used sites
that made the venue radical for her subjects. As a work of dance theater,
Carry Me Home never really transcended the hard facts of its subject—the
men themselves and their insurmountable life-and-death health issues. In-
stead, it inaugurated a theater of illness where being present and watching
made one a witness whose presence allowed public confession rather the
spectatorship of judgment. Anna’s 1960s experiments with participatory
spectatorship were coming full circle. The participants now arrived with
the issues that needed to be addressed and Anna’s task was to shape a move-
ment theater that allowed this.
In her work of the 1980s Anna had become a guide to the kingdom of
the sick, a specialist in a performance category of her own invention, one
that might be called “the tourism of sickness.” Reshaping her own path from
illness into remission as the detailed itinerary for a journey anyone could
take, and that all would eventually make, Anna’s Circle the Earth became
the most often performed dance of her career, with Parades and Changes a
distant second. Each year, starting with the Mount Tamalpais healings in
1980 and continuing as Circle the Earth from the mid-1980s through 1991,
Anna had oªered free preparatory workshops to the public, inviting large
groups of individuals to design a community myth, which they filled out
through drawing, writing, talking, and dancing individually, with partners,
and as a group. The results were highly individual and idiosyncratic, so it
is not possible to designate any one occasion as a typical performance. Yet
the scores setting the process in motion remained remarkably constant from

328 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

year to year. As Anna has described this dance aimed at bringing peace to
individuals and communities: “Circle the Earth is a series of ceremonies and
prayers expressed through movement in the tradition of a dance ritual. It
is comprised of eleven little scores, each with its own intention, props, and
vocabulary of actions. preparation . . . Peace Meditation coming into
mutual alignment. i am the earth . . . we birth ourselves. i want to
live . . . confronting death. vortex dance . . . we create a group identity.
monster dance . . . we evoke and confront the destructive forces within
us. restoration . . . we heal our wounds and restore our lives. bridges
and passageways . . . we create a pathway to Peace. the earth run . . .
we oªer the planet our commitment to Peace. peace wheels . . . we cre-
ate a wheel of harmony. bird transformation . . . we send word of what
we have learned and created to the whole planet. peace bird and com-
mitment . . . Celebration. Performers and Witnesses join.”78
Many performing artists had commuted from the realm of the therapeu-
tic to that of the artistic, but with Circle the Earth Anna transported the ex-
otic cargo of illness into the center of the postmodern dance tradition. Anna’s
tools remained resolutely pedagogical in this regard. Like her mentor Mar-
garet H’Doubler, she wrote numerous statements about her process, the ma-
jority of them manuals for how to teach these public rituals.79 Anna’s les-
sons were designed to lead participants through the physical, emotional, and
imaginal landscape of the body. The destinations were understanding, ac-
ceptance, possibly even remission, and the means was performance.
Schechner, a longtime friend of Anna’s, once challenged her about this
causal linking of dance with recovery. In an interview he said to her, “But
I want to know when you ask people to come together, is it in order to en-
joy dancing, making dances, or is it to ‘change the world’?” Anna replied,
“I don’t know the answer to this question yet. We are engaged in an ex-
periment and we are by no means finished with it.”80
In conversation several years later, Schechner expanded on this issue: “It
becomes suspect when you think individual actions can change structural
action. Certain artists want to make the world better. When you make the
world better through art, you change individuals, but you can’t make these
big claims.” The more defensible contribution Anna made through her work
around performance and disease, Schechner suggested, is the way in which
it questions and challenges the idea that there is a required body for dance.
“She helped shift the focus from the body to the person,” he said. “Every
person has a body and uses it. In ballet you choreograph onto the body.
There is no agency. Anna made the whole person the basis of choreogra-

ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE 329

 phy.”81 Anna had pursued a transformation of the dancing body into the
prosaic body and looped it back into a new possibility of what could con-
stitute a performing body. At the same time, in recasting the audience as
witnesses, she forced open the insularity of her subject, disease and death,
and demanded a diªerent kind of engaged participation from the viewers.
“Why perform?” she had asked in her manual “Circle the Earth.” Her an-
swer? “We needed the attention of the witnesses to know that we weren’t
talking just to ourselves, that we dance in relation to our larger commu-
nity.”82 Scripted in relation to this one dance, this is a mission statement
that holds equally well for all of her work of this period and, indeed, her
career.

330 ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

 TEN

Choreographing Disappearance:
Dances of Aging
1992–2006

The disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; it rehearses and

repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs always to be remembered.
peggy phelan
Unmarked

Dying is an art.
sylvia plath
“Lady Lazarus”

anna’s last living parent , her mother, Ida, died in the summer of
1992, and one and a half years later, in the winter of 1994, Anna broke her
twenty-two-year absence from the stage with the premiere of her solo The
Grandfather Dance. She had continued dancing in her classes and work-
shops, but 1972 had been her last professional appearance on stage. Now,
as she approached her mid-seventies, Anna began looking at her own ag-
ing, addressing this subject obliquely at first by invoking her late grandfa-
ther from her remembered impressions as a little girl.
People sometimes speak of first grasping their own mortality when the
last generation of family members before them passes away, and they real-
ize they are next. Anna’s mother died four days before her ninety-ninth birth-
day. (Anna’s father, Isadore, had died in the autumn of 1980.) In the final
moments of Ida’s life, Anna crawled into bed with her mother and eªec-
tively enacted a duet of stillness in the environment of the hospital bed.
Like a parent, she cradled her parent as Ida’s breath faded. At the same time

331
 this “dance” that Anna improvised in the hospital bed in the dwindling mo-
ments of her mother’s life suggested the image of a child communicating
silently with a beloved elder, a relationship that The Grandfather Dance
would explore. Her “duet of stillness” also curiously presaged her partici-
pation in Eeo Stubblefield’s Still Dance, a series of photographs through
which Anna would “rehearse” her own aging and impending death in re-
lation to nature. The performance scholars Peggy Phelan and Heidi Gilpin
have both connected this kind of repetition in live performance to Freud’s
exploration of the psychic process of repetition and its links to the trauma
of disappearance. “A child’s fort-da [peekaboo-like] game of disappearance
and return (mimicking the disappearance and return of the child’s mother)
exposed for Freud how an individual, through the repetition of a traumatic
experience, could take on an ‘active part’ in relation to that traumatic event,”
Gilpin notes. She concludes, “The act of recollecting is a substitute for rep-
etition.”1 Anna’s late-career dances are performance recollections, an attempt
to access a memory of a trauma yet to happen to her specifically, but al-
ready scripted in many respects through her observation of the passing of
her parents.

Taken together, the dances Anna began to create and perform when she
was in her mid-seventies oªer a series of gradually enlarging close-ups of
her psychological preparation for her own death. Her candor in delineat-
ing the tensions of this confrontation and her attempts at honestly depict-
ing female old age are remarkable. Anna’s position as a key forerunner of
American postmodern dance makes her charting of her own journey
through her seventies into her eighties a model that forces us to consider
issues of identity and disappearance in live art.
Anna’s works at the end of the twentieth century chart her ambivalence
toward the use of her own body as what some performance theorists would
call a “colonized” product of the times.2 She challenges not only the ways
in which social mores construct her body, hiding its age, but also the con-
ventions of live performance, which both courts and then evades the dis-
appearance of its product and performer. Anna implicitly resists many of
the silent “rules” of live art—that old women don’t dance, that elderly fe-
males should remain an invisible presence in society, that the fixation on
youth should be unchallenged in dance.
In her early work Anna questioned, and often changed, the nature of
dance. Who can be a dancer? she asked. What does dance look like? Where

332 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

does it happen? What is its attitude toward everyday life? What is the role
of the viewer? And what is the relation of one’s work to one’s emotional
and physical environment? These same questions led her inextricably into
the revelations of her late-career performances. Throughout her career she
has explored what a body knows at diªerent stages of life.
Intuitively, Anna has built her investigation on the other side of what
the writer Naomi Wolf identified, simplistically, as the paradox of The
Beauty Myth: “Women’s craving for ‘perfection’ is fired by the widespread
belief that their bodies are inferior to men’s—second-rate matter that ages
faster.”3 Through these dances it is possible to glimpse many of the com-
plex social tensions surrounding older women and the performing body in
late-twentieth-century America. At the same time Anna’s dances allow for
a recasting of the condition of age in the performing artist, and particu-
larly the female dancer, as what the performance artist Rachel Rosenthal
once aªectionately, if euphemistically, called “ripening” in defiance of me-
chanical logic.
Implicitly Anna’s dances of the past decade can be seen as rehearsals, pro-
viding a slowly accumulating vocabulary of movements and images, for a
dance of death. At the same time Anna is drafting her valedictory to con-
temporary dance. Her RSVP approach to art making receives the ultimate
test here, as she attempts to “score” the one “performance” we can never
“valuact” (evaluate and then decide on a new action). Having come to this
art form in the early 1930s, as dance ushered in new images of women’s equal-
ity through the redefined physical force and social presence of the female
body, Anna closes out the century with images that suggest how a path of
transcendence might be charted through the representation of decline. Her
subtext is now aging, and particularly how to draft the complex public nar-
rative of a woman performer’s aging.
The aging dancer choreographing dances for herself is locked in a
di‹cult economy of disappearance and a self-portraiture of decay. The
dancer spends her entire life trying not to “let her body go,” a Sisyphean
task, and then she finds herself on the edge of having to “let it go” for all
eternity. While the desire to be remembered is a fundamental feature of
performance, as Peggy Phelan has observed, so too is disappearance. For
the aged dancer who continues to make and perform new work herself,
rather than accumulate and recycle repertory, this commerce with disap-
pearance becomes particularly fierce. Her medium, her changing body, re-
lentlessly charts its own decline regardless of her eªorts to wrest time and
expressiveness from it. Having spent a lifetime accommodating to the

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 333

 evanescence of her art, the aging dancer faces a new tension—a medium
whose temporality ironically grows more salient each time she creates a new
work, enlarging her inventory of (vanishing) dances. The dancer who con-
tinues to work into old age, then, struggles with a triple disappearance: the
first is the impermanence of the object she creates, the dance; the second
is her ephemeral medium, her own living body, which ages and then van-
ishes with her death; and the third, and most immediate, is with her con-
trol over the narratives she still wants that diminishing medium to tell.
Inside this struggle against disappearance an aged dancer’s work thus tells
a double story— one is the conscious statement she constructs in her cho-
reography, and the other is the spectral narrative her aging body spins in-
dependently as it quietly discloses its softening form, stiªening joints, and
waning strength and range. As it ages, the dancer’s body sheds a profes-
sional lifetime of the assumed narratives it has, and might have, expressed.
In their place is an authentic narrative that grows increasingly vivid with
the passing years—the performance of aging.
Dance is an art form that is particularly anxious about age because its
physical deteriorations impose themselves on the medium of dance, the
dancer’s body, so irrefutably. Not only do the presence and eªects of age
evade concealment in the dancing body, but their very opposite—youth,
physical power, and stamina—are the attributes on which the art form is
constituted. It is little wonder, then, that in most Western theatrical dance
forms a performer is considered “old” at thirty-five and generally “finished,”
outside of character or mime roles, after the early forties. To continue danc-
ing even into one’s fifties is a rarity, into one’s sixties is practically unheard
of. To dance about one’s immediate experience in one’s eighties is nearly
unimaginable.
Anna is working within a Western performance tradition that has almost
no history of the elderly performing or of decay being showcased. In con-
trast, in the Japanese tradition of Butoh, old age is routinely depicted. The
great Butoh master Kazuo Ohno was legendary for performing into his
eighties.4 His performances oªered layerings of strangely blurred gender
and age personas. Through costuming and dense makeup he would seem
to assume the form of a young girl, an ancient woman, an elderly man, or
a cooing infant, sometimes in such quick succession that the identities
seemed simultaneous. Despite his declining robustness, Ohno remained
very much a performer in these works, layering on personas rather than
peeling them away as Anna does. Yet in a 1986 interview with Richard
Schechner, Ohno was asked, “When you finish a really good perfor-

334 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

mance . . . what do you do? How do you cool down?” Ohno laughed. “At
the age of 80 there is no more ‘stage’ and ‘daily life,’” he said. Eiko, a Bu-
toh-trained dancer half Ohno’s age who was serving as his translator, ex-
plained simply, “He doesn’t commute.”5
If Anna “commutes” as a performer at all in her late-career dances, her
journey is to interior psychological spaces rather than parallel performing
presences. She makes her path by stripping away rather than accretion. For
a woman in a Western dance tradition, her bold statement is to stay in her
true identity. One myth that Anna implicitly rewrites with her late-in-life
dances is what the feminist sports historian Patricia Vertinsky refers to as
“the familiar master narrative of [physical] decline.”6 In its place her works
posit high endurance, risk, and a dynamic concept of aging as not so ex-
ceptional. Implicitly they lobby for the active aged woman’s body as an icon
of physical and performance prowess that belongs in the public gaze.
Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering book The Coming of Age, which first
appeared in English in 1972, inaugurated a discussion about how, in West-
ern culture, age and aging are conceptualized more negatively in regard to
women than men. At that time de Beauvoir observed, “I have never come
across a single woman, either in life or in books, who has looked upon her
old age cheerfully. In the same way no one ever speaks of a beautiful old
woman.”7 While the cultural possibilities for women have expanded dra-
matically in the last few decades, this negative conception of aged women
remains as a final piece of the identity baggage Anna’s generation still needs
to redress. As an artist, Anna, with her dances of old age, oªers a dramatic
physical image as a visual riposte to this neglect. So not only is Anna work-
ing within an art form and a cultural tradition that valorize youth, and a
medium that demands it, but she belongs to the gender whose associations
with age are the most negative and the least nuanced culturally. “Of course
men don’t age any better physically,” Naomi Wolf says. “They age better
only in terms of social status. We misperceive in this way since our eyes are
trained to see time as a flaw on women’s faces where it is a mark of char-
acter on men’s.”8
De Beauvoir catalogues a number of great artists who have created self-
portraits in their old age—Leonardo da Vinci, Goya, Monet, and Rem-
brandt, and not only are all of them male, but their self-portraits tend to
be, like that of da Vinci, “extraordinary allegories of old age . . . with fea-
tures chiseled by experience and knowledge—they are those of a man who
has reached the highest point of his intellectual powers.”9 These portraits
valorize aged males in terms of the good that time has etched in their char-

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 335

 acters, as it is revealed on their bodies, primarily from the neck up. If one
positions Anna’s last dances, particularly her performances in Eeo Stub-
blefield’s Still Dance from 1998 to 2002, in this tradition of male painters
making grand consummatory self-portraits at the end of their lives, they
become fascinating studies of Anna’s attempts to depict her own old age.
Like the late-nineteenth-century Countess de Castiglione, whose futile
struggle to author her own image through staged photographs has been
chronicled by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Anna is grappling in Still Dance
with drafting a bluntly candid image of her aged self as she presents her-
self to the camera.10 This is relatively unmapped terrain, particularly for a
female dancer.
Arguing as an advocate for aging women in sports, Patricia Vertinsky has
called for a new, active concept of aging as “self-narrated experience.”11 In-
stead of treating the aging woman’s body as a fiction, hidden reality, or cu-
riosity, Anna’s dances reinscribe it in the public sphere as part of an “aes-
thetics of expressivity” rather than an “aesthetics of eªacement.”12
Writing about live performance, Heidi Gilpin observes, “Indeed, we must
begin not only to let the body go, but also to revel in its absence, and in
the traces engendered by its passage from presence to absence.”13 It is these
traces that Anna’s late dances seem to be deliberating as she herself con-
siders the many levels of that passage from presence to absence, as the will
battles entropy. The line between traces of her presence in the end of her
performance and the end of her life is permeable.

Ida’s death was still very much on Anna’s mind when the dancer Nina Wise,
who had been working with A Traveling Jewish Theater, asked her if she
would create a “Jewish” dance for the theater group’s festival of Jewish artists.
The Grandfather Dance premiered at the Fort Mason Theater in San Fran-
cisco on February 2, 1994. For this dance, Anna wears a pair of her father’s
black silk pajamas along with her own lace-up mountain boots and a long
white tasseled scarf, which she uses as a prayer shawl. She begins by chat-
ting casually with the audience from the stage. She uses a first-person nar-
rative to frame the dance as intimate and personal, while at the same time
shaping it as a theatrically informal disclosure. “My daughters had some
chance to connect to the Yiddish culture, but my grandchildren, they missed
it all,” she comments, explaining that this dance is for them. As the faint
sound of a klezmer band is heard, Anna slides into a tipsy, joyous stomp-
ing dance, her arms lifted up imploringly and her head tilted quizzically to

336 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

one side in a theatrically “Jewish” pose that might come directly from Fid-
dler on the Roof.
Anna appears before us as her grandfather, but the voice of her charac-
ter becomes that of herself as a little girl in awe of this devout and bearded
old man. “All my life I’ve been searching for a dance that would move me
as much as my grandfather’s dance moved him,” she says. This is her first
pass at portraying old age, and she does it indirectly. Instead of represent-
ing the women in her family, she identifies with the male legacy, masking
her gender. So she presents herself visually as the right age but the wrong
gender. (The fact that gender disappears in some sense in old age becomes
perhaps liberating, or at least aesthetically useful, for Anna.) At the same
time, through her voice, she presents herself as the right gender but the
wrong age. She seems to be casting about for how to situate herself some-
where between the performer and the spectator of her own senescence. This
is negotiating the balance between representing and inhabiting.
By approaching the subject of age obliquely, and through the male gen-
der in whom age is equated positively with wisdom and insight, Anna seems
to be wresting a corresponding regard for her own old age as a woman per-
former. But it isn’t her old age she is performing, yet, and it also isn’t her
real self she is dancing about. As a lifelong performer, it is Anna’s body as
much as her mind that holds her knowledge. By wearing her father’s sheer
silk bedclothes she seems almost to be trying to climb into his skin, and
her grandfather’s as well, as if “trying on” an elder relative’s old age before
she can address her own.

Late in the summer of 1998 Anna found herself confronting a health crisis
with Larry that brought the subject of age and death into much more im-
mediate proximity to her own life. On Monday, August 24, Larry went into
a San Francisco hospital for a minor elective surgical procedure on his arthritic
hip. His physician said he did four hundred of these procedures a year and
that Larry should be out and on his way by the next morning. However,
Larry had been taking large amounts of aspirin for his arthritis and had not
been informed to stop prior to surgery. As a result, in surgery he began to
hemorrhage profusely, suªering a blood clot and two major strokes that left
him in intensive care on a ventilator, temporarily paralyzed and battling pneu-
monia. It was a month before he was taken oª the ventilator (leaving his
voice with a permanent huskiness) and transferred to Marin General Hos-
pital, closer to Anna and their daughters and their families.

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 337

 During the two months of Larry’s hospitalization, Anna shuttled between
home and hospital, attending to him as his mobility gradually returned. It
was a profound immersion for her in the links between mobility and life
and in the body’s capacity to give birth to ambitions in the midst of a strug-
gle against death. One Sunday evening in early September Anna staged a
healing with a few friends, and later, in October, she sat by Larry’s bedside
and led him through a movement meditation to help him sleep. It worked
after one and a half hours, until a male nurse barged in and turned on the
lights to take Larry’s vital signs. Anna was frustrated, but when the nurse
left, Larry said he thought he could do it himself if she just massaged his
feet. She did and he was asleep in ten minutes. With a resilience and resource-
fulness that paralleled her own, Larry began to investigate how to use a com-
puter mouse to be able to draw and design in case he didn’t regain full use
of his hands. He also asked Anna to contact friends who were in wheel-
chairs so he could discuss with them how to get around that way should
he need to. He seemed to swiftly accept the possibility of his disability and
figure out how to accommodate to it in order to keep his creative produc-
tivity going. Like Anna, he viewed life experiences like this as setbacks to
be overcome or adjusted to while his work as a creative artist continued.
Fortunately, within a few months he returned to full health and mobility.
Prophetically, Anna had taught a workshop in early October for a meet-
ing of the California Dance Educators Association at San Francisco State
University, which she titled “Regaining the Passion of Dance.” “So many
teachers get burned out after years of teaching,” she said, explaining that
her focus was on “getting them to reconnect with why they became inter-
ested in dance in the first place.”14 This is an internal conversation that has
fueled her own creative work in dance for decades, and one that she was in
the process of revisiting with new immediacy in the wake of Larry’s med-
ical emergency. Movement performance as a mechanism for survival was
not just theory but deeply embedded practice for her.

Anna’s next dance, From 5 to 110, was performed at San Francisco’s Theater
Artaud on November 7, 1999, as part of a shared bill with three other ag-
ing dancers, infelicitiously named “Still Moving.” At seventy-eight, Anna
was the oldest in the group. She received the only standing ovation of the
evening for her performance, and in the question-and-answer session that
followed she displayed a sharp humor and a focused intelligence that sug-
gested her cognitive dexterity easily matched her physical adroitness. The

338 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

scale of her presentation was theatrical but the scope of her concerns was
intimate.
From 5 to 110, a solo, is Anna’s second attempt at depicting her own old
age. It opens with her striding in boldly to center stage from an upstage
corner, wearing a long gray knit skirt, boots, a suede vest, a loose-sleeved
white blouse, and a fringed scarf over her shoulder. “I don’t see my birds,”
she says. “I don’t feel the ground under me. I feel lonely in this big black
box.” This lament for nature is a familiar anti-proscenium stance she has
taken before in traditional theater spaces, but here it serves to disassociate
her actions from “performing.” Additionally, what is arresting about it as
a beginning is that she is, intuitively, expressing a lamentation for the dis-
location of the elderly. We suddenly realize that as spectators of an aged
performer we are worried that the elderly on stage are going to lose their
sense of place and that in their journey of transformation they will forget
the way back. For most of us, the theater is by definition a deeply unfa-
miliar place, where location is continually redefined. For someone with
Anna’s duration as a performer, however, the theater is extremely familiar
and its paths well mapped.
From her opening “confession” Anna slides imperceptibly into the dance,
punctuating each of her statements with a brief gesture. “When I was five
years old I danced for the fun of it. When I was a teenager I danced to
rebel.” She makes a fisted gesture to wistful violin music. “When I was half
a hundred I danced for peace and justice. God of longevity, grant me the
time. For I have so many dances to do. Grant me the time. When I am one
hundred and nine I will dance as things really are.” (It was at this point that
the audience rose in a spontaneous standing ovation.)
In From 5 to 110, as in The Grandfather Dance, Anna is still backing into
a portrayal of herself as aged. The marker of age she starts with is an im-
age of herself as a child. The remaining reference points of age are all on
the other extreme of aged—even the one middle-aged reference is framed
in terms of its relationship to old age: “when I was half a hundred,” not
just “fifty.” In fixating on the two extremes—the start and the finish of her
life, the middle decades of Anna’s existence as a dancer are made to seem
mere stations on the road to the present. Her body’s history reverberates
with each cultural epoch she has lived and danced through, and the cul-
minating point is where she is at this moment. More typically, dancers view
their performing life as a tragic march away from this middle period.
In the post-performance discussion, Anna paraphrased an old Mae West
joke about the essentials of life: “For the first eighteen years, you need good

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 339

 parents. Then from eighteen to thirty, good looks. Then from thirty to fifty,
good genes. Then from fifty on, just money.” She continued, “‘Art serves
my life’ is not my motto so much as ‘life serves my art.’ With eighty star-
ing you in the face it’s enlightenment at gunpoint.”15 With these comments,
Anna begins to inhabit her age publicly. In her subsequent work, she will
rewrite Mae West’s recipe, making the cultivated capacity of the perform-
ing artist’s body to reflect her lived, and immediate, life, the dancer’s equiv-
alent of “money.”

During the autumn of 1998, as Larry convalesced, Anna asked Eeo Stub-
blefield, a performance artist who had studied with her in the late 1970s, if
she could participate in a site-specific form of environmental performance
art Stubblefield had developed called Still Dance.16 Since the early 1980s
Stubblefield had been staging and performing her pieces from Still Dance
in nature, and she had taught this form of dance at Anna’s Sea Ranch work-
shops. Stubblefield’s process relates to the genre of “staged photography”
that emerged in the 1980s, in which photographers created scenes specifically
for the camera, constructing “real” visual narratives and assuming the roles
of director, set and costume designer, and often even actor in their own
scenery. In Still Dance performance, body art, photography, and the par-
ticularity of a place in the environment are woven together. Aesthetically,
Still Dance is situated between environmental theater, performance art, fem-
inist body art of the 1970s, and massive earthworks.
For years, both on her dance deck in Kentfield and during her summer
retreats at Sea Ranch, Anna had been exploring dance in relation to specific
locales in nature, so this way of working was not new to her. As she explains:

I collaborate with my environments because I have a strong attitude about

the body not being an object. It is part of a total environment in space.
That is influenced by Larry’s work. You can see it in that our house is in
and out of space.
I also believe philosophically that humans are not the center of the
universe. . . . My physical body is what I relate to on one level. But then
what I am most concerned about is related beyond to the environment,
and that is my holistic body. One reason I’m attached to the natural
environment is it emphasizes for me my whole environment. That’s also
one reason I like doing Still Dance, because that brings me into direct
contact with my personal body in relation to my collective body. I don’t
focus just on my personal body. In our culture we tend to think of our

340 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

 body as the center. Our social body is our body in relation to others. The
body in the environment, that’s the collective body.17

In collaborating on Stubblefield’s series of photographs Still Dance with

Anna Halprin, Anna placed herself in a position of trust, allowing Stub-
blefield to select the environments and costuming, establishing the setting
for Anna’s dance. When they began the project, Stubblefield, sensing Anna’s
concern and anxiousness over her husband’s health, chose a locale that would
allow Anna to work with these feelings. Stubblefield took Anna to the beach
at the Marin Headlands, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Fran-
cisco. As if literalizing the emotional weight and helplessness Anna was feel-
ing, Stubblefield asked Anna to strip nude and then buried her in a cold,
wet hole, four feet deep, in the sand at the ocean’s edge. Stubblefield arranged
Anna so that she could move only from the ribs up; the rest of her body
was encased in sand, paralyzed in a cement-like prison. Her breasts, arms,
shoulders, neck, hair, and face were painted as well as caked with wet sand,
stuck firmly to her body with a sticky coating of molasses. Her eyes even-
tually became red and swollen from sand that blew into them.
With Stubblefield directing and photographing her, a shivering Anna be-
gan to improvise from her sandy cell. In Stubblefield’s photographs of this
performance, the “Rock Series,” Anna seems to be already buried, like a
figure sinking in quicksand. With her skin and hair painted to match the
rust and gray tones of the huge beach rocks behind her, Anna looks like a
half-buried pewter and rock sculpture. She seems to be both receding into
the earth and being extruded from it. In her dance for this work Anna phys-
icalized in her own body what she imagined her husband to be feeling with
his legs immobilized from paralysis and his hands frozen in stiª claws. In
the process Anna discovered, in her body, her capacity to dance death. She
had begun to choreograph disappearance. She was now ready to start phys-
icalizing loss and demise. The process of taking on the form of these emo-
tions also allowed her to discover their aªective qualities. “It was like a liv-
ing death,” she later reported. “I confronted my anguish in that dance.”18
In her last corpus of works, and particularly Still Dance, Anna abandons a
focus on the mind’s understanding of death in order to listen to the body’s.
Her focus as the performer in this Still Dance piece is not on demonstrat-
ing an idea about death; it is about the body feeling buried, replanted in
the earth, and the mind coming to terms with this purely through the body.
Working collaboratively with Stubblefield, Anna performed in twenty-

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 341

 one Still Dance locales, with the resulting photographs often named for their
location. For these meditative works, often of near stasis, set deep in rugged
natural settings, Anna danced nude and alone, with Stubblefield and her
camera the only witnesses. With her body coated by Stubblefield with mud,
molasses, straw, dry grasses, clays, plants, bark, or body paint, Anna uses
performance in these works to envision her own eventual return to the earth.
An image from the “Mud Series” of 1999, for example, captures Anna
seated at the edge of a muddy pit, her body, head, and hair entirely coated
with a crust of deep brown mud. Anna’s arms are upraised, and in the fist
of each hand she holds a clump of mud-covered grasses, which look just
like handfuls of her own matted and sticky hair. We see Anna only from
the back, but the image is startling because, although her pose resembles
that of a female bather in a Degas pastel, instead of cleaning her body, she
is smearing herself with wet dirt. The eªect is that of first recognizing this
as a classic image of a female nude on display and then feeling one’s power
as a spectator undercut because Anna’s mud play seems a ritual as much for
herself as for us.
Another sequence, the “Old Woman Series,” shows Anna facing the cam-
era in a kneeling position, covered with mud over her face and body. The
darkness of the wet mud might make one think of the blackface of min-
strelsy, but because Anna’s entire face, including both her lips and her eyes,
is coated with the same mud veneer, so the facial features are not exagger-
ated as in minstrelsy, this reference doesn’t stick. Another reference that
might seem to resonate through this and other mud studies of Still Dance
is the chocolate-smeared body of the performance artist Karen Finley in
her 1989 monologue We Keep Our Victims Ready. But the mud on Anna is
not a conscious stand-in for excrement and defilement as Finley’s body
smearing was. There is no aura of seduction or spectatorial display about
her simple actions in Stubblefield’s tableaux.
Although Anna’s consciousness of her Jewish heritage is more cultural than
religious, numerous elements of Jewish burial traditions are at play in the
Still Dance series. The fundamental Jewish law shaping burial is to have the
body returned to the earth quickly, within twenty-four hours of death.19 Ac-
cording to Jewish tradition, the body is prepared for the grave with the ut-
most simplicity. The body is cleaned, and no attempt is made to preserve or
prettify it. Everyone, regardless of gender, age, or wealth, is buried alike, in
a plain wooden co‹n and wearing nothing but a simple, white shroud (a
garment that, in fact, is the only article of clothing Stubblefield uses on Anna
in any Still Dance). Cremation and embalming are strictly forbidden in Ortho-

342 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

dox Judaism because they are seen as repudiations of the natural pace of the
body’s decomposition. The emphasis is on supporting the natural breakdown
of the flesh so that the body is returned swiftly to the earth, the source of life.
Since the Holocaust, images of ovens, chimneys, and the charred remains of
Jewish bodies have lent additional negative associations to cremation.
It is possible to infer many other references, deliberate as well as uncon-
scious, in Still Dance. These range from the visual arts—including Ana
Mendieta’s earth-body sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s use of her body
as material, and Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud body actions—to eco-
feminist and ecopsychological concepts of personal and “planetary” well-
being, to Larry’s grand revisionings of nature as a charted landscape for the
moving figure in his urban designs. All of these flicker through Still Dance.
Most notably, the manner in which Stubblefield represents Anna as both
image and medium in Still Dance evokes Mendieta’s Silueta series (1973–80).
While Mendieta as a visual artist in her twenties used images of the silhouette
of her body emblazoned into the earth to suggest metaphoric associations
between soil and the fecund female body, Anna’s body in Still Dance cre-
ates narratives of the fragile, fleeting existence and contradictory meanings
of an old female body.20 Like Mendieta’s works, Still Dance contains es-
sentialist associations of the earth as a maternal link to ancestry, as both a
burial site and a site of rebirth. Depending on the place in nature where
she is performing a particular Still Dance, Anna appears alternately durable
or frail, a form that seems to have just crawled out of the earth and may
slide back in at any moment.
Visual artists like Auguste Rodin have revealed decrepit and tortured bod-
ies as simply another side of nature the artist can depict. But in Still Dance
we see not just nature mapped onto the body, but the body in turn being
mapped onto nature. In the 1998 “Driftwood Series,” Stubblefield has Anna,
encased in a sheer white shroud, crawl along the cold damp sand at the
ocean’s edge, as if she were a giant thread of mucus coughed up on the shore.
In the 1999 “Log Series,” Anna rolls in the hollow of a rotting redwood,
burying herself in a deep bed of compost and dead leaves. Thus Stubblefield
shapes Anna to render what is customarily thought of as the least theatri-
cal stage of life, old age, as an intensely performative state.
“As a dance artist I am propelled towards the natural world by three be-
liefs,” Anna has said of her outlook in Still Dance. “One is the notion that
the human body is a microcosm of the earth; the second is that the processes
of nature are guidelines to my aesthetics; and the third is that nature is a
healer. Rather than imitate the outward forms of nature or use nature as a

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 343

 stage set, I identify with its basic processes. The work is reflective, and at-
tempts to understand how the natural world and human experience reflect
each other.”21
The Still Dance images convey the rapport Anna feels with the environ-
ment as a text and a partner. Anna is the only figure in these images, yet it
would not be an exaggeration to say they are all duets, pas de deux between
an old woman and the landscape. The environments with which she dances
are expansive stretches of nature—the Northern California shoreline; a deep
redwood grove; a cavernous watery grotto in “Underworld Series,” where
she sits as a small sky-blue figure huddled at the water’s edge; or acres of
hay fields in “Straw Series,” where she cavorts at sunset, transformed into
an ambulating haystack by the huge tufts of straw a‹xed to her body. Each
of these environments introduces a diªerent dialogue, framing a diªerent
portrait of the same image, that of Anna’s body as a tiny figure in a dra-
matic, desolate setting in nature. Her form is at once a figure of force as
well as one of extreme repose.
As Stubblefield explains, “Still Dance is not a process of forcing the land
to serve as a metaphor for an internal human state. Nor is the land used as
a backdrop for an abstract set of aesthetic principles. . . . The place does
reflect our inner world, but the dancer explores that reflection through cho-
sen movements so that the outer world influences and shapes the dance.”22
Stubblefield further clarifies: “My use of color and texture (body paint, mud,
grasses) emerges from the interplay of both the character of the story and
the direct observation of the land. This body art helps prepare the performer
to move out of the ordinary realm, and also gives the viewer the chance to
go with her. My hope is to refine and extend the senses, triggering memo-
ries deep within the body.”23
Ana Mendieta once remarked about her Silueta series that “I use the earth
as my canvas and my soul as my tools.”24 This is a statement that Anna and
Stubblefield might just as easily have made about Still Dance, where, as in
Mendieta’s work, the aggressiveness of nature is not only present but pal-
pably performed on Anna’s body. In making this work, Anna’s aging, fe-
male body is analogized within the most ritualistic, and final, frame we come
to inhabit—the moist embrace of soft earth.

By December 1999, a little more than a year after Larry’s ordeal, Anna was
deep into creating a major new dance, Intensive Care, a twenty-five-minute
piece based on her experiences at his hospital bedside. Here she focuses di-

344 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

rectly on the prelude to death. While she draws on her husband’s illness and
brush with death, it is significant that she stages it on her own body. Dressed
in white hospital smocks that gape open in the back, revealing the naked
backside of each performer, Anna and three younger dancers move through
a slow tableau of postures of pain, suªering, terror, outrage, and finally ac-
ceptance. This litany of movements is structured on the five-part process
Anna initially developed in her work with dance and illness twenty-five years
earlier. Now she brings it full circle to buttress a stage dance about illness.
In the months of rehearsal leading up to the premiere of Intensive Care,
the four performers each try to find their own point of engagement with
the subjects of death and dying. The actor David Greenaway, for instance,
had done hospice work in San Francisco’s AIDS community; Lakshmi
Aysola had studied Butoh with Min Tanaka in Japan; Jeª Rehg was bat-
tling both AIDS and cancer. (Rehg died in September 2001, a little over a
year after the work’s premiere in June 2000.) It is their private reality Anna
is asking her dancers to perform in Intensive Care as she searches for hers.
This is a dance about death, and it’s on her body, but still it is not yet her
own death she is dancing about.
With each performer drawing on her or his own storehouse of experiences,
the result is a performance that hovers between rawness and realism, mak-
ing viewing it at times both uncomfortable and engrossing. One critic said
of its premiere that “it was hard to look at but impossible to look away.”25
That reaction curiously parallels aspects of Anna’s own response to Larry’s
illness. “I was so frightened with Larry in intensive care that I would just
come to the studio and dance,” Anna recalled of the genesis of Intensive Care.
“So it grew from a very personal thing. It started as a solo, but I wanted to
expand the idea of the dance so it wasn’t so personal and to explore our diªer-
ences around the theme of death and dying to find our commonalities.”26
In the years since its premiere in 2000, Anna has continued to rework
Intensive Care, drawing on the contributions of new performers. She has
added a new ending, using Meredith Monk’s breathy and ethereal “Gotham
Lullaby.” The four dying figures slowly advance toward the audience, swoon-
ing into a final series of painterly stations of death, arms swinging vacantly
against their chests and mouths shaping silent cries as black-garbed atten-
dants support the fading individuals.

The June 2000 premiere of Intensive Care took place at the Cowell The-
ater in San Francisco, as part of an evening-long concert to celebrate Anna’s

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 345

 upcoming eightieth birthday (in July). For this program Anna revived the
undressing and re-dressing section of Parades and Changes, and the juxta-
position with Intensive Care illuminated how this earlier body, with its
defiant youthfulness and prowess, captured with such vividness by Anna
in the 1960s, had now given way to a worn and corpselike body of old age,
riddled with anxieties about death. For the same program, she also paired
The Grandfather Dance and From 5 to 110 with two new dances in a selec-
tion she called Memories from My Closet. The two new dances were Grati-
tude, a short monologue about her male and female ancestors, and The Cour-
tesan and the Crone, a short solo. In his review of this concert John Rockwell
wrote:

Like all her work, and the work of many of the artists with whom she has
collaborated, these dances could easily be dismissed as New Age Califor-
nia dippiness. “I’m accused of being touchy-feely,” she once said. “Well, I
am.” But what made these retrospective performances so moving was her
ability, enriched by a lifetime of desire and human drama, to refocus her
experience back into art.27

The Courtesan and the Crone, like The Grandfather Dance and From 5 to
110, is a dance about two extremes of identity—in this instance, sexual and
gender identities—that frame Anna. Wearing an elaborate Venetian car-
nival mask of a beautiful young woman, which one of her daughters had
brought her as a gift from Venice years earlier, and a long gold cape, which
she originally bought for a White House reception she attended with her
husband, Anna repeatedly flip-flops from the gestures of a coy seductress
to those of a finger-jabbing old crone. As she shifts her mask, her body seems
to gain and lose years as well. As the courtesan, Anna strokes her breasts
and thighs inviting the spectator’s touch. As the crone, she curves her spine
forward, hunches her back, and stares menacingly at the audience. In this
brief snapshot the seductiveness of beauty and the fear of age are portrayed
as opposite sides of the same feminine coin.
The crone is the real archetype Anna is closing in on, an archetypal figure
of matriarchal power. Historically, the crone has been seen as the embod-
iment of wisdom and the final figure in the three stages of a woman’s life—
virgin, mother, and crone. The counterpart to the “death-dealing” crone is
the “life-giving” virgin. Even if today, as the feminist writer Barbara Walker
indicates, “the law doesn’t murder witches any longer . . . modern society
does eliminate older women in a sense. They are made invisible.” Walker

346 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

directly links this denial of the crone to our society’s abhorrence of death:
“In their anxiety to deny the crone archetype through religious imagery,
patriarchal societies even denied the fact of death itself. The crone was the
one who took the soul through the dark spaces of nonbeing. She repre-
sented the kind of death that our culture wished to conceal, making it in-
visible as old women are invisible.” Indeed, as Walker argues, the permit-
ted images of death in our society tend to be violent and sudden, hence
distanced from us. “The crone shows us death as it more frequently is ex-
perienced, death from wasting disease and the slow degeneration of the body
and mind.”28
In a program note for her eightieth-birthday retrospective concert, Anna
wrote:

In our culture, it seems as if we relate to death by hiding from it, roman-

ticizing it or mythologizing it. Rather than interpret a concept, I want to
convey what I have seen in others and felt within myself: feelings of fear,
anger, sadness, regret, panic and even guilt. . . . What we as performers
are trying to do is bypass our acquired belief systems and go directly to
our physical bodies which hold all our life experiences.29

Without being conscious of it, Anna is using the voice of the crone here.
She has learned the crone’s language because she is now close enough to
feel in her own body death’s inexorable approach. The formula Anna is using
here is one she has employed repeatedly over her career to give the contours
of emotional realism to her dances. However, now she is attempting to give
public shape to the one experience of which we can have only future—
never past—knowledge: death.

In December 2000 the pair of Japanese-American dancers Eiko and Koma

approached Anna about creating a collaborative work. Supported by a grant
from Charles and Stephanie Reinhart, co-artistic directors for the Amer-
ican Dance Festival and dance at the Kennedy Center, the resulting dance
premiered in October 2001 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC,
with additional performances in January at the Joyce Theater in New York
and at the Yerba Buena Theater in San Francisco. “Stephanie and I were
the midwives for this project,” Charles Reinhart said. “We went to Eiko
and Koma, and said we’d like to commission you to do something with
another artist. When they came up with Anna we jumped for joy!”30 As

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 347

 Eiko and Koma explained, “We have gotten so much from [Anna]: this is
just a way of giving back.” Even though, as Eiko indicated, the extent of
their formal training with Anna was a single workshop in 1977, her
significance in American postmodern dance has been formative for them.
When pressed about the specifics of Anna’s influence, Koma said simply,
“We live in New York and we are crazy. Here we know there is another per-
son on the West Coast even more crazy.”31
Anna had never collaborated in this fashion with other dancers, and the
process was di‹cult and prolonged as she advocated the dance evolve
through her method of scoring while Eiko and Koma pushed to design it
with more of an immediate emphasis on its visual impact. Over the next
eight months Eiko and Koma commuted four times from New York to re-
hearse in Anna’s indoor studio and outside on the dance deck. In one of
the early rehearsals composer and renowned cellist Joan Jeanrenaud sat in
the middle of the studio, her eyes gazing downward as she played double
stops, pulling rich, resonant tones from her cello, occasionally hinting at a
klezmer-like melody in little lyric runs. She focused on the task at hand,
adumbrating death and relationships, the themes of this cross-cultural and
cross-generational dance. Anna, for her part, followed Koma’s instructions
as she walked a few inches on her bare feet across the hardwood floor of
her dance studio. From the other end of the room Koma called out to her
softly, “Walk as if each step were on a carpet of tiny, tiny, flowers and you
are not wanting to crush them. Feel the nice smell of the flowers in the up-
per body. And below, under your feet, destruction!” Anna tried again. This
time she let her chest and head arch slightly backward and her arms float
gently open, elbows bent, as she moved her feet in small steps, brushing
them lightly across the top of the floor and then plowing them down in
the imaginary flowers. “My balance isn’t so good now, so walking slow is
hard,” she told the Japanese-born Koma, fifty-three, and his wife, Eiko,
forty-nine, who crouched near her feet.32
For Anna this quip about balance was a rare admission about any age-
imposed limitation on her remarkably lithe and limber old body. The pre-
vious day, for their first session together, Koma had asked Anna to “be an
egg,” which she dutifully did as a solitary exercise for one hour. Later, on
that gray and chilly afternoon, the three had spent several hours, nude ex-
cept for wrap-around skirts, improvising movement studies on the dance
deck. Comfortable with nudity, they had been in quest of sculptural still-
life images to evoke the implicit subjects of their collaboration—the nav-
igation of relationships and the end of one’s life.

348 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

 The match was both logical and iconoclastic. Like Anna, Eiko and Koma
work intuitively using nature as a springboard, coaxing out their choreo-
graphic designs rather than imposing them, letting the subject of their dance
emerge quietly. Until this collaboration Eiko and Koma had always worked
exclusively with each other with an acute eye toward form and images,
whereas Anna focused on what she calls her holistic body, a conception of
the body as part of a total environment in space. The resulting dance, Be
With, was a document of a process, an emotional movement puzzle that
kept spilling its pieces on the floor and reassembling them in a new order.
In rehearsals death and tangled human bonds inhabited the studio im-
provisations through a sense of the body as a tremendously weighted and
unwieldy freight whose steering grows increasingly perilous.
The Be With rehearsals were as much about finding motivation as in-
venting movement out of the poetry of decay. As the work evolved over
the months, Anna immersed herself in Eiko and Koma’s style of slow, sus-
tained action, and they in turn were tugged into her steady questioning of
motivations and the psychological and emotional texture of the dance. “In
my work I don’t start with emotion. I start with something that might elicit
emotion,” Anna told them.
The costumes began as lacy cheesecloth robes, which Koma hand-painted
a fiery red and orange and then cut and tied until they resembled shred-
ding skin. They imparted an eerie texture of decomposition to the dancers’
crumpling walks along the mottled deep rust rear wall of the studio. Be
With came to oªer a mordant yet transcendent image of the dancing body
stilled.
In performance, Be With courts, and then thwarts, narrative under-
standing. As Tobi Tobias, the dance critic for New York magazine, noted,
“And all of a sudden, this stuª starts telling stories! Halprin appears to be
the aged female of the tribe who must be escorted, willingly or no, to her
death; a generic nurturing mother who brings solace to Eiko; a mother-in-
law to Koma, who confronts her almost brutally, and perhaps sexually. Forty
minutes of what might be taken by the irreverent for an ethnographic soap
opera concludes with a contrived epiphany in which the three protagonists
are raised on high, looking like statuary representing household gods.” Al-
though she called Be With “a worthy experiment,” Tobias reflected on the
ambiguity of its content:

What’s going on? When they operate alone, Eiko and Koma are not
characters in a narrative or even in a situation. They’re more like ele-

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 349

 ments of nature, life at a stage of development distinctly primordial, only
slightly more apprehending than stones, rivers, and trees. Halprin’s presence
changes the nature of what occurs not because she is Caucasian but because
her contribution has forced upon Eiko and Koma’s private universe con-
cerns and attitudes of Western culture innately alien to it.33

Anna struggled with Be With, and despite a generally favorable critical re-
ception she remained dissatisfied—for her, as for Tobias, its real content
remained elusive. Still, after the performance, she remarked, “I needed time
for it to sink into my bones. Working with Eiko and Koma was a welcome
challenge. I learned a lot and I admire their aesthetic. We remain wonder-
ful friends.”34

Anna continued working with Eeo Stubblefield until 2002. It is interest-

ing that Still Dance, the only work Anna performed that was deliberately
not created for a live audience, exists as one of the most heavily documented
artifacts of her career. Not only did Stubblefield shoot hundreds of photo-
graphs of Anna, but Andy Abrahams Wilson documented their collabo-
ration in Returning Home, a forty-five-minute film released in spring 2003.
Wilson had followed and documented Anna’s work for several years, be-
ginning when he was a graduate student in visual anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Southern California in the late 1980s. One of his early projects
was a documentary script about Anna, which concludes with a statement
from her prophetically anticipating the aesthetic of dancing her immedi-
ate reality that Returning Home would chronicle:

I don’t think it’s possible that I’ll ever stop my work . . . unless I lose my
mind. . . . One of the things I’ve noticed is how some dancers will just
keep dancing the same dances as if they were the same age they were when
they did those dances—and I’ve just never done that. I’ve always been
very aware of where I am in my own personal life, and whatever I do in
dance always reflects that.35

Fifteen years later, in the film Returning Home, Anna speaks frankly about
the demands of her aesthetic choice to have her art follow her life:

I’m aging. My body is not the same as a twenty-year-old’s, and it doesn’t

have the prescribed quality of being in social places. But I think an aged

350 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

 body has its own configurations of beauty. So the nakedness is its own
metaphor. Working in nature stirs up very ancient memories that are just
stored in the body. It makes me feel I am being true to nature by being
sensitive to the natural world around me. The dances touch such deep
places in me like a soul. That I would never have thought up. So they
are always like little treasures. I come back feeling reborn in some way.
Whenever I feel I need inspiration I always return to nature. Maybe it
has to do with releasing to be able to come to terms with my own passing
when the time comes.36

At the same time that Anna has been making her dances of aging and de-
fying the rarity of encountering an old woman’s body as the subject of dance,
the growing cosmetic surgery industry has ironically focused public atten-
tion on the aesthetics of aging. In this context, the aged woman’s body has
become present by virtue of striving for its transformation backward in time
to youthfulness.37 “Instead of aging normally through their full life cycle,
women are constrained to create an illusion that their growth process
stopped in the first decade or two of adulthood,” Barbara Walker has
noted.38 The aging adult is forced to think diªerently about her (or his)
aging self. The hierarchy shifts: instead of using one’s mental resolve to ag-
gressively shape, discipline, and push one’s body into the desired physical
form, it is the body that begins dictating to the mind, cataloguing its lim-
itations. As the philosopher Michel Foucault has observed, “The body the
adult has to care for, when he is concerned about himself, is no longer the
young body that needed shaping by gymnastics: it is a fragile, threatened
body, undermined by petty miseries.”39
Indirectly, the rhetoric that the aesthetic surgery industry uses to describe
its goals for the aging body reveals some key beliefs about the performative
aspects of oneself that are lost through aging, and potentially recoverable
through “treatment.” The cosmetic surgery industry prizes the body that
defies change and instead enacts broadly cultural beauty ideals. An arrested
state of continually performing the same immutable physical self becomes
the goal. This is freighted with complexity, because, as the feminist theo-
rist Kathleen Woodward has noted, “For its owner, the aging body is always
a reality, always a fiction.”40 Our bodies are constantly growing older, yet
we work continually to become stronger and healthier, as if growing in the
opposite direction from death.
Anna’s struggle with her body is not to preserve this myth of the un-

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 351

 changing self. Instead, she steadily works through dance to embody images
showcasing change by continually adjusting to the mutability of her body
and the evolving nature of her emotional preparedness for death. In Still
Dance Anna prefigures death as a sensory experience rather than representing
it as the most extreme form of sensory deprivation. Freud said that the com-
pulsion to repeat was a substitute for the ability to access memory. Anna
uses repetition in her choreographies of aging as a way to represent the mem-
ory of an experience that has not yet happened.
If, as Christopher Lasch observed in The Culture of Narcissism, despair
of the future leads people to fixate on youth, then is it Anna’s optimism
about the future that propels her to embrace age?41 She examines rage, sor-
row, loss, fear, and guilt as emotional reactions to the approach of death,
giving each a physical presence in her body. Her dances of aging are an at-
tempt to recover through art the individual’s authentic and true self, the
same self that cosmetic surgery purports to reclaim. Elective medical in-
terventions against aging, however, reclaim the body through erasure. Stalled
aging is the goal, whereas Anna’s portraits of aging aim to showcase the
functional and true tractability of the old body. Perhaps aging and death
lose their sting when made to work for an artist.
Anna also implicitly challenges a myth of the dance world—that one
works steadily to change the body closer toward perfection during the years
when one is training. Then, imperceptibly, at one point, one shifts, paral-
leling the goal of aesthetic procedures, to working toward not changing as
one struggles to deny the eªects of aging on the body’s inner musculature,
skin, response time to stimuli, speed, and precision.42 Anna’s dances of ag-
ing are in direct conflict with the impulse of aesthetic surgery, where med-
ical intervention fictionalizes the exterior self to match the interior one.
Anna’s life project has been how to draft a nonfiction movement portrait
where the inner and outer narratives mesh.
In several Still Dance series Stubblefield asked Anna to both experience
internment and “perform” it, representing burial visually in such a way that
the camera—and behind it, the spectator—shares the experience. Here the
work lies midway between the theatricality of dance and the personal im-
mediacy of performance art. In her video performance Mitchell’s Death
(1978), the performance artist Linda Montano “dances” her experience of
one degree of separation from death. In this solo Montano, after inserting
dozens of acupuncture needles in her face, recites an incantation about the
details of the death by gunshot of her ex-husband Mitchell. The perfor-

352 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

mance is an act of healing, but an experience of pain, particularly because
in chanting her text she constantly has to move the muscles of her face in-
stead of remaining still, as is customary in acupuncture treatments. Anna,
in contrast, invites the body to perform and enact its emotions rather than
allowing us to witness passive discomfort we can only hypothesize.
It is because Anna has defined so well the path into and out of the back-
rooms of our aªective centers that her performance process has been as
influential to the field of contemporary dance and theater as her actual cho-
reography. Witnessing Anna today, in the costume of herself—that of an
elderly woman on the edge of eternity—is ultimately comforting because
it reminds us so vividly of the profound uses of live performance. Time
and loss are essential elements in all choreographic works, and all the more
in Anna’s final body of works.
Even the notion of the beautiful is reassessed as an aesthetic value
through the use of Anna’s body as a site to recuperate disease, waste, and
aging. This suggests that performance can be a mechanism for surviving
and healing the displacement of physical decline. At the same time Anna
gives us a diªerent understanding of disappearance and death. In her late-
in-life dances Anna presents her life as her work and her ideas oªered for
the next generation to develop. For much of her life Anna was preoccu-
pied with using performance to describe the world she found. In these
dances of aging she finally embraces performance to address the world she
wants.

Since 2000, Anna has continued to perform Intensive Care both in the
United States and in France, often pairing it with the part of Parades and
Changes that features a group of young performers undressing and dress-
ing.43 In September 2004, thirty-nine years after she first performed in Eu-
rope, surprising audiences with her dance ritualizing everyday behavior,
Anna took Intensive Care to Paris, the first time she had ever performed in
France. She and a group of eight dancers performed at the Centre Pompi-
dou as the opening dance event of the Festival d’Automne in what the
French press called a “spectacle vivant,” a designation that captured the spare
yet lushly ceremonial quality of her program of Parades and Changes and
Intensive Care.
In extensive advance coverage, Anna was heralded as a force parallel to
Merce Cunningham in initiating postmodern dance. Every performance

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 353

 was sold out and hopeful ticket buyers clustered at the entrance to the the-
ater. Unknown to the Pompidou authorities, Anna and her dancers oªered
a free, hour-long outdoor improvisation, En Route, nightly in the nearby
Place Igor Stravinsky. Dressed in their Parades and Changes unisex suits,
embellished with black bowler hats, umbrellas, and a boom box for portable
sound, the dancers turned their nightly trip from the hotel to the theater
into a processional echoing the irreverent whimsy of the animated sculp-
tures of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely in the square’s fountain.
Inside the theater, the dancers again bridged the proscenium frame, greet-
ing audience members on the aisles as they walked to their seats.44
In March 2006, shortly before her eighty-sixth birthday, Anna was fea-
tured in a half-hour Spark program on KQED-TV, the San Francisco–based
PBS station. Before a camera crew filming her teaching in her studio, she
elaborated her belief about what makes a dance meaningful: “There are es-
sentially two ways of working with the body,” she said. “One is when mind
informs the body. When mind is telling you what to do. The other is when
body itself informs the mind. It becomes your body and you are able to
have experiences that go beyond conscious thinking.”45
Experiences are the most complex and least predictable outcomes of a
performance, and they can vary dramatically for the performer and the
viewer. Anna’s description of how to work with the body in a way that opens
new experiences suggests her belief that even the most limited range of
movement is potentially interesting if it is anchored in authenticity. This
belief was the basis of a project Anna initiated in 2005, working with the
oldest population of her career. Called Seniors Rocking, this project was a
participatory workshop, and ultimately a performance event, for seniors,
drawn primarily from assisted living communities and senior centers near
the Halprin home in Marin County. “I wanted to work with people my
own age and deal with issues that seniors deal with,” she said of the gene-
sis of Seniors Rocking. She remarked that she had spent her career working
with young people and now wanted to return to working with peers be-
cause their issues were closer to her own. “I fuss around about death and
dying in my mind,” she admitted.46
Seniors Rocking was also prompted by her reaction to a film of the Ger-
man choreographer Pina Bausch’s 1998 restaging of her 1978 work Kontakt-
hof for a cast of untrained people over sixty. Anna was distressed by Bausch’s
method of having these older dancers drilled to learn set choreography orig-
inally made for younger bodies. They are goaded to keep count, stay in for-
mation, learn not to fidget, and memorize the steps by Jo Anne Endicott,

354 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

who staged the work for Bausch in the film. Endicott comments, “Pina has
always had a fantastic sense of what is ‘in.’ At the moment, old is ‘in.’”47
For Anna, old is in her current repertoire because she herself is old and
continually curious about what kind of new information she can still coax
from her dancer’s canvas. The Kontakthof process of watching an ordinary
old body struggle to fit into a dance made for a young professional dancer
seemed to her arrogant and insulting. “Not once did they leave a place for
what was going on in these old people’s own lives,” Anna said about the
film of Bausch’s dance. In contrast, Seniors Rocking takes as its beginning,
and end point, a modest range of movement actions tailor-made by each
senior who turned out for the series of free workshops Anna oªered. The
simple act of rocking in a rocking chair, done as minimally or as maximally
as the performer wants, is the choreographic center of Anna’s dance for the
seniors. “What can you do with the action of rocking?” she asked the group
of men and women, aged sixty-five to their mid-nineties, seated in the car-
peted social room during their first meeting in the Redwood Retirement
Community Center in Mill Valley. She then led them to focus their atten-
tion on the prosaic act of rolling through the foot—pushing oª with the
ball, recovering by dropping the heel, then sequentially rolling back up to
the toes to push oª again. “It doesn’t matter that the movement was lim-
ited in range—what came through was the spirit,” she said.48
By the first of the two afternoon performances staged in early October
2005, the seniors are rocking, having found a remarkable range of move-
ment interest and personal drama in their relationship to their rocking
chairs. Prompted by an article about the dance in the local newspaper, the
community has come forward to donate sixty-nine rocking chairs to sup-
port all the rocking seniors. The chairs have been set up on an island in the
middle of a small lagoon at the Marin Civic Center. The presence of a Swiss
film crew headed by Ruedi Gerber, who is making a documentary on Anna,
adds to the ceremony of the event and signifies the international stature of
the trim, curly-haired woman who many think is simply an unusually ac-
tive elder. The finished performance is evocative and poignant without be-
ing nostalgic or overtly maudlin. There is a simple dignity to the mass of
seniors as they sit in their rocking chairs, stretching their arms upward in
a dance of softly waving arms that is both minimalist and childlike.
Using a cluster of performers to add interest to the same fundamental
action of rocking, Seniors Rocking reveals both theatrical savvy and sensitiv-
ity to the performers’ needs and limitations. A not-so-distant cousin to Pa-
rades and Changes, it oªers a late-in-life equivalent to undressing—dancing

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 355

 in public. As is often the case with Anna’s work, the results divide between
private epiphanies and larger resonant questions staged with keen theatri-
cal insight: Who should dance? Why? How?
“We are considered seniors—people who are ‘done,’” a seventy-nine-year-
old woman tells the recording crew after the performance. “But we are the
next generation. Anna has given us an opportunity to just let it go. We aren’t
accepting cultural expectations for what we should do.” Another woman
fastens on the metaphoric power of the rocking chair: “There was a special
moment as I was saying good-bye to the rocking chair that I realized it was
a symbol of my life,” she says, referring to the final moment in the dance
when each elder rose from her or his chair, placed a flower on the seat, and
slowly walked away. “There was sadness, depression but also joy,” she con-
tinues. “I know now I would like to be able to celebrate dying the way I
celebrate life. That’s a gift that Anna has.”49
By the summer of 2006 Anna is already onto her next project, having
turned over the running of the ongoing Redwood seniors group to a for-
mer student who assisted her on Seniors Rocking. She speaks excitedly about
her new topic—love—inspired by Auguste Rodin’s famous sculptural
studies of amorous passions. Several years earlier, she tellingly reflected on
the source of her continual new projects and the tension between simpli-
fying means and expanding possibilities that has propelled her:

There is a secret to longevity in dance: I found a process, which enabled

me to access my creativity through dance. . . . I stripped away many
of the assumptions I had learned about dance, and re-invented it for
myself. . . . I experimented with where dance could take place, and who
could be a dancer. I danced on the streets and the beaches, and I danced
with people who had never taken a dance class in their lives. . . . I started
questioning what dance could be about and I started making dances that
had to do with my life and the lives of the people who dance them. I have
been playing for these many years in the open field of dance, where life
experience is the fuel for my dancing, and dance is the fuel for my life
experience.50

Anna resists the standard use of dance and, with it, a static notion of the
artist and artistic style. In her career she has made a full circle back to the
nature and role of dance in its most elemental use. Her one constant has
been a vision of art as a continual transformation of experience, an open-

356 CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

ing of possibility, a hedge against the predictable. “I want you to imagine
that you have one dance left to do,” she once told an audience. “I want you
to imagine what this dance would be. Money is no object. Production val-
ues are irrelevant. What is the dance you want to do —this last dance of
your life?”51

CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE 357

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

my first thanks must go to Anna Halprin, who did not always agree
with my perspective but who nonetheless gave me unlimited access to her
extensive archives, files, letters, photographs, scores, and notes. She partic-
ipated with unflagging generosity in countless interviews and telephone
conversations during the fifteen years I worked on this project. I was al-
lowed to observe Anna teaching workshops and classes for dancers, indi-
viduals challenging AIDS and cancer, health care providers, and seniors as
well as in training sessions at Sea Ranch, retreats at Esalen, and perform-
ances and public addresses in the Bay Area and abroad. Lawrence Halprin
was also very generous with his time, photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks,
and memories. Both of them read the manuscript before it was edited and
corrected some factual details. Beyond that, they had no direct involvement
in the making of the book.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the dancers, collaborators, and
associates of Anna who generously shared their memories and often pri-
vate letters, photographs, and clippings with me. They contributed im-
measurably in giving me as vivid a sense as possible of the early workshops
on the dance deck and many of the works of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
that have vanished. These individuals include Charles Amirkhanian, Jack
Anderson, Paul Baum, Jeanne Hayes Beaman, Ruth Beckford, Miriam
Raymer Bennett, Sunni Bloland, Rabbi Samuel Broude, Trisha Brown, Jim

359
 Burns, Remy Charlip, Wanda Coleman, Bruce Conner, Maggie Creigh-
ton, Merce Cunningham, Doris Dennison, George Dorris, Eiko and
Koma, Simone Forti, Kathelin Gray, Kim Hahn, Daria Halprin, Rana Hal-
prin, Melinda West Harrison, Alma Hawkins, William Heick, Mary Hink-
son, Luca Hoving, Jenny Hunter Groat, Warner Jepson, Rhodessa Jones,
Kush, Jo Landor, Pearl Lang, Skip La Plante, Nina Lathrop, Norma Leis-
tiko, Murray Louis, Sydney Luria, Jasmine Nash Lutes, Vera Maletic, Jamie
McHugh, Nancy Cronenwelt Meehan, Meredith Monk, Robert Morris,
Louise H’Doubler Nagel, Irving Penn, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Raymer,
Larry Reed, Charles Reinhart, Terry Riley, John Rockwell, Juanita Sagan,
Benito Santiago, Richard Schechner, Albert Schuman, Ida Schuman, Stan-
ton Schuman, Ramon Sender, Kermit Sheets, Allan Stinson, Eeo Stub-
blefield, Morton Subotnick, Lynne Palmer Van Dam, Sir Lawrence Wash-
ington, James Woods, and La Monte Young. In particular, A.A. Leath
responded from his home in the rainforest in Costa Rica with great gen-
erosity to my letters asking about the early works of the San Francisco
Dancers’ Workshop, sharing photos, films, and clippings from his own files,
as did John Graham. Gail Randall Chrisman shared childhood letters, and
Liam O’Gallagher provided a copy of the Blue Planet Notebook. Dee Mullen
and Jeri Sulley helped with photographs and clippings in Larry’s o‹ce
archives.
I am also very grateful to Richard Schechner for his generosity in writ-
ing the elegant foreword. I extend special thanks to the photographers who
allowed me to use their work, particularly Duane Beeson for Coni Beeson,
Rick Chapman, the Imogene Cunningham Trust, Paul Fusco, Lawrence
Halprin, William Heick, Warner Jepson, John Kokoska, Hattula Moholy-
Nagy, Ron Partridge, Irving Penn, Casey Sonnabend, and Eeo Stubblefield,
as well as Brigitte Carnochan for the author photograph. The Maison Euro-
péenne de la Photographie in Paris generously sent me a copy of the cata-
logue for Irving Penn’s photographs of The Bath. The San Francisco Perform-
ing Arts Library and Museum kindly supplied digital files for the images
of Ann Schuman in the 1920s, Ann Schuman in the Hillel Dance Group,
Ann Halprin and Welland Lathrop in their studio, the 1960 summer work-
shop, Ten Myths, Lunch, Ann Halprin doing an outdoor improvisation in
the 1970s, and the “Monster Dance” from Circle the Earth.
I owe a very special thanks to my friend the late Stephen Cobbett Stein-
berg, who, inspired by my early research on the Halprins, made the 1989
KQED-TV special dual portrait of the Halprins, Inner Landscapes. After
Steve’s death Joan Saªa, his associate at KQED-TV, allowed me to retrieve

360 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the dozens of background tapes that Steve had made, including video trans-
fers of much of the archival footage of Anna’s dances and Larry’s projects,
as well as extensive interviews with the Halprins and their associates, just
before they were to be erased. I am very thankful to the staª of the San Fran-
cisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, and particularly Kirsten Tanaka
and Tricia Roush, for their generosity in giving me access to the files and
boxes of Anna Halprin’s materials that were in the process of being trans-
ferred from her home to their San Francisco o‹ces during the final period
of this project. Monica Mosley at the Dance Collection of the New York
Public Library was helpful in research I conducted there, as was the curator
at the Steenbock Archives at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
My colleague Peggy Phelan read an early draft of several chapters, and I
have profited greatly from her insightful criticisms and conversations over
several years. Mark Franko also made many helpful and important com-
ments about the manuscript. Michele Pridmore Brown at the Michelle Clay-
man Institute for Gender Research at Stanford made perceptive comments
on the chapter on aging. And Danny Walkowitz oªered suggestions on an
early chapter as well. Marcia Siegel was a supportive reader of the initial
proposal of this book and oªered valuable criticisms.
I am especially thankful to Joan Acocella, Mindy Aloª, Sally Banes, and
Deborah Jowitt, each of whom oªered their own form of encouragement
at diªerent important moments in the life of this project. Former and cur-
rent students at Stanford also provided much appreciated assistance; these
include Jill Antonides with her sharp editorial eye, Miguel de Bacca, and
Emily Hite. And thanks to the Department of Drama, Zack, Daniel Sack,
Arden Thomas, and Kathryn Syssoyeva, who also assisted me, as did Alice
Kleeman, who transcribed hours of interviews over the years.
I would like to give profound thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation for its 2001 fellowship without which this book
would probably never have been completed. A fellowship at the Stanford
Humanities Center for 2001–2 was also critical to my completion of this
project, allowing me time to write and research and to test out ideas among
a remarkable community of scholars. The Djerassi Resident Artists Pro-
gram oªered me a month of splendid solitude to write in October 2002.
The Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford (now the
Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research) also oªered me a very
collegial work community during the 2002–3 academic year. The Penin-
sula Community Foundation made possible the use of many of the pho-
tographs in the book with a greatly appreciated publication grant. The

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 361
 Peninsula Community Foundation also helped support my time at Djerassi
with an Outstanding Artist Foundation Fellowship. Finally, for a week each
in the summers of 1992 and 1993, when my two children were quite young,
the Cottages at Hedgebrook Women Writers Colony on Whidby Island,
Washington, gave me my first fellowships that made possible the drafting
of the prospectus for this book.
Some material from this book appeared earlier in different forms: mate-
rial from chapter 4 appeared in “Anna Halprin and Improvisation as Child’s
Play,” in Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, eds., Taken by Surprise: A
Dance Improvisation Reader ( Wesleyan University Press/University Press of
New England, 2003); material from chapter 6 appeared in “Anna Halprin
and the 1960s: Acting in the Gap between the Personal, the Public and the
Political,” in Sally Banes and Andrea Harris, eds., Reinventing Dance in the
1960s: Everything Was Possible (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); and
material from chapters 6 and 10 appeared in “Anna Halprin’s Urban Rituals,”
in The Drama Review (Summer 2004).
I cannot conclude without expressing my gratitude to my remarkable ed-
itors at UC Press. Doris Kretchmer was the first to have faith in the merit
of the project, Sheila Levine graciously supported it, and Sue Heinemann
spared no eªort in improving each chapter with her unstinting editorial ex-
pertise and wealth of knowledge as a student of Anna Halprin’s for many
years. Her fastidious reading of the text has saved it from a great number
of errors. My gratitude and love to my husband, Keith, son, Josh, and daugh-
ter, Maya, whose patience and understanding over the years get my final
and most heartfelt thanks.

362 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 NOTES

Anna Halprin’s archives are now located at the San Francisco Performing Arts
Library and Museum. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interviews with the Halprins, which
he gave to the author, will also be available at SFPALM.

PREFACE

1. In 1972, after she survived a recurrence of her colorectal cancer, she

adopted a modified version of her birth name, Hannah, anglicizing it to
“Anna.”
2. Ann Halprin, lecture-demonstration at Stanford University, Stanford, Cali-
fornia, June 1961.
3. Susan L. Foster, Choreography and Narrative Ballet’s Staging of Story and
Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 261.
4. The dance historian Linda Tomko has noted how increasing circulation
of Freud’s theories in America refigured notions of what it was that bodies con-
tained or deployed or needed to express. See her Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnic-
ity and Social Divides in American Dance 1890–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 218.
5. Anna Halprin, in Artists in Exile: A History of Modern Dance in San Fran-
cisco, video documentary produced by Austin Forbord and Shelley Trott, San
Francisco, 2000.

363
 CHAPTER 1: WHY SHE DANCED

1. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, San Francisco, 1988,

no. 2, 18.
2. Irving Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1996), 50.
3. Ibid., 40.
4. Ibid., 65.
5. Ibid., 94.
6. Author’s interview with Robert Raymer, Atherton, California, July 10,
1992.
7. Author’s interview with Albert Schuman, Woodside, California, July 18,
1992. All subsequent quotations from Albert Schuman are from this interview.
8. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 22.
9. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, June 30, 1992.
10. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism: An Anthology of Israelite
Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
11. Author’s interview with Albert Schuman.
12. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 16.
13. Ibid., 23.
14. Author’s interview with Ida Schuman, Woodside, California, March 17,
1990.
15. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Noted by Robert Raymer in author’s interview with Raymer, 1992.
21. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
22. Author’s interview with Albert Schuman.
23. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
24. A. Zilversmit, Changing School: Progressive Education Theory and Prac-
tice, 1930–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
25. Carlton Washburne, What Is Progressive Education? A Book for Parents and
Others (New York: John Day, 1952), 87, 144.
26. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
27. Author’s tour of the Winnetka schools and Halprin’s home in August 1994.
In an interview with the author ( July 8, 1992), Miriam Raymer Bennett reported
that there were two prominent Jewish families in Winnetka, the Loebs and the
Strausses, who wanted, or succeeded in, it is unclear, passing local legislation that
said neighbors had to approve a new family moving into a neighborhood. (She

364 NOTES TO PAGES 2–12

believes this was an additional eªort by the German Jews to keep the Eastern
European ones out.)
28. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
29. Washburne, What Is Progressive Education? 125.
30. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Random House, 1977), 147.
31. Washburne, What Is Progressive Education? 124.
32. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
33. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 28.
34. Ibid.
35. Author’s interview with Robert Raymer. All subsequent quotations from
Raymer are from this interview.
36. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 20.
37. Ibid., 28.
38. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
39. Suzanne Shelton, Divine Dancer: A Biography of Ruth St. Denis (New
York: Doubleday, 1981), 152–53.
40. Traditionally one is deemed Jewish by virtue of having been born to a
Jewish mother.
41. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
42. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 31.
43. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
44. Author’s phone interview with Pearl Lang, September 20, 1992.
45. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, February
13, 2002.
46. Author’s interview with Ida Schuman. Ida made this comment after a
prompt from Anna, who was present at the interview.
47. In Doris Humphrey, Doris Humphrey: An Artist First, ed. Selma Jeanne
Cohen (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 133.
48. Marcia B. Siegel, Days on Earth: The Dance of Doris Humphrey (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 151.
49. Humphrey, Doris Humphrey, 143.
50. Ann Halprin, unpublished notes, 1941, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
51. Ibid.
52. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 3.
53. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 13, 2002.

CHAPTER 2: THE SECRET GARDEN OF AMERICAN DANCE

The epigraph is from Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction

(New York: Routledge, 2002), 23.

NOTES TO PAGES 12–23 365

 1. Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russian and the So-
viet Union, 1881 to the Present (New York: Schocken Books, 1988).
2. “Harvard’s Jewish Problem,” www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-
semitism/harvard.html (September 24, 2002). The subsequent quote from Low-
ell is also from this source.
3. David O. Levin, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
4. William James Lawson, ed., Dance Magazine College Guide (New York:
Dance Magazine, 1988–89), 11.
5. Sali Ann Kriegsman, Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 6. Ironically, it was reportedly the need for physical
exercise and the lack of a gym, not Progressive ideals, that led the wife of Ben-
nington’s president Robert Devore Leigh to suggest that exercise classes might
be oªered as an art form—dance (ibid.).
6. Ibid., 79, 74.
7. Quoted in ibid., 75.
8. Janet Mansfield Soares, Louis Horst: Musician in a Dancer’s World (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 140.
9. Ibid., 142.
10. The ages of the students ranged from 16 to 41, and of the 180 partici-
pants, 100 were in the general program, with most of the others in the profes-
sional program. Kriegsman, Modern Dance in America, 78.
11. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, February
13, 2002. All quotations in this paragraph are from this interview.
12. Author’s phone interview with Jeanne Hayes Beaman, September 26,
2002. All quotations from Beaman in this chapter are from this interview.
13. This was something Ann’s college mentor Margaret H’Doubler once told
a student. See Janice Ross, Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Begin-
ning of Dance in American Education (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2000).
14. Martha Hill, “Martha Hill Reminisces about Bennington,” videotape of
lecture delivered at Bennington College on July 25, 1985, in New York Public Li-
brary’s Dance Collection, MGZHA 4–375: 1985.
15. Blanche Trilling, “History of Physical Education for Women at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin, 1898–1946,” 1951, University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives.
16. Author’s phone interview with Mary Hinkson, March 3, 1997.
17. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958 [1934]).
Although Art as Experience was not published until 1934, Dewey had been ru-
minating on these ideas for decades.
18. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, April 14, 1999.
19. Quoted in Ross, Moving Lessons, 151.
20. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, April 14, 1999.

366 NOTES TO PAGES 23–31

 21. Ibid.
22. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 13, 2002.
23. Max Kadushin, Organic Thinking: A Study in Rabbinic Thought (New
York: Bloch, 1938). Kadushin had trained in New York in the 1920s, when it was
fashionable to find ways to organize knowledge in a discipline. He was part of a
number of scientists and intellectuals who were finding ways to unify fields and
organize apparently random information into a theory of “organic thinking.”
24. Max Kadushin, The Rabbinic Mind (New York: Blaisdell, 1965), 111–12.
25. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, San Francisco, 1988,
no. 2, 13.
26. Ann Halprin, personal notes (1941), in Anna Halprin’s archives. The dance
was based on Walt Whitman’s “The Hymn for Dead Soldiers.”
27. Ben Stephansky, “Wisconsin Hillel Dance Idea,” The Hillel Review (Uni-
versity of Wisconsin), November 27, 1941.
28. Kriegsman, Modern Dance in America. All quotations in this paragraph
are from pages 82–83 in this source.
29. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 13, 2002.
30. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, September 25, 2002.
31. Ted Sinitzky, “A Tribute to Excellence,” The Hillel Review (University of
Wisconsin), 1939. Around this time The Daily Cardinal, the University of Wis-
consin student body newspaper, began devoting a weekly column to dance and
dance activities on campus
32. Nik Krevitsky, “Orchesis Triumphs at U. of Wisconsin,” Chicago Dancer,
June 1941.
33. Ann Schuman, introductory speech given at University of Wisconsin,
Madison, 1940; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
34. J. A. Gray, “To Want to Dance: A Biography of Margaret H’Doubler,”
Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, Tucson, 1978, 167.
35. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin on teaching dance to children,
Kentfield, California, March 12, 1994.
36. Ibid.
37. Gray, “To Want to Dance,” 216.
38. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, April 14, 1999.
39. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence and Anna Halprin,
Kentfield, California, 1988, reel 15.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco, July 10, 1992.
44. Ibid.
45. Author’s interview with Sydney Luria, New York, November 10, 2000.
All subsequent quotes from Sydney Luria are from this interview.

NOTES TO PAGES 31–40 367

 46. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco,
1988, 21–24.
47. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, July 10, 1992. Quotations in
this paragraph and next are from this interview.
48. Ibid.
49. Note from Lawrence Halprin to author, June 28, 2004; author’s inter-
view with Lawrence Halprin, July 10, 1992.
50. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence and Anna Halprin, reel 15.
51. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco, August 1, 1995.
52. Author’s interview with Miriam Raymer Bennett, Atherton, California,
July 8, 1992.
53. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, July 10,
1992.
54. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, August 1, 1995.
55. Ibid.
56. George M. Goodwin, “Wright’s Beth Sholom Synagogue,” American Jew-
ish History 86 (Spring 1998): 1.
57. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, 47.
58. Ibid., 48.
59. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 13.
60. Ibid., 16–17.
61. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence and Anna Halprin, reel 15.
62. Ann Schuman Halprin, “Hebrews: A Dancing People: The Historical De-
velopment of Jewish Dance,” senior thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison,
1942, 97–98.
63. Ruth Hatfield, interviewed by Carol Murota, 1992, in Legacy Oral His-
tory Project, San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum.
64. Margaret H’Doubler, “A Question of Values and Terms,” Dance Observer
12, no. 7 (August–September 1945).

CHAPTER 3: THE BAUHAUS AND THE SETTLEMENT HOUSE

The epigraph is quoted in Reginald Isaacs, Walter Gropius: An Illustrated Biog-

raphy of the Creator of the Bauhaus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983), 68.
1. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco,
1988, 53.
2. Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape (London: Ar-
chitectural Press, 1938).
3. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco, August 1, 1995.
Subsequent quotations in this paragraph are also from this interview.

368 NOTES TO PAGES 41–51

 4. Isaacs, Walter Gropius, 238.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 68.
7. Quoted in ibid., 228.
8. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, August 1, 1995.
9. Isaacs, Walter Gropius, 236.
10. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, October 8, 2002.
11. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, San Francisco, 1988,
no. 2, 22.
12. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin on teaching dance to children,
Kentfield, California, March 12, 1994. All the subsequent quotations about her
experience at Winsor (except for her program note) are from this interview.
13. Ibid. All the quotations about her experience at the settlement house are
from this interview.
14. Thomas H. Johnson, Oxford Companion to American History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966).
15. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, 55–56.
16. Ann Halprin, personal notebook, 1943, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
17. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, March 12, 1994.
18. Ann Halprin on Barbara Mettler’s summer session, in her private jour-
nal, 1943; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
19. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, March 12, 1994.
20. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, October 8, 2002.
21. Robert Kraus, “William Steig at 80,” Publishers Weekly (1987), available
at www.williamsteig.com/article-pw87.htm.
22. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, February
13, 2002.
23. William Steig, The Lonely Ones (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1942).
24. In ibid., ii.
25. Program for The Lonely Ones, 1955, in Anna Halprin’s archives. When
Ann performed The Lonely Ones at the New York festival of the American Na-
tional Theatre and Academy (ANTA) in 1955, Cazden played his piano score live
at every performance.
26. Roger Angell, “The Minstrel Steig,” New Yorker (February 20 and 27,
1995): 2.
27. Larry later described the lessons he had learned in this way: “Social prob-
lems and architecture were valid and important. Space and form are linked;
the object you make has to be integrated into the landscape; the arts are not
segmented—they are all one hunk; the arts are a way of creatively modifying
and improving the world through creativity; and crafts and arts should not be
separated” (from Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, 59).

NOTES TO PAGES 51–64 369

 28. See M. E. Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1987), 17.
29 David Vaughan, Merce Cunningham Fifty Years (New York: Aperture,
1997), 27.
30. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, no. 2, 2.
31. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, October 8, 2002.
32. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, 60.
33. Ann Halprin, letter to “Julie,” April 1945, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
34. Tilla Hevesi, “San Francisco Letter,” Dance Observer (May 1945): 57.

CHAPTER 4: WESTERN SPACES

The epigraph is from Kenneth Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter” (1957) in San Fran-
cisco Stories, ed. John Miller (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1990), 179.
1. Anna Halprin, phone conversation with author, June 30, 2002.
2. “Celebration—Five Dead, 624 Injured,” San Francisco Chronicle, August
16, 1945.
3. See, for example, Stanton Delapane, “S.F. Rioting Mob Is Out of Con-
trol; Sailors, Civilians, Girls in a Wild Bacchanalia,” San Francisco Chronicle, Au-
gust 16, 1945.
4. Peter Hartlaub, “Huge Crowds Avoided Deaths of Past Years,” San Fran-
cisco Examiner, January 1, 2002; see www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file = /
examiner/archive/2002/01/01.
5. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin, Kentfield, California, September
20, 1991.
6. Anna Halprin, “A Report on Citydance,” in Moving toward Life: Five
Decades of Transformational Dance, ed. Rachel Kaplan (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press/University Press of New England, 1995), 170.
7. Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xviii.
8. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco,
1988, 5.
9. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy”
(1911), quoted in Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 422.
10. Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California 1786–1940, 2nd ed. (San Fran-
cisco: Hughes Publishing, 1989), 4.
11. Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 312.
12. Quoted in ibid., 313.
13. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Anna Halprin, San Francisco, 1988,
no. 2, 5.

370 NOTES TO PAGES 65–74

 14. This very useful phrase comes up in Foster’s general discussion of ballet
choreography and narrative, in her book Choreography and Narrative Ballet’s Stag-
ing of Story and Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). Foster has
said that people “understand choreographic theorizations best when the bodies
that enact them are engaged in distinct corporeal pursuits and are positioned in
frictive encounter with dancing bodies” (xvi).
15. Dore Ashton, “An Eastern View of the San Francisco School,” in San
Francisco Stories, ed. John Miller (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1990), 211.
16. Ibid., 209.
17. Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New
York: Mentor Books, 1964), 212–13.
18. Dorothee Imbert, “Of Gardens and Houses as Places to Live: Thomas
Church and William Wurster,” in Marc Treib, ed., An Everyday Modernism: The
Houses of William Wurster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 114.
19. Ibid.
20. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, 7–9.
21. Ibid., 2.
22. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco, August 1, 1995.
23. Ibid.
24. In Lawrence Halprin, Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places, exh. cat. (San
Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 116.
25. Lawrence Halprin, “Landscaping a Small Plot,” Sunset, November–
December 1949, 105, 122.
26. Los Angeles Times, February 1949, from scrapbook of Lawrence Halprin.
27. Thomas Church and Lawrence Halprin, “You Have a Gold Mine in Your
Backyard,” House Beautiful, January 1949, 37–44.
28. In Treib, ed., Everyday Modernism, 127.
29. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, 3.
30. Ibid., 7–8.
31. Halprin, Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places, 116.
32. “They Love to Dance,” Terpsichore (April 1949).
33. Author’s interview with John Graham, Stanford, California, September
21, 1992.
34. Author’s interview with Nina Lathrop, San Francisco, August 20, 1992.
Despite the fact that she was interviewed nearly forty years after Ann and Lath-
rop had dissolved their studio partnership, below the surface of Nina’s clipped
answers one could clearly sense her lingering defensiveness of her husband and
resentment of Ann.
35. Alfred Frankenstein, “Ann Halprin Impressive in Dance Recital,” San
Francisco Chronicle, October 27, 1947, 13.
36. Alfred Frankenstein, “A Variety of Dance Programs,” San Francisco
Chronicle, 1947; in Anna Halprin’s archives.

NOTES TO PAGES 74–82 371

 37. Spencer Barefoot, “Worthwhile Dance Program,” San Francisco Call Bul-
letin, 1947.
38. Ibid.
39. Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American
Classrooms 1880–1990 (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1993), 143.
40. Gale Randall Chrisman, e-mail to author, October 20, 2001.
41. Ibid., Chrisman kindly showed four photographs from Ann’s classes.
42. Including a black student in a private dance class with whites was fairly
radical at the time, some five years before the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that
racial segregation was unconstitutional in public schools.
43. Chrisman, e-mail to author, October 20, 2001. Chrisman’s parents were
active Communists and in 1953, at the height of the blacklisting terror, they moved
to Canada for several years. Ann continued to correspond with Chrisman dur-
ing this time, giving her advice about the next steps to take in developing her-
self as a dancer. At one point, when Chrisman wanted to take ballet, Ann cau-
tioned her against it, writing, “Why is it impossible for a teacher to do an honest
job of directing students in both ballet and modern? In answering this question
can you describe the diªerence between ballet and contemporary dance in terms
of 1) technique, 2) choreography, 3) its values to the individual as an experience,
4) its values to society as we know it today” (letter from Ann Halprin to Gale
Randall [Chrisman], December 14, 1954).
44. Lenore Peters Job, Looking Back While Surging Forward (San Francisco:
Peters Wright Creative Dance, 1984), 80–81.
45. Chrisman, e-mail to author, October 20, 2001.
46. “Dancer Ann Halprin’s Art Is a Philosophy of Life, Too,” San Francisco
Chronicle, 1950, 11; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
47. Author’s phone interview with Ruth Beckford, Oakland, California, Sep-
tember 8, 1994. Subsequent quotations from Beckford are also from this interview.
48. Murray Louis, “Editor’s Note,” Impulse (1948): 2.
49. Author’s interview with Jenny Hunter Groat, Lagunitas, California, Au-
gust 13, 1992. Subsequent quotations from Hunter Groat are also from this
interview.
50. Yvonne Rainer, “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Anna Halprin,” Tulane
Drama Review 10, no. 5 (1965); reprinted in Moving toward Life: Five Decades of
Transformational Dance, ed. Ruth Kaplan (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University
Press/University Press of New England, 1995), 77.
51. Author’s interview with Graham.
52. Ann Halprin, “Intuition and Improvisation in Dance,” Impulse (1955):
10–15.
53. Ibid.
54. Ann Halprin, “Children’s Class,” Impulse (1948): 27–29.

372 NOTES TO PAGES 82–88

 55. Ann Halprin, “Teaching Dance,” Impulse (1949): 20.
56. Ibid.
57. Halprin, “Intuition and Improvisation in Dance,” Impulse (1955): 11.
58. Ann Halprin, “Training for Expression,” Impulse (1957): 39.
59. Author’s interview with Doris Dennison, San Francisco, July 19, 1993.
60. Ibid.
61. Doris Dennison, “Improvisation and Dance Accompaniment,” Impulse
(1948): 13–15.
62. Murray Louis, Inside Dance: Essays by Murray Louis (New York: St. Mar-
tin’s Press, 1980), 3.
63. Author’s interview with Murray Louis, Arlee, Virginia, March 26, 2000.
64. Ibid.
65. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, September 25, 2002.
66. Jennifer Dunning, “How Dance Can Shape a Child’s View of Life,” New
York Times, December 1, 1997.
67. Mindy Aloª, “Arias,” The New Republic, October 9, 2000, 6.
68. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, September 25, 2002.
69. Jim Waring, “What Is the Ideal Technical Equipment for Today’s The-
ater Dancer?” Impulse (1948): 18–20.
70. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, May 24,
2002.
71. Richard Ford, “Notes on Classes for Boys,” Impulse 8 (1953).
72. Author’s interview with Nancy Cronenwelt Meehan, New York, Sep-
tember 13, 2001. All the subsequent quotations from Meehan are also from this
interview.
73. Author’s interview with A.A. Leath, Madison, Wisconsin, September 8,
1992.
74. Lawrence Halprin, “The Choreography of Gardens,” Impulse (1949):
31–32.
75. In Sunset, March 1955, from scrapbook of Lawrence Halprin.
76. Author’s interview with Ann Halprin, May 24, 2002.
77. In Anna Halprin’s archives.
78. Author’s interview with Leath.
79. It seems appropriate that Ann met Jo Landor, a painter who worked for
decades as her artistic consultant (becoming the artistic director for the San Fran-
cisco Dancers’ Workshop), when Landor brought her two daughters to take dance
classes with Ann (in this case, at the Union Street studio). One day Ann asked
the mothers to make Indian costumes for the children, and when she saw Lan-
dor’s rustic invention made out of old burlap potato sacks she quickly recruited
her to make costumes for Ann and her adult dancers in an upcoming dance con-
cert at San Francisco’s Stern Grove. “It was the first time we collaborated,” Lan-

NOTES TO PAGES 89–98 373

 dor said. “The dance was called Madrona and I began by gathering colors and
fabrics the dancers could carry with them. I always felt that I worked as an artist
and my materials were the space” (author’s interview with Jo Landor, San Fran-
cisco, August 14, 1991).
80. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, January
25, 1996.
81. Clipping from Dance Magazine, 1957, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
82. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, Decem-
ber 21, 1995.
83. From an undated document on the Marin Children’s Dance Coopera-
tive, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
84. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, January 25, 1996.
85. From undated document on Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative.
86. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, December 21, 1995.
87. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin, Kentfield, California, January
2, 2002.
88. “Dancing in the Dark? Jobs and Futures for the College Dance Ma-
jor,” Mademoiselle, September 1950, 140–41.
89. Lawrence Halprin, “Structure and Garden Spaces Related in Sequence,”
Progressive Architecture, May 1958, 96–104.
90. Lawrence Halprin, “The Art of Garden Design,” Journal of Popular Cul-
ture, July 1954, 226.
91. Ann Halprin, letter to Gale Randall [Chrisman], December 14, 1954.
92. Lawrence Halprin and Ann Halprin, “Dance Deck in the Woods,” Im-
pulse (1956): 24.
93. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, 51.
94. Quoted in William L. Crosten, “Music Center Theater at Stanford Uni-
versity,” Impulse (1959): 59.
95. Ben Belitt, “Poet in the Theater,” Impulse (1959): 12.
96. Halprin and Halprin, “Dance Deck in the Woods,” 23.
97. Ibid., 24.
98. Ibid.
99. In Stanley Eichelbaum, “The Kentfield Home of the Halprins—A
Dwelling Built for a Dancer,” San Francisco Examiner (1959): 11–13; in Anna Hal-
prin’s archives.
100. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, December 21, 1995.
101. Merce Cunningham, draft of lecture demonstration on Ann Halprin’s
dance deck, 1957; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
102. Doris Humphrey, letter to Ann Halprin, October 11, 1953. When Ann
wrote back, expressing interest, Humphrey supplied more details about the fes-
tival in a letter of October 20. Both letters in Anna Halprin’s archives.

374 NOTES TO PAGES 98–108

 103. Ashton, “An Eastern View of the San Francisco School,” 209.
104. Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent, 97. He is quoting Harold Rosen-
berg at the end.
105. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, July 19, 1999.
106. Humphrey, letter to Ann Halprin, October 20, 1953.
107. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, Decem-
ber 11, 1989.
108. John Martin, letter to Ann Halprin 1947; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
109. John Martin, “Broadway Applauds Marin Dancer,” quoted in Marin
Independent-Journal, June 4, 1955, M6.
110. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, December 11, 1989.
111. Author’s interview with Hunter Groat.
112. Author’s interview with Leath.
113. P. Adams Sitney, “The Potted Psalm,” in Visionary Film: The American
Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 82.
114. Ibid., 83.
115. Starr, Americans and the California Dream.

CHAPTER 5: INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE, LUCY, AND BEAT CULTURE

The epigraph is quoted in Deborah Klotchko and Barbara Hitchcock, Innova-

tion/Imagination: Fifty Years of Polaroid Photography (New York: Harry Abrams,
1999), 13.
1. Ibid., 16.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, September 24, 2003.
4. Author’s interview with Jenny Hunter Groat, Lagunitas, California, Au-
gust 13, 1992.
5. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, January 22,
2005.
6. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with James Broughton, 1988; in author’s
archives.
7. Ibid.
8. Quoted in P. Adams Sitney, “The Potted Psalm,” in Visionary Film: The
American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 83.
9. Steinberg’s interview with Broughton. The subsequent quotation is also
from this interview.
10. See Lori Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 29, 161.
11. Author’s interview with Jo Landor, San Francisco, August 14, 1991.

NOTES TO PAGES 109–119 375

 12. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, January 22, 2005.
13. Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women, 28. As Landay notes, I Love
Lucy ran as a half-hour situation comedy from October 1951 to May 1957, and
as thirteen hour-long shows from November 1957 until April 1960 (155).
14. Ibid., 29.
15. Ibid., 187.
16. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin, Kentfield, California, January 2,
2002.
17. Author’s interview with Simone Forti, Los Angeles, August 11, 2001.
18. Author’s interview with Landor.
19. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin.
20. Author’s interview with Meredith Monk, Stanford, California, March 5,
2000.
21. Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 3. It should be noted that
Ann’s actions both repudiated and embraced contemporary feminist issues about
“domestic discontents,” and her social class enabled her always to have childcare
and a housecleaner, giving her independence from full-time household duties.
See M. Carson, “Domestic Discontents: Feminist Reevaluations of Psychiatry,
Women and the Family,” Canadian Review of American Studies (1992 Special Issue
Part II): 171–91.
22. Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in
the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1982).
23. See Lisa Phillips, Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965, exh. cat.
(New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 125.
24. Although (as noted in the previous chapter), in the late 1940s, just prior
to the period this list covers, Waring did spend a couple of formative years in his
development as a dancer studying at the Halprin-Lathrop School in San Francisco.
25. Quoted in Ann Charters, Beat down to Your Soul (New York: Penguin
Books, 2001), 169.
26. See A. B. Levine, “The Body’s Politics: Race and Gender in the Authen-
tic Sixties,” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, Charottesville, 1997, 221. Nor-
man Mailer’s “The White Negro,” published in 1957, added to the masculinist
mythology by conflating the avant-garde artist with the hipster so that what be-
came glorified in the public consciousness was the artist as psychopath.
27. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, January 22, 2005.
28. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
29. Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 220.
30. Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1982).
31. Halprin’s style of “hanging” loosely with a group while being basically

376 NOTES TO PAGES 120–124

independent can be also construed as a Beat posture. Halprin never had a “com-
pany”; instead, starting in 1955, she formed the San Francisco Dancers’ Work-
shop, a loose collective of dancers and an actor with whom she improvised, dis-
covering movement and exploring narratives of their lives together. In 1952
Herbert Blau had cofounded the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop at San Fran-
cisco State with Jules Irving.
32. Quoted in Daniel Belgrade, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and
the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 89.
33. Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent, 151.
34. Quoted in ibid., 151.
35. Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent, 63.
36. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, September 1,
2003.
37. Author’s interview with Hunter Groat.
38. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, January 22, 2005.
39. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001. The following quote is also from this
interview.
40. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, September 24, 2003.
41. Daughter of the Voice, The Prophetess, and another dance of this period,
Emek, which focus on Jewish heroines who became inspirational leaders for their
people, fit into the post-Holocaust dances that Naomi Jackson describes as cre-
ating “uplifting, timeless images of a positive Jewish identity” (see her Converg-
ing Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y [Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000]).
42. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, January 22, 2005.
43. Anna Halprin in “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Anna Halprin,” Tulane
Drama Review 10, no. 5 (1965): 77.
44. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
45. Author’s interview with A.A. Leath, Madison, September 8, 1992.
46. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
47. Author’s interview with Hunter Groat.
48. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
49. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin, September 5, 1991.
50. Author’s phone interview with William (Bill) Heick, January 24, 2004.
51. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
52. The evening also included a film Heick made of a Pomo Indian curing
ceremony at Stewart’s Point, on the Northern California coast, next to the fu-
ture site of Sea Ranch (author’s phone interview with Heick).
53. Note from William R. Heick to the author, July 7, 2004. These images
and the dancers’ air of hip nonchalance obliquely invoke and update 1930s pho-
tographs of Ted Shawn and his male dancers posing heroically with their mus-
cled forms blending into the geometry of huge factory machinery.

NOTES TO PAGES 124–131 377

 54. Author’s conversation with Paul Berliner, Stanford, California, May 12,
2002.
55. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
56. Ibid.
57. Author’s interview with John Graham, Stanford, California, September
21, 1992.
58. Quoted in H. George-Warren, ed., The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats:
The Beat Generation and American Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 354.
59. Ann Halprin, “Message to Our Audience from the Performers,” mimeo-
graphed sheet, 1957; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
60. David Sterritt, Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the Fifties, and Film (Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998).
61. Author’s interview with Graham.
62. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, September 24, 2003.
63. Author’s interview with Simone Forti, Vermont, September 22, 1993.
64. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
65. Author’s interview with Forti, July 22, 1993. Trisha Brown recalls that the
term structured improvisation developed in the early 1960s in New York out of
things she and Forti were doing together (phone message to author, June 18,
2004).
66. This contrasted significantly with Grand Union’s more egalitarian
structure.
67. Author’s interview with Leath.
68. Ibid.
69. Author’s interview with Forti, July 22, 1993.
70. Edward Halsey Foster, Richard Brautigan (Indianapolis: Twayne, 1983),
21.
71. Michael Mason, “The Pancakes and the President: A Review of The Tokyo
Mountain Express,” Times Literary Supplement (May 1, 1981): 483.
72. Robert Kern, “Williams, Brautigan, and the Poetics of Primitivism,”
Chicago Review 27, no. 1 (1975): 47–57.
73. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, January 22, 2005.
74. Program for Flowerburger at Contemporary Dancers Foundation, San
Francisco, November 29–30 and December 1, 1959; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
75. Peter Yates, “Visions of Dance—Part Two,” Arts and Architecture, 1962,
in Anna Halprin’s archives.
76. J.B., “A Halprin Happening,” Open City Press, November 18, 1964, 3.
77. Ann Halprin, “Program Notes of June 18, 1960,” in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
78. Steinberg’s interview with Broughton.
79. Ibid.
80. “Rainer Interviews Halprin,” 3.

378 NOTES TO PAGES 131–139

 81. K. Robert Schwarz writes, “During the summer of 1958 [Young ] com-
posed his first mature composition, the Trio for Strings—a landmark in the his-
tory of twentieth-century music and the virtual fountainhead of American mu-
sical minimalism” (Minimalists [London: Phaidon Press, 1996], 3).
82. “Rainer Interviews Halprin,” 6. Rainer interviewed Halprin in 1962, but
the interview was not published in TDR until 1965.
83. This piece evokes Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus study, Pole Dance (1927),
a choreographed solo in which a performer, in simple leotard and tights (the cos-
tume Ann used for Birds), with long poles a‹xed to each limb, navigates a black
stage. The sticks swing like huge insect legs, shooting out from each body part.
84. Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, “La Monte Young,” in The Theatre of
Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other
Mixed-Means Performances (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 191.
85. Author’s interview with Terry Riley, Grass Valley, California, October 21,
2003.
86. Both letters mentioned in e-mail from Marian Zazeela to the author, June
21, 2004. These letters were researched by Jeremy Grimshaw, a Ph.D. student at
the Eastman School in New York.
87. This statement comes from a letter Young wrote on April 7, 1960, to
Leonard Stein, a noted pianist and one of Schoenberg’s foremost disciples. (Stein
had been Young’s composition teacher at City College.) In the letter, Young noted
that Ann “would have used us to do the program down there but she had al-
ready begun work with the other musicians before she met me.” A few days later,
though, he followed with another letter announcing that he and Terry Riley
would be doing the music for Ann’s UCLA March concert after all. In this sec-
ond letter he laments that the dance in the concert will not be as fully improv-
isational as the workshops, noting that he and Riley will present a score that is
“altogether improvised on the spot.” (All these remarks are cited in the e-mail
from Zazeela to author.)
88. Author’s interview with Warner Jepson, San Francisco, December 17,
2001.
89. Quoted in Kostelanetz, “La Monte Young,” 193.
90. Author’s interview with Riley. Subsequent quotations are also from this
interview.
91. Zazeela, e-mail to author.
92. A few weeks later, in a letter to Cage, Ann described more fully her con-
tinued support but growing concern about how the radicalness of their actions
affected audiences. She noticed that “the sounds were of such a natue that in be-
coming involved as the audience was with them, they could not [see] the dance”
(Ann Halprin, letter to John Cage, June 23, 1960; in Anna Halprin’s archives).
93. Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 12.

NOTES TO PAGES 140–144 379

 94. Yvonne Rainer, Yvonne Rainer: Work 1961–73 (Halifax: Press of the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 312–13.
95. Yvonne Rainer, e-mail to author, August 21, 2001.
96. Kostelanetz, “La Monte Young,” 77.
97. Ibid., 192.
98. Zazeela, e-mail to author.
99. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, October 4, 2003.
100. Young’s dance deck lecture may have been a model for the fragmented
narratives in Ann’s major work the following year, The Four-Legged Stool, for
which Riley created what became known as his “Mescaline Mix” score.
101. Kostelanetz, “La Monte Young,” 191.
102. Zazeela, e-mail to author.
103. Author’s interview with Riley.
104. Ibid.
105. Eventually Young recorded two of the sounds from this period of work
for Ann and released them as a tape composition, which Merce Cunningham
used in his 1964 dance Winterbranch.
106. Yvonne Rainer, e-mail to author, August 16, 2001.
107. Robert Morris, e-mail to author, August 22, 2001.
108. Author’s interview with Trisha Brown, 1993. The subsequent quotations
from Brown are also from this interview.
109. Ann Halprin, “Program Notes of June 18, 1960,” in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
110. Ann Halprin, “Statement for Jack Anderson,” January 1961, in Anna
Halprin’s archives.
1 1 1. Ann Halprin, “Lecture-Demonstration for the University of British Co-
lumbia, Vancouver, Canada,” February 1961, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
112. Rainer, e-mails to author, August 21 and August 16, 2001.
113. Stephen Steinberg’s interview with Yvonne Rainer, 2001, aired on
KQED San Francisco; in author’s archives.
114. Rainer, e-mail to author, August 21, 2001.
1 15. Ibid.
116. Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal
Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia Col-
lege of Art and Design, 1974), 32.
117. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
1 18. Forti, Handbook in Motion, 32.
1 19. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001.
120. Author’s interview with Simone Forti, Larkspur, California, July 5, 1993.
121. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, September 24, 2003.
122. The other members of the workshop were Paulus Berenson, Marni
Mahaªay, and Steve Paxton (Banes, Democracy’s Body, 7).

380 NOTES TO PAGES 145–152

 123. Much of the information on Dunn in this paragraph comes from Banes,
Democracy’s Body, 3–4.
124. Author’s interview with Forti, 2001; Morris, e-mail to author.
125. Rainer, e-mail to author, August 21, 2001.
126. Quoted in Banes, Democracy’s Body, 8.
127. Banes, Democracy’s Body, xviii.
128. Susan Leigh Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” in Meaning in Motion, ed. Jane C.
Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 251. Foster’s observa-
tions are about contact improvisation but apply to Ann Halprin in this instance.

CHAPTER 6: URBAN RITUALS

The epigraphs are from Diane Arbus, 1962 application to the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation, and Lenny Bruce, quoted in Maria Damon, “The Jew-
ish Entertainer as Cultural Lightning Rod: The Case of Lenny Bruce,” Postmodern
Culture 7, no. 2 ( January 1997): 5.
1. Martin Shepard, Fritz (Sagaponack, NY: Second Chance Press, 1975), 113.
2. Author’s phone interview with Lynne Palmer Van Dam, 2002.
3. Stanley Eichelbaum, “Playhouse Dance Bedlam,” San Francisco Exam-
iner, May 7, 1962, 37.
4. Alfred Frankenstein, “Puzzle and Pathos of ‘Five-Legged Stool,’” San
Francisco Chronicle, 1962; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
5. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, January
10, 2003.
6. Anna Halprin, Introduction to Movement Ritual I; reprinted in Rachel
Kaplan, ed., Moving toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance (Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1995), 37.
7. Roy A. Rappaport, “Ritual,” in Folklore, Cultural Performances and Pop-
ular Entertainments, ed. R. Bauman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
249–52, 255.
8. Nancy Stark Smith, “After Improv” (interview of Anna Halprin), in Mov-
ing toward Life, 203.
9. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
(New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982), 15.
10. James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 46.
11. Ibid.
12. Ann Halprin, “The Four-Legged Stool,” unpublished production notes,
1961; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
13. Merce Cunningham, draft of lecture demonstration on Ann Halprin’s
dance deck, 1957; in Anna Halprin’s archives.

NOTES TO PAGES 152–160 381

 14. Author’s interview with Palmer Van Dam.
15. Lawrence Halprin, “A Discussion of ‘The Five-Legged Stool,’” San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, April 29, 1962, 3.
16. Ann Halprin, “The Four-Legged Stool.”
17. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, April 14, 1999.
18. Lawrence Halprin, “A Discussion of the Five-Legged Stool,” 3.
19. Chronology in Lawrence Halprin, Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places,
exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 126.
20. Lawrence Halprin, “A Discussion of the Five-Legged Stool,” 3.
21. Susan Sontag, “Looking at War: Photography’s View of Devastation and
Death,” New Yorker, December 9, 2002, 97.
22. See Richard Schechner, Between Anthropology and Theater (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 6. Ann’s performative exploration of the
territory between theater and anthropology anticipated Schechner’s and other
scholars’ theoretical exploration.
23. Anna Halprin, Introduction to Movement Ritual I, in Moving toward
Life, 47.
24. Anna Halprin, Dance as a Healing Art: A Teacher’s Guide and Support
Manual for People with Cancer (Kentfield, CA: Tamalpa Institute, 1997), 37.
25. Jack Anderson, “Manifold Implications,” Dance Magazine 36, no. 4 (April
1963): 45.
26. Berio interviewed in Alfred Frankenstein, “The Dance in the Galleries,”
San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1962.
27. Ibid.
28. Luciano Berio, letter to Ann Halprin, January 8, 1963.
29. Luciano Berio, letter to Alfred Frankenstein, June 25, 1962; in Anna Hal-
prin’s archives.
30. Diane Di Prima, “A Concert of Dance—Judson Memorial Church”
(1962); reprinted in The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, Numbers 1–37, ed. Diane Di
Prima and LeRoi Jones (La Jolla, CA: Laurence McGilvery, 1973), 239.
31. Rainer quoted in Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater,
1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 67.
32. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 66.
33. Diane Wakoski, “Letter to the Editor” (1962), reprinted in The Floating
Bear: A Newsletter, 252.
34. Author’s interview with Jack Anderson, San Francisco, October 29, 2001.
35. James Waring, “Letter to the Editor” (1962), reprinted in The Floating
Bear: A Newsletter, 263.
36. Author’s interview with Remy Charlip, San Francisco, December 21, 2001,
and follow-up letter, June 25, 2004.
37. The original La Fenice, which translates as “The Phoenix,” was built in
1792, but it burned to the ground in 1836 and was rebuilt the following year.

382 NOTES TO PAGES 161–168

 38. Author’s interview with Melinda West Harrison, Sea Ranch, California,
September 21, 2001.
39. Ann Halprin, “Esposizione,” unpublished notes, 1962; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
40. Luciano Berio, letter to Ann Halprin, December 1962; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
41. Ann Halprin, letter to Luciano Berio, 1963; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
Ann later said she hated the solo, and she only performed it a few more times,
in Rome and once in Zagreb (author’s conversation with Anna Halprin, De-
cember 8, 2003).
42. Ann Halprin, letter to Berio.
43. Ann Halprin, “Esposizione.”
44. Ann Halprin, letter to Berio.
45. First quotation from Ann Halprin, “Esposizione”; second from Ann Hal-
prin’s personal notes, 1963, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
46. Ann Halprin, “Esposizione.”
47. Ann Halprin, letter to Berio.
48. Jan Bark, “Happening i Venedig” (Stockholm, 1963); in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
49. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, April 13,
1999.
50. Alfred Frankenstein, “The Workshop’s Tour,” San Francisco Chronicle,
1963; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
51. Ibid.
52. Author’s interview with Vera Maletic, Warrenton, Virginia, March 25,
2000. Maletic’s mother, Ana, who headed a Laban-based dance school in Za-
greb, was also enlisted to help—she was called upon to collect the hundred wine
bottles needed for the dance.
53. Ann Halprin, letter to her dancers, December 4, 1963; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
54. Author’s phone conversation with Ramon Sender, July 15, 2004.
55. Patric Hickey and Jo Landor worked on the costumes, decor, and props
for this piece.
56. Alexander Fried, “A Tape Center Novelty—Is It a Parlor Trick?” San Fran-
cisco Examiner, 1964; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
57. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, July 19, 1999.
58. Yvonne Rainer, “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin,” Tulane Drama
Review 10, no. 5 (1965).
59. Shepard, Fritz, 66. This biography is the source for much of the biogra-
phical information on Perls.
60. Fritz S. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (Moab, Utah: Real People Press,
1969), 16.

NOTES TO PAGES 168–175 383

 61. Quoted in Shepard, Fritz, 129–30. Additional quotations are also from
this source except as noted, for Anna Halprin later retold this story to the au-
thor with some slight modifications.
62. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, July 19, 1999.
63. Shepard, Fritz, 3.
64. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, July 19, 1999.
65. Shepard, Fritz, 22.
66. Quoted in ibid., 60.
67. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, 53.
68. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, July 19, 1999. Subsequent quota-
tions about this dream are also from this interview.
69. The Esalen Institute was founded in 1962 as an alternative educational
center devoted to the exploration of what Aldous Huxley called the “human po-
tential,” the world of unrealized human capacities that lies beyond the imagi-
nation. Once home to a Native American tribe known as the Esselen, Esalen is
located on twenty-seven acres of spectacular coastline with the Santa Lucia Moun-
tains rising sharply behind, and it is blessed with natural hot springs. The insti-
tute soon became known for its blend of Eastern and Western philosophies in
experiential and didactic workshops, taught by a steady influx of philosophers,
psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers.
70. Fritz S. Perls, “A Session in Gestalt Therapy,” 1968 videotape, Esalen In-
stitute, Esalen, California, produced by Mediasync Corporation.
71. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004; the following quotation is
also from this note. Henderson, who also lived in Marin, continues to be friends
with Larry and Anna forty or so years later.
72. Author’s phone interview with Paul Baum, August 26, 1993.
73. Author’s phone interview with Trisha Brown, June 11, 1993.
74. A.A. Leath, letter to author, January 13, 2004.
75. Author’s interview with Brown, 1993.
76. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, July 30,
2001.
77. Author’s phone interview with Carla Blank, June 28, 2004.
78. Author’s interview with Meredith Monk, Palo Alto, California, March
1, 2000.
79. Meredith Monk, videotaped interview by Stephen Steinberg, 1991; in San
Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum.
80. Author’s interview with Monk, 2000. The three-week August workshop
in which Monk participated occurred just before Ann left for Sweden for the
premiere of Parades and Changes, and most of the material she gave the work-
shop students to explore came directly from the sections of Parades and Changes
she was fine-tuning. Ann actually left early, and A.A. Leath taught the final week
of the workshop.

384 NOTES TO PAGES 176–181

 81. Ann Halprin, “Parades and Change (A Dancers’ Workshop Produc-
tion),” videotape, 1964–65; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
82. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, July 19, 1999.
83. Ibid.
84. Rana Halprin remembers the Goldsmiths as being among the few Jew-
ish families in Marin at that time: “Although I had many friends in the area,
there were parents there who thought the scene [on the dance deck] was pretty
weird and didn’t want their kids playing with these Jews and artists” (phone in-
terview with author, June 11, 2004).
85. Author’s phone interview with Morton Subotnick, January 29, 1992.
86. Author’s interview with John Graham, Stanford, California, September
21, 1992.
87. Author’s interview with Jo Landor, San Francisco, August 14, 1991.
88. Author’s phone interview with Kim Hahn, January 20, 1992.
89. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, June 30, 1992.
90. Author’s phone interview with Carla Blank, June 22, 2004.
91. Ann Halprin, “Parades and Changes,” 2.
92. Lawrence Halprin, Halprin: Changing Places, 129.
93. Folke Rabe, letter to Ann Halprin, June 22, 1965; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
94. Stephen Steinberg’s interview with Yvonne Rainer, 1990, for KQED,
1990; in author’s archives.
95. Folke Rabe, in “Program Notes for Parades and Changes,” Stadsteater
Publicity Department, Stockholm, 1965, 2; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
96. Bengt Hager, in “Program Notes for Parades and Changes,”1.
97. Ryman, review of Parades and Changes (1965); translation from Swedish
in Anna Halprin’s archives.
98. Sven Kyberg, letter to Ann Halprin (via Swedish TV station), Decem-
ber 16, 1965; in Anna Halprin’s archives. Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the
Living Theater, who were living in Europe in exile from the United States from
1964 to 1969, also saw the Swedish television broadcast and wrote to Ann, prais-
ing her daring vision (noted in Marsha McMann Paludan, “Expanding the Circle:
Anna Halprin and Contemporary Theater Practice,” unpublished paper, 1994, in
Anna Halprin’s archives).
99. Hager, in “Program Notes for Parades and Changes,”1.
100. Madeline Kats, “Review of Parades and Changes,” Expressen (Stockholm),
1965; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
101. Bengt Jahnsson, in Dagen Nyheter, September 1965; translation from
Swedish in Anna Halprin’s archives.
102. Robert J. Pierce, “The Ann Halprin Story,” 1974; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
103. Ann Halprin, “The Play Will Be Real—That Is, There Will Be No Play,”
San Francisco Chronicle, March 14, 1965.

NOTES TO PAGES 182–188 385

 104. Ibid.
105. Quoted in Rainer, “Yvonne Rainer Interviews Ann Halprin.”
106. Quoted in N. E. Uber, “Ann Halprin: Towards a Biography,” thesis,
Sonoma State University, Sonoma, California, 1985, 133.
107. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 28.
108. Ann Halprin, “Program Notes for Apartment 6 ” (1965), in Anna Hal-
prin’s archives.
109. A.A. Leath, letter to author, January 13, 2004.
110. Uber, “Ann Halprin,” 78.
111. Alfred Frankenstein, “Apartment 6—New Realism in Theater,” San
Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 1965, 7.
112. In Smith, “After Improv,” 191.
113. Uber, “Ann Halprin,” 79.
114. Ann Halprin, “Program Notes for Apartment 6.”
115. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
116. Paludan, “Expanding the Circle,” 145.
117. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
118. George Dorris, e-mail to author, November 1, 2001.
119. Author’s interview with Anderson.
120. Dorris, e-mail to author.
121. Meredith Monk was recruited to sign the invitations so that they had
the imprimatur of the city’s new arts community.
122. Clive Barnes, “Dance: The Ultimate in Bare Stages,” New York Times,
April 24, 1967, 38.
123. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
124. Author’s interview with Charlip.
125. Marcia B. Siegel, At the Vanishing Point: A Critic Looks at Dance (New
York: Saturday Review Press, 1968), 301.
126. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin, Kentfield, California, January
2, 2002.
127. Ann Halprin, “A New Development from the Rock Scene,” press re-
lease, San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, October 1967; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
128. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.
129. Dennis E. Showalter, “Archie Bunker, Lenny Bruce and Ben Cartwright:
Taboo-Breaking and Character Identification in ‘All in the Family,’” Journal of
Popular Culture 9, no. 3 ( Winter 1975): 618–21.
130. John Kifner, “No Joke! 37 Years after Death Lenny Bruce Receives Par-
don,” New York Times, December 24, 2003, A1, A20.
131. Damon, “The Jewish Entertainer,” 6.
132. Author’s interview with Anderson.

386 NOTES TO PAGES 189–198

 CHAPTER 7: FROM SPECTATOR TO PARTICIPANT

The epigraph is from author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, Califor-
nia, February 19, 2001.
1. Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Random House/
Rolling Stone Press, 1984), 171.
2. Ibid., 175, 178.
3. Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception
(London: Routledge, 1990), 36–37.
4. Posted by Amanda Lyons in 2002 at www.uncwil.edu/com/rohler/all2
.htm.2.
5. Perry, Haight-Ashbury, 171. In 1966 then-governor Ronald Reagan de-
scribed a hippie as someone who “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells
like Cheetah” (Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage [New York:
Bantam Books, 1987], 217).
6. Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National
Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 73.
7. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993), 152.
8. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, September
5, 1991.
9. Ann Halprin, “Bath,” undated choreographic notes, 1; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
10. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, April 8, 1999.
11. Ann Halprin, “Bath,” 1.
12. Anna Halprin, “What and How I Believe: Stories and Scores from the
’60s,” in Moving toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, ed. Rachel
Kaplan (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New En-
gland, 1995), 104, 106.
13. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, February 13, 2002.
14. Ibid.
15. Ann Halprin, “Bath,” 1–2.
16. Lawrence Halprin, Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places, exh. cat. (San
Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 132. The month-long
workshop in 1966 was the first of four collaborative sessions on group creativity
Ann and Larry led on the dance deck in Kentfield, in the San Francisco studio,
and on the beach at Sea Ranch over the next five years.
17. Lawrence Halprin, Notebooks 1959–1971 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), 158.
18. Ibid., 166, 179.
19. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, March 22, 2002.
20. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 19, 2001.
21. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, April 8, 1999.

NOTES TO PAGES 199–206 387

 22. Ann Halprin, letter to Lars, n.d.; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
23. Author’s phone interview with Irving Penn, November 30, 1995.
24. William K. Zinsser, “Culture: The New Joy,” Look, January 9, 1968, 8.
25. John Berger in his Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972) describes
being naked as being oneself and being nude as a form of performing in a state
of undress. Classical art depicts nudes, and naked images, such as Manet’s Dé-
jeuner sur l’Herbe have generally always made viewers uncomfortable.
26. Author’s interview with Penn.
27. Edmonde Charles-Roux, introductory essay in Irving Penn, Le Bain:
Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco, exh. cat. (Paris: Maison Européenne de la
Photographie, 1997).
28. Postcard announcement for Ten Myths, September 1967, collection of John
Rockwell. Rockwell had participated in several of Ann’s workshops and studio
events.
29. Ibid., 4.
30. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 19, 2001.
31. Gay McNulty notes that keeping performances in a theater building en-
sures that what happens in it comes under the control of civic authorities and
prevents the contamination of the not real with the real (McNulty, Space in Per-
formance: Making Meaning in the Theatre [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1999], 279).
32. Ann Halprin, “Mutual Creation,” Tulane Drama Review 13, no. 1 (Fall
1968): 166; reprinted in Moving toward Life, 133.
33. Ibid.
34. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 19, 2001.
35. The full series of Ten Myths included (1) Creation, (2) Atonement, (3)
Trails, (4) Totem, (5) Maze, (6) Dreams, (7) Carry, (8) Masks, (9) Story Telling,
and (10) Ome.
36. For more on H’Doubler’s influential teaching, see Janice Ross, Moving
Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 161.
37. [ John Rockwell], “Myths: An Explanation by Ann Halprin,” press re-
lease, February 1, 1968, from Ralph Harper Silver Public Relations, San Fran-
cisco, 1; in Anna Halprin’s archives. Although this press release is signed by Ann
it was partially ghost-written by John Rockwell. It seems more of a combination
feature and review than a bulleted news release. It reflects the perspective of an
outsider, representing, perhaps even reveling in, the strangeness and potential
controversy of the event.
38. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, December
19, 2001.
39. Ibid.
40. [ John Rockwell], “Myths: An Explanation by Ann Halprin,” 4.

388 NOTES TO PAGES 206–215

 41. Ann Halprin, in “An Interview with Ann Halprin by Douglas Ross,” in
“Mutual Creation,” Tulane Drama Review 13, no. 1 (Fall 1968): 174; reprinted in
Moving toward Life, 150.
42. Ibid.
43. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play
(New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982), 47.
44. Ann Halprin, “Interview by Douglas Ross,” 174.
45. Richard Schechner, “Performers and Spectators Transported and Trans-
formed,” Kenyon Review 3, no. 1 (1981): 106.
46. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 19, 2001.
47. Margaret H’Doubler initiated the use of blindfolds in the dance class-
room in the second decade of the twentieth century as a way to get her students
to attend to tactile and emotional stimuli rather than just visual cues (see Ross,
Moving Lessons, 157). In a discussion between Ann and Margaret H’Doubler
filmed on the Kentfield dance deck by filmmaker Connie Beeson in 1970, Ann
describes a technique she uses in the studio of having her students cover their
eyes with their hands “in order to turn oª the mind and go into the body.”
H’Doubler responds excitedly, “That’s why we worked with blindfolds in the
classes you took with me.” Ann agrees, “Yes.”
48. The description of “Trails” is based on Ann Halprin, “Mutual Creation,”
166.
49. Schechner, “Performers and Spectators,” 90.
50. Ann Halprin, “Mutual Creation,” 175.
51. Erving Goªman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York:
Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1956), 162.
52. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 19, 2001.
53. Ann Halprin, “Mutual Creation,” 169, 170.
54. Author’s interview with John Rockwell, New York, New York, Novem-
ber 10, 2000. Ann, who says she has no memory of this “Carry” episode, laughed
good-naturedly at Rockwell’s report of it, while not discounting it (author’s in-
terview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, February 2, 2002). Yet Kathe-
lin Gray (formerly Honey Hoªman), who participated in “Carry” in the 1960s,
also remembered this incident (author’s interview with Kathelin Gray, San Car-
los, California, January 3, 2002).
55. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1993), 23.
56. Author’s interview with Gray.
57. Author’s interview with Rockwell.
58. Goªman, Presentation of Self, 51.
59. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 19, 2001.
60. Ann Halprin, interviewed in Vera Maletic, “The Process Is the Purpose,”
Dance Scope (Fall–Winter 1967–68): 13.

NOTES TO PAGES 215–221 389

 61. Stephen C. Steinberg, interview with Anna Halprin, San Francisco, 1988,
no. 2, 24.
62. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, February 19, 2001.
63. Ibid.
64. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, August 24,
1993.
65. Paul Patai, Myth and Modern Man (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
66. Author’s phone interview with Anna Halprin, December 3, 2001.
67. Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique
of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992),
161.
68. In [Rockwell], “Myths: An Explanation by Ann Halprin.”
69. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 94.
70. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1949), 4.
71. Richard Schechner, Essays in Performance Theory (New York: Drama
Books Specialists, 1977), 75ª; see also R. L. Grimes, Ritual Criticism: Case Stud-
ies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1990), 204–5.
72. Heuwell Tircuit, “Up and Down the Walls,” San Francisco Chronicle, May
21, 1968.
73. Arthur Bloomfield, “When Nudity Is Defensible in Dancing,” San Fran-
cisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, October 15, 1967, B4.
74. William Gilkerson, “Thursday Night Myths with Dancer Ann Halprin,”
San Francisco Examiner, March 31, 1968. The subsequent quotations are also from
this article.
75. Antonin Artaud, quoted in McNulty, Space in Performance, 5.
76. McNulty, Space in Performance.
77. Ibid., 122.
78. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press,
1958 [1938]), 60.
79. “Rites: The Mythmaker,” Time, January 24, 1969.
80. Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, 41. New York natives Beck, a painter, and
Malina, an actress, had married in 1948 and began presenting the Living The-
ater in their apartment in the summer of 1951.
81. Ibid.
82. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, December 12, 2001.
83. Ibid. This was confirmed by Kathelin Gray, who worked with the Liv-
ing Theater in New York after studying with Ann (author’s interview with Gray).
84. A.F. [probably Alfred Frankenstein], “Fillmore Abstraction—Light,
Music, Dance,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, October 8, 1967,
29.

390 NOTES TO PAGES 222–229

 85. Gitlin, The Sixties, 206.
86. “Chronology of San Francisco Rock 1965–1969,” www.sfmuseum.org/
hist1/rock.html.
87. Philip Zimbardo, The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), 36.
88. Goªman, Presentation of Self (the subsequent quotation is also from this
source). As Wanda Corn has argued, Duchamp’s action oªered important per-
ceptual and conceptual lessons to Americans about their own national culture,
its objects of originality, and its practices of consumption, and how the two are
linked (see Corn, The Great American Thing, 48–49).
89. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double. See also Richard Kostelanetz, The
Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments,
and Other Mixed-Means Performances (New York: Dial Press, 1968).
90. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, November 15, 2001.
91. Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 32.
92. Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon and Schus-
ter, 1968), 23.
93. Ibid.
94. Jennifer Kumiega, The Theatre of Grotowski (London: Methuen, 1985), 36.
95. Stephen Steinberg, interview with Richard Schechner, New York, 1988,
3; in San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum. Ann, however, has
attributed her concept of witnessing to Native American dances.
96. Quoted in Kumiega, The Theatre of Grotowski, 54.
97. Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York:
Harry Abrams, 1966), 188.
98. Ibid.
99. Michael Kirby, “Happenings: An Introduction,” in Happenings and
Other Acts, ed. M. R. Sandford (London: Routledge, 1995), 3.
100. Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, 195–96.
101. Ibid., 196–97.
102. Author’s interview with Ann Halprin, November 15, 2001.
103. Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992), vii.
104. Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1990), 2.
105. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, April 8, 1999.
106. Marjorie Perloª, “cage:chance:change,” in Radical Artifice (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
107. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16,
no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
108. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
109. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 229–240 391

 110. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and
Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 3.
1 1 1. Marjorie Garber, Symptoms of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 64.
1 12. Sally Banes has made an important analysis of the gaze in dance that
complicates Mulvey’s initial reading; see Banes’s Dancing Women: Female Bodies
on Stage (London: Routledge, 1998).
1 13. Quoted in Susan Manning, “The Female Dancer and the Male Gaze:
Feminist Critiques of Early Modern Dance,” in Meaning in Motion, ed. Jane C.
Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 156.
1 14. Susan L. Foster, “Dancing Bodies,” in Meaning in Motion, 236–57.
1 15. Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, 287.
1 16. Goªman, Presentation of Self.
1 17. Ann Halprin, “Mutual Creation,” in Moving toward Life, 149.

CHAPTER 8: CEREMONY OF MEMORY

The epigraphs are from Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72; Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-
Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 286.
1. Fletcher Knebel, “Antonioni Found a Dancer for His Girl and a Car-
penter for His Boy,” Look, November 18, 1969, 37–40.
2. Ibid.
3. F. A. Villella, “Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing in Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point,” www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/4/zabriskie.html. 4 [ac-
cessed in 2002].
4. Virginia Westover, “‘Nowest’ Girl in Films,” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 22, 1969.
5. Daria Halprin, unpublished biographical statement, n.d.; in Anna Hal-
prin’s archives.
6. Calvin C. Hernton, Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred and
Sexual Hang-ups (New York: Random House, 1971), 36.
7. bell hooks, “Reflections on Race and Sex,” in Yearning, Race, Gender and
Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990).
8. “Remembering Racial Change: The Civil Rights Movement in Fiction,”
presented at Black Liberation Conference, Stanford University, Stanford, Cali-
fornia, November 3, 2001.
9. Alice Walker, Meridian (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976),
165.
10. Lawrence Halprin, Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places, exh. cat. (San Fran-
cisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 135. The next quotation is
also from this source.

392 NOTES TO PAGES 240–249

 11. Stephen C. Steinberg’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, San Francisco,
1988, 30.
12. Lawrence Halprin, Lawrence Halprin, 134.
13. Douglas Davis, “The Golden Voyage,” in ibid., 68.
14. Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-
House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 6.
15. Chip Lord interviewed by Paul Baum, in Lawrence Halprin and Jim
Burns, Taking Part: A Workshop Approach to Collective Creativity (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1974), 214.
16. Lawrence Halprin, introduction to Taking Part.
17. Author’s phone interview with Jim Burns, August 26, 1993.
18. Halprin and Burns, Taking Part, 199.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 206–7.
21. Ibid., 208–9.
22. Lawrence Halprin, e-mail to author, June 2, 2004.
23. See Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human
Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969).
24. Author’s interview with Lawrence Halprin, July 10, 1992.
25. Theodore Shank, “Framing Actuality: Thirty Years of Experimental The-
ater 1959–1989,” in Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, eds., Around the Absurd (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 242–43.
26. Lawrence Halprin, Notebooks 1959–1971 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1972), 263 (entry for December 20, 1967).
27. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, August 24,
1993.
28. Connerton, How Societies Remember.
29. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagina-
tion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 9–10.
30. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 17.
31. See Roach, Cities of the Dead.
32. Thomas C. Dent, Richard Schechner, and Gilbert Moses, eds., The Free
Southern Theater, by the Free Southern Theater: A Documentary of the South’s Rad-
ical Black Theater (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 3.
33. Ng[gE wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986).
34. The description that follows is based on David Sears and John Mc-
Conahay, The Politics of Violence: The Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston:
Houghton-Mi›in, 1973), 4–5.
35. Author’s phone interview with Larry Reed, January 13, 2002.
36. Sears and McConahay, Politics of Violence, 196.
37. Shank, “Framing Actuality,” 248.

NOTES TO PAGES 249–260 393

 38. Ann Halprin, “Lunch,” performance notes, 1968, 1; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
39. Author’s interview with Norma Leistiko, Kentfield, California, June 21,
1992.
40. Author’s interview with James Woods, Los Angeles, August 26, 1993.
41. William Glatkin, “The Art of Eating,” Sacramento Bee, June 16, 1968.
42. Charles Amirkhanian, e-mail to author, December 3, 2001.
43. Ann Halprin, “Lunch,” 1.
44. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam
Books, 1987), 234.
45. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 83.
46. Author’s phone interview with Charles Amirkhanian, August 26, 1993.
47. Bobby Seale, interviewed on San Francisco in the 1960’s, KRON-TV (San
Francisco), 1992.
48. Wavy Gravy, interviewed on San Francisco in the 1960’s, KRON-TV (San
Francisco), 1992.
49. This romance reached a peak in 1969, when Leonard Bernstein, music
director of the New York Philharmonic, hosted a fund-raising party for a group
of members of the militant Black Panther organization. Journalist Tom Wolfe
wrote a celebrated article about the party for New York magazine, where he in-
troduced the term “radical chic” in his title and discussion of the evening. Wolfe’s
point was that a surface appeal to social justice really masked a desire to be chic
and trendy. The Panthers, whom Bernstein helped raise defense money for, were
not nonviolent like Martin Luther King Jr., and Bernstein was criticized and pick-
eted for endorsing this brand of race activism. See Joan Peyser, Leonard Bern-
stein: A Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 408–9.
50. Author’s interview with Woods. All subsequent quotations from Woods
are from this interview.
51. Author’s interviews with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, Septem-
ber 5, 1991, and August 24, 1993.
52. Author’s phone interview with Wanda Coleman, August 27, 1993. All sub-
sequent quotations from Coleman are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
Unfortunately, despite repeated efforts over many months, it wasn’t possible to lo-
cate any other Watts residents who participated in the workshops and performance.
53. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, August 24, 1993.
54. A poster for the Dancers’ Workshop winter semester announced these
tryouts, giving the first public mention of the Watts event: “Ann Halprin is con-
ducting weekly workshops at studio watts in Los Angeles in preparation for
a new Dancers’ Workshop production to be given in February at the Mark [Ta-
per] Music Hall in Los Angeles. The group of performers will be a combined
group of blacks from studio watts with a new group from the San Francisco
area.”

394 NOTES TO PAGES 260–267

 55. Author’s interview with Larry Reed. All subsequent quotations from Reed
are from this interview.
56. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
57. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, August 24, 1993. The subsequent
quotation is also from this interview.
58. Author’s phone interview with Melinda West Harrison, August 27, 1993.
All subsequent quotations from West are from this interview.
59. Seth Hill, Right On! Dilexi Foundation Film, San Francisco, 1969. This
sixty-minute film was broadcast in May 1969 on the local public broadcasting
station, KQED-TV.
60. Author’s phone interview with Liam O’Gallagher, August 26, 1993. Sub-
sequent quotations are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
61. See Liam O’Gallagher, The Blue Planet Notebooks (San Francisco: X-Com-
munications, 1972). O’Gallagher also wrote the words for a taped reading about
the dancers’ experiences.
62. Ann Halprin, “Ceremony of Us: Interview with Erika Munk,” in Mov-
ing toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, ed. Rachel Kaplan
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England,
1995), 154.
63. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
64. See Joel Makower, Boom! Talkin’ about Our Generation (Chicago: Tilden
Press, 1985), 205.
65. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, August 24, 1993.
66. See Paul Baum’s comment on p. 180.
67. Author’s interview with Rana Halprin, San Francisco, June 11, 2004. Dur-
ing this time Rana still went by the name Rana Schuman to mask her biologi-
cal relationship to Ann. Indeed, Ann was so systematic in not disclosing that
Daria and Rana were her daughters that forty years later, Kathelin Gray, one of
the participants in Ann’s mid-1960s events, still believed that Daria and Rana
were adopted.
68. In Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, eds., Conversations with Richard
Wright ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 224.
69. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, August 24, 1993.
70. Ibid.
71. Wanda Coleman, A War of Eyes: And Other Stories (Santa Rosa, CA: Black
Sparrow Press, 1988), 170.
72. From Hill, Right On!
73. Ann Halprin, letter to Ida Schumann, May 19, 1969; in Anna Halprin’s
archives. She signed this letter with her mother’s aªectionate nickname for her,
“Sister Dearie.”
74. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
75. Coleman, War of Eyes, 171.

NOTES TO PAGES 267–276 395

 76. Daria Halprin, phone conversation with author, June 7, 2004. Although
Daria had at first been away filming Zabriskie Point, she returned to the Dancers’
Workshop at her mother’s request to participate in the final joint workshop and
the performance at the Mark Taper Forum.
77. Ibid.
78. Paul Baum, letter to James Woods, January 1969; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
79. Paul Baum, “The Day After,” Los Angeles, report to Ann Halprin, 1969,
1; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
80. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968).
81. Ann would reprise this stomping movement twenty years later for the
monster dance in Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line.
82. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
83. For a more complete description of the score, see “Instructions to Per-
formers: Ceremony of Us,” in Moving toward Life, 161–65.
84. James T. Burns, “Microcosm in Movement,” The Drama Review 13, no.
4 (Summer 1969).
85. Notes about post-performance meeting on Ceremony of Us, February 27,
1969, in Anna Halprin’s archives.
86. Baum, “The Day After,” 2–3.
87. Author’s interview with Amirkhanian. Amirkhanian’s score was created
by recording rehearsals and encounters among the group of performers and then
taking these dialogues and chopping them up and reordering them.
88. Ann Halprin, from transcript of Ceremony of Us discussion, 1969, Studio
Watts School for the Arts, Los Angeles, 31.
89. Baum, “The Day After,” 7.
90. Martin Bernheimer, “Ann Halprin Presents Dance Happening at Taper
Forum,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1969, 8.
91. John Rockwell, “Disappointing Experimental Dance,” Oakland Tribune,
March 1, 1969, 4.
92. John Rockwell, letter to Ann Halprin, March 1969; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
93. See Joseph R. Roach, “Power’s Body: The Inscription of Morality as
Style,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Perfor-
mance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: Univer-
sity of Iowa Press, 1989), 100.
94. Here Ann might be seen as enacting the truism Roach describes of how
the signifying body is constructed in theatrical representation beginning on the
level of the techniques of preparing the body (see ibid., 101).
95. John Rockwell, “Ann Halprin Builds New Bridges in Dance,” Oakland
Tribune, March 1969.

396 NOTES TO PAGES 277–284

 96. Helen Flynn, “Sensuous Dancers in ‘Turn-On’ at UOP,” The Record
(Stockton, CA), March 1969.
97. Author’s phone interview with Annie Hallett, June 22, 2004.
98. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, August 24, 1993.
99. The head of the Expansion Arts program, Van Witfield from Watts, had
seen the Ceremony of Us performance at Mark Taper Forum and followed Ann’s
work closely after that.
100. Ann Halprin, letter to donors for 1969 summer session scholarships, Au-
gust 1969; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
101. Author’s phone interview with Jasmine Nash Lutes, December 27, 2001.
102. Heuwell Tircuit, “An Award for Multi-racial Dance Research,” San Fran-
cisco Chronicle, 1969; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
103. Ann has since revealed that the anonymous donor was Roger Stevens,
then the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and a follower and fan
of Ann’s multiracial work, who by necessity had to keep a low profile about his
enthusiasm (author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, March 22, 2002).
104. Tircuit, “Award for Multi-racial Dance Research.” The following de-
scription of the setup and lunch is also from this source..
105. “Tac Squad’s Happening,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 18, 1969, 4.
106. “Dancers’ Workshop Bail Benefit Party,” San Francisco Chronicle, De-
cember 31, 1969.
107. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, April 14,
1999.
108. In the spring of 1975 the French artist Daniel Buren staged a somewhat
similar event, asking various people from the New York art world to walk through
the Wall Street area carrying placards with nothing but vertical stripes.
109. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, August 24, 1993.
110. See John Sabini and Stanley Milgram, “Candid Camera,” Society 16, no.
6 (1969): 55–58.
111. Ann Halprin, “New Time Shu›e,” diary entry, 1970; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
112. Stanley Goree, letter to Ann Halprin, May 30, 1970; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
113. Ann Halprin, “New Time Shu›e.”
114. Ibid.
115. Ann Halprin in film footage of Ann Halprin and Margaret H’Doubler
by Connie Beeson, 1970; in Anna Halprin’s archives. All the quotations in this
paragraph are from this source.
116. Ann Halprin, “New Time Shu›e.”
117. Author’s phone interview with Rabbi Samuel Broude, December 18,
2001. All subsequent quotations from Rabbi Broude are from this interview.

NOTES TO PAGES 284–292 397

 118. Author’s interview with Nash.
119. Anna Halprin, “Three Decades of Transformative Dance,” interview by
Nancy Stark Smith, in Moving toward Life, 19.
120. Susi Oppenheimer, letter to the editor, Temple Sinai Newsletter (Oak-
land, CA), 1971.
121. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
122. Author’s phone interview with George Leonard, June 28, 2004.
123. Author’s interview with Sir Lawrence Washington, San Francisco, Au-
gust 17, 2001.
124. Ann Halprin, “Community Art as Life Process: The Story of the San
Francisco Dancers’ Workshop,” in Moving toward Life, 126.
125. Richard Schechner, “Ann Halprin: A Life in Ritual,” The Drama Review
33, no. 2 (1989).
126. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
127. Ann Halprin, “Community Art as Life Process,” 117.
128. Marcia B. Siegel, review reprinted in At the Vanishing Point: A Critic
Looks at Dance (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), 301–2.
129. Robert J. Pierce, “The Ann Halprin Story,” 1974; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
130. Author’s interview with Sydney Luria, New York, November 10, 2000.
131. Author’s interview with Jack Anderson, San Francisco, October 29, 2001.

CHAPTER 9: ILLNESS AS PERFORMANCE

The epigraph is from Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors
(New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 3. The essay “Illness as Metaphor” originally
appeared in 1978.
1. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, June 28, 2002; J. Wil-
liams, “Daria Halprin,” Pacific Sun (San Rafael, California), April 29, 1977.
2. P. J. Growald, “Captain America Weds,” Washington Post, May 16, 1972.
3. Author’s interview with Sydney Luria, New York, November 10, 2000.
4. Parade Magazine, n.d.; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
5. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin, Kentfield, California, January
2, 2002.
6. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 192.
7. Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 122.
8. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 193.
9. See Ann Halprin, “Community Art as Life Process: The Story of the
San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop” (1973), in Moving toward Life: Five Decades

398 NOTES TO PAGES 292–303

of Transformational Dance, ed. Rachel Kaplan (Hanover, NH: Wesleyean Uni-
versity Press/University Press of New England, 1995), 126.
10. Robert J. Landy, Drama Therapy: Concepts and Practices (Springfield, IL:
Charles C. Thomas, 1985), 27. Just as the Living Theater chanted lines from the
writings of the existential therapist R. D. Laing in their 1967 play Paradise Now,
singing about madness as a visionary experience as they danced, Ann too bor-
rowed from psychology, systematizing elements from Gestalt therapy in her work-
shops and performances. Connections between performance and the human po-
tential movement begun in the 1960s were becoming more clearly established in
this period of the early 1970s. Husband-and-wife psychologists Eugene and
Juanita Sagan were not alone in sampling dance classes as a means toward diªer-
ent psychological insights.
11. Marsha McMann Paludan, “Expanding the Circle: Anna Halprin and
Contemporary Theater Practice,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, 268; in Anna
Halprin’s archives.
12. Ann Halprin, “My Experience of Cancer” (1993), in Moving toward Life, 65.
13. Anna Halprin, “Dance as a Self-Healing Art: Working with People Chal-
lenging HIV and Cancer,” presented to the American Dance Association, April
1991, 1–3; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
14. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, February
19, 2001.
15. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 17.
16. See Allen H. Postel, W. Robson, N. Grier, and S. Arthur Localio, “Train-
ing the Patient in the Bulb Syringe Method of Colostomy Irrigation: A Manual
for Nurses,” Rehabilitation Monograph 26 (1965): 1–25 (New York: Institute of
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, New York University Medical Center).
17. Anna Halprin, “Circle the Earth: Myth and Ritual through Dance and
the Environment,” draft of manual, 1991, 84; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
18. Ibid., 81.
19. Anna Halprin, “My Experience of Cancer,” 66.
20. Ibid.
21. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 21.
22. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, January 23,
2004.
23. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, July 2, 2006.
24. Anna Halprin, “My Experience of Cancer,” 67.
25. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, January 23, 2004.
26. Margaret Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulner-
able Self (London: SAGE Publications, 2002), 5.
27. Ibid., 49, 52.
28. Lawrence Halprin, Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places, exh. cat. (San Fran-
cisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 141.

NOTES TO PAGES 303–310 399

 29. In ibid., 98.
30. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Process in the Human En-
vironment (New York: George Braziller, 1969).
31. In 1976 Anna had returned to an active schedule of teaching, lecturing,
leading workshops, and reviving her rituals. She guest-taught in Israel and Japan
and led a summer solstice ritual at the pyramids in Egypt and a collective cre-
ativity workshop in Delphi. She resumed the practice she had been doing for
several years of making a participatory dance for the American Humanistic Psy-
chology Association’s annual meeting based on the conference theme.
32. Another precedent was an exercise Anna used in one of her 1975 sum-
mer workshops, where participants divided into small groups and then moved
around the city, paying special attention to the “dances” of everyone around them.
At the end of the day they all came together again for a large group dance in
Justin Herman Plaza, a downtown area designed by Larry (note to author from
Sue Heinemann, a participant in the 1975 workshop, April 6, 2006).
33. Author’s phone conversation with Ramon Sender, July 15, 2004.The score
was reprinted in TDR.
34. Anna Halprin, James Burns, and James Nixon, “Citydance: Anna Hal-
prin and San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop 1977” (San Francisco: San Francisco
Dancers’ Workshop booklet, 1977), 7.
35. Anna Halprin, “A Report on Citydance 1977,” in Moving toward Life, 170.
36. Anna Halprin, “A Workshop for San Francisco,” unpublished talk, San
Francisco, 1976; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
37. Anna Halprin, Burns, and Nixon, “Citydance,” 30.
38. Anna Halprin, “A Workshop for San Francisco.”
39. Author’s phone interview with Anna Halprin, July 2, 2006.
40. At Jewish funerals mourners used to distribute coins to the poor who
came to the cemetery, and as they gave money away they chanted, “Tzedakh will
save from death.” The reminder to give is present at every major event in Jew-
ish life. See Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People (New York:
Schocken Books, 1952).
41. Rachel Kaplan, “Introduction to ‘Leaning into Ritual,’” in Moving to-
ward Life, 184.
42. Author’s interview with Daria Halprin, January 2, 2002.
43. Quoted in Sandy Park, “San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop Training Pro-
gram 1978 Documentation,” unpublished manual, 108; in Anna Halprin’s
archives.
44. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
45. All the quotations in this paragraph and the next are from Park, “Train-
ing Program,” 108–9.
46. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, March 10,
2004.

400 NOTES TO PAGES 311–317

 47. Anna Halprin, “Circle the Earth,” 16–17.
48. The drawing of the self-portrait, which was an important resource for
Anna’s “exorcism” dance, became a central part of the Tamalpa training, where
one part of the program culminates in the performance of a self-portrait in front
of an audience of workshop members.
49. Anna Halprin, Dance as a Healing Art: A Teacher’s Guide and Support Man-
ual for People Living with Cancer (Kentfield, Calif.: Tamalpa Institute, 1997), 18.
50. “Anna Halprin: A Life in Ritual: Interview by Richard Schechner”
(1989), in Moving toward Life, 249.
5 1. Anna Halprin, “Planetary Dance,” in Moving toward Life, 230.
52. Anna Halprin, “Circle the Earth,” 9.
53. Quoted in Paludan, “Expanding the Circle,” 298.
54. Author’s conversation with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, May 2,
2000.
55. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, March 10, 2004.
56. Quoted in Jamie McHugh, “Circle the Earth: Dancing with Purpose,”
In Dance (February 1988): 3.
57. Ibid.
58. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies—An Introduction (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 62.
59. Ibid., 71.
60. “Anna Halprin: A Life in Ritual: Interview by Richard Schechner,” 251,
253.
6 1. Anna Halprin, Dance as a Healing Art, 137.
62. McHugh, “Circle the Earth: Dancing with Purpose,” 4.
63. Anna Halprin, “Planetary Dance,” 226.
64. Author’s phone interview with Maggie Creighton, July 5, 2004.
65. Maggie Creighton, note to author, July 9, 2004.
66. Paludan, “Expanding the Circle,” 318.
67. Anna Halprin, Dance as a Healing Art, 79; for subsequent material, see 89.
68. Author’s interview with Allan Stinson, San Francisco, 1992.
69. Janice Ross, “Anna Halprin: A Performance Response to AIDS,” Dance
USA/Journal 9, no. 1 (1991): 12.
70. Author’s phone interview with Jamie McHugh, July 1, 2004.
7 1. Quoted in Jamie McHugh, “Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the
Line,” San Francisco Sentinel, Spring 1991.
72. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, Kentfield, California, December 11,
1989.
73. David Gere, How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography
in the Age of AIDS (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
74. Author’s interview with Stinson.
75. Author’s interview with Anna Halprin, June 30, 1992.

NOTES TO PAGES 317–327 401

 76. Quoted in Andy Abrahams Wilson, Positive Motion, videotape, Abra-
hams Wilson Productions, Sausalito, California, 1991.
77. Ibid.
78. Anna Halprin, “Circle the Earth,” 10.
79. See, for example, Anna Halprin, Dance as a Healing Art.
80. “Anna Halprin: A Life in Ritual,” 251.
8 1 . Author’s interview with Richard Schechner, New York, April 12, 2002.
82. Anna Halprin, “Circle the Earth,” 114.

CHAPTER 10: CHOREOGRAPHING DISAPPEARANCE

The epigraphs are from Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1993), 147; Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” in Collected Poems of
Sylvia Plath (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 244. Special thanks to Michele Prid-
more Brown of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford
for her insightful comments about women and aging in an earlier draft of this
chapter.
1. Heidi Gilpin, “Lifelessness in Movement, or How Do the Dead Move?
Tracing Displacement and Disappearance for Movement Performance,” in Cor-
porealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, ed. Susan L. Foster (New York:
Routledge, 1996), 110, 114.
2. Eugenio Barba, “From Learning to Learning to Learn,” Dictionary of The-
ater Anthropology, ed. Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese (London: Routledge,
1991), 244.
3. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against
Women (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 93.
4. Bonnie Sue Stein, “Twenty Years Ago We Were Crazy, Dirty and Mad,”
The Drama Review 30, no. 2 (1986): 107–26.
5. Richard Schechner, “Kazuo Ohno Doesn’t Commute,” The Drama Re-
view 30, no. 2 (1986): 169.
6. Patricia Vertinsky, “Sporting Women in the Public Gaze: Shattering the
Master Narrative of Aging Female Bodies,” Canadian Woman Studies 21, no. 3
(2002): 59.
7. Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New
York: Putnam’s Sons, 1972), 297.
8. Wolf, Beauty Myth, 93–94.
9. De Beauvoir, Coming of Age, 300.
10. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” October 39 (Win-
ter 1986): 65–108.
11. Vertinsky, “Sporting Women in the Public Gaze,” 59.
12. This phrase comes from Jacqueline Hayden in describing the public view

402 NOTES TO PAGES 327–336

of the body; quoted in Kathleen Woodard, Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Gen-
erations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 276.
13. Gilpin, “Lifelessness in Movement,” 106.
14. Author’s conversation with Anna Halprin, October 13, 1998.
15. Anna Halprin, post-performance discussion for “Still Moving,” Theater
Artaud, San Francisco, November 5, 1998; from author’s notes.
16. Anna used a $30,000 grant she had received from the Irvine Foundation
to support this collaboration.
17. Author’s phone interview with Anna Halprin, January 12, 2002.
18. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, April 10, 2003.
19. For information on Jewish burial traditions, see Mark Zborowski and Eliz-
abeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: Schocken
Books, 1952), 376, and Anita Diamant with Howard Cooper, Living a Jewish Life:
Jewish Traditions, Customs and Values for Today’s Families (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1976), 291–92.
20. Some critics have also seen references to death in the underlying violence
of some of Mendieta’s imagery, especially in her silhouettes that are burnt into
the ground.
21. Anna Halprin, quoted in brochure for the Still Dance photographs, 2001;
in Anna Halprin’s archives.
22. Author’s phone interview with Eeo Stubblefield, January 23, 2003.
23. Eeo Stubblefield, quoted in brochure for the Still Dance photographs,
2001.
24. Barbara G. Walker, The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom and Power (New
York: Harper and Row, 1985).
25. Allan Ulrich, “Halprin a Delight at Retrospective,” San Francisco Exam-
iner, June 6, 2000.
26. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, January 12, 2000.
27. John Rockwell, “Bridging Past and Present,” New York Times, June 11,
2000, 33.
28. Walker, The Crone, 29, 32, 33.
29. Anna Halprin, in program notes for Anna Halprin’s Eightieth-Year Ret-
rospective, Cowell Theater, Fort Mason, San Francisco, June 2000.
30. Author’s phone interview with Charles Reinhart, January 5, 2001.
31. Janice Ross, “Landscaping Death,” New York Times, January 27, 2002,
“Arts and Leisure,” 1.
32. Ibid.
33. Tobi Tobias, “Snow Motion,” New York, February 18, 2002.
34. Anna Halprin, note to author, June 23, 2004.
35. Andy Abrahams Wilson, “Dance Is for Life: The Work of Anna Hal-
prin,” documentary script, University of Southern California, December 19, 1989,
79; in Anna Halprin’s archives.

NOTES TO PAGES 336–350 403

 36. Anna Halprin in Returning Home: Dances with the Earth Body, film di-
rected and produced by Andy Abrahams Wilson, 2003.
37. Deborah Caslav Covino, “Outside-In: Body, Mind and Self in the Ad-
vertisement of Aesthetic Surgery,” Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 3 (2001): 95.
38. Walker, The Crone, 23.
39. Quoted in Covino, “Outside-In,” 95.
40. Kathleen Woodard, Figuring Age, 273.
41. Wolf cites this observation by Lasch in The Beauty Myth (130).
42. See Covino, “Outside-In,” 93.
43. Although Anna does not maintain a company of dancers, she often works
with a group called the Sea Ranch Collective, consisting of former students, a
number of whom participated in this revival of Parades and Changes. The Sea
Ranch Collective has also developed a number of environmental pieces, such as
Seasons (begun in 2003).
44. See Janice Ross, “Halprin Takes Paris,” Dancemagazine, February 2005, 20.
45. Anna Halprin on Spark, KQED-TV San Francisco, March 2006.
46. Author’s phone interview with Anna Halprin, March 5, 2006.
47. Quoted in Judith Mackrell, “Growing Old Disgracefully: How a Bunch
of Untrained 60-Somethings Are Breathing New Life into a Pina Bausch Clas-
sic,” Guardian, November 27, 2002.
48. Author’s phone conversation with Anna Halprin, November 20, 2005.
49. Interviews at Redwood Retirement Community Center, Mill Valley, Cali-
fornia, October 12, 2005, recorded on tape “One Step”; in Anna Halprin’s archives.
50. Anna Halprin, speech given at the University of California, Davis, in
2000, excerpted in “Arts and Healing Network News,” March–April 2006, at
www.artheals.org/news_2006/marApr06.html.
51. Ibid.

404 NOTES TO PAGES 351–357

 CHRONOLOGY OF PERFORMANCES,
VIDEOS, AND FILMS

STUDENT DANCES

Pastoral, 1936 and 1938

choreographed and performed by Ann Schuman; music: Francis Poulenc;
location: Goodman Theatre, Chicago
Saga of Youth, 1938
choreographed and performed by Ann Schuman; music: unnamed
student; location: New Trier High School, Winnetka, Illinois
Air Primitive, 1938
choreographed and performed by Ann Schuman; music: unnamed
student; location: Bennington, Vermont
Elegy, or Hymn to Dead Soldiers, 1939
choreography by Ann Schuman; performers: Ann Schuman, Orchesis;
music: percussion; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Song of Youth or Refugees, 1939
choreography by Ann Schuman; performers: Ann Schuman, Orchesis;
music: voice; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Allegro Barbaro, 1939
choreography by Ann Schuman; performers: Ann Schuman, Orchesis;
music: Béla Bartók; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Dedication, 1939 or 1940
choreography by Ann Schuman; performers: Ann Schuman, Orchesis;
music: unnamed student; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison

405
 Chaconne, 1939 or 1940
choreography by Ann Schuman; performers: Ann Schuman, Orchesis;
music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Ferruccio Bussoni; location: University of
Wisconsin, Madison
War Hysteria, 1940
choreography by Ann Schuman; performers: Ann Schuman, Orchesis;
music: percussion; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Mat Dance, 1940
choreography by Ann Schuman Halprin; performers: Ann Schuman
Halprin and group; music: Karol Borsuk; location: Orchesis at the
University of Illinois, Chicago
Three Pages from a Diary, ca. 1940
choreographed and performed by Ann Schuman Halprin; music: Aaron
Copland, Karol Borsuk; location: Orchesis at the University of Illinois,
Chicago
Protest, 1941
choreographed and performed by Ann Schuman Halprin; music: percus-
sion; location: University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Shalom, 1942
choreography by Ann Schuman Halprin; performers: Ann Schuman
Halprin, Hillel Dance Group; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Folk Suite, 1942
choreography by Ann Schuman Halprin; performers: Ann Schuman
Halprin, Hillel Dance Group; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Ceremonial, 1942
choreography by Ann Schuman Halprin; performers: Ann Schuman
Halprin, Hillel Dance Group; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Prayer, 1942
choreography by Ann Schuman Halprin; performers: Ann Schuman
Halprin, Hillel Dance Group; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Wedding Dance, 1942
choreography by Ann Schuman Halprin; performers: Ann Schuman
Halprin, Hillel Dance Group; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Stella, 1942
choreography by Ann Schuman Halprin; performers: Ann Schuman
Halprin, Hillel Dance Group; location: University of Wisconsin, Madison

EARLY WORK IN NEW ENGLAND

Sketches, 1942
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: students; location: Mettler
Estate, Franklin, New Hampshire

406 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

Jazz Fantasy, 1942
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: students; location: Mettler
Estate, Franklin, New Hampshire
Death, 1942
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: students; location: Mettler
Estate, Franklin, New Hampshire
New Hampshire Landscape, 1942
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: students; location: Mettler
Estate, Franklin, New Hampshire
Feminine Intrigue, 1942
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: students; location: Mettler
Estate, Franklin, New Hampshire
Epilogue, 1943
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; location: Harvard School
of Design, Cambridge, and South End Settlement House, Boston
Prologue, 1943
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; location: Harvard School
of Design, Cambridge, and South End Settlement House, Boston
Something Horizons, 1943
choreography by Ann Halprin; location: Harvard School of Design,
Cambridge, and South End Settlement House, Boston
The Lonely Ones, 1943
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, based on cartoons of
William Steig; music: Norman Cazden; costume: Lawrence Halprin;
location: Harvard School of Design, Cambridge, and South End Settle-
ment House, Boston

EARLY WORK IN CALIFORNIA (AND NEW YORK)

Bitter Herbs, 1945
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: Norman Cazden;
location: Kaufman Auditorium, New York
Interplay, 1946
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Dick Ford, and
Welland Lathrop; location: 1831 Union Street, San Francisco
Duet, 1946
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Dick Ford, and
Welland Lathrop; location: 1831 Union Street, San Francisco
Harmony at Evening, 1946
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and Welland Lathrop;
poem: James Broughton; location: 1831 Union Street, San Francisco

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS 407

 First Half Century or Life and Times of the Gadget, ca. 1947
choreography based on an idea by Ann Halprin and realized by 1831 Union
Street students; costumes: Lawrence Halprin, Welland Lathrop; music:
Arthur Eisler; location: Marines Memorial Theatre, San Francisco
People Unaware, 1947
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Paul Baum,
Gladys Brower, Welland Lathrop, Georgiana Wiebenson, Richard Mait-
land; music: Francean Campbell; location: Marines Memorial Theatre and
1831 Union Street, San Francisco
Solitude—Quest, 1947
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Maguerite Perego, Richard
Maitland; music: Domenico Scarlatti; costumes: Mary Grant; location:
1831 Union Street, San Francisco
Short Story, 1947
choreography by Ann Halprin; location: 1831 Union Street, San Francisco
Entombment, 1947
choreography by Ann Halprin; music: Cameron McGraw; costume:
Welland Lathrop; set piece: Lawrence Halprin; location: Marines Memor-
ial Theatre, San Francisco
The Prophetess, 1947
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: Alan Hovhaness;
costume: Lawrence Halprin; location: Marines Memorial Theatre, San
Francisco; revival: ANTA Theater, New York, 1955
The Intruder, 1948
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; location: Marines Memor-
ial Theatre, San Francisco
Theme and Variations, 1949
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Richard Ford,
Welland Lathrop; music: Henry Purcell; costumes: Lawrence Halprin;
location: Marines Memorial Theatre, San Francisco

PERFORMANCES FROM 1950S AND 1960S

Emek, 1951
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Ruth Beckford,
Stanley Brooks, Gladys Brower, Richard Ford, Welland Lathrop, Richard
Maitland, Alec Rubin, Dulcy Stovner, James Sartin, Marta Skor, Geor-
giana Wiebenson; music: Leonard Ratner; costumes: Lawrence Halprin;
premiere: March 25, 1951, Curran Theater, San Francisco
Coªee Pot, 1953
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: vocal score;
location: 1831 Union Street, San Francisco

408 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

Daughter of the Voice, 1953
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Welland
Lathrop, Avril Weber; music: Alan Hovhaness; costumes: Lawrence
Halprin; decor: Keith Monroe; narrator: Alan Loew; premiere: April 24,
1953, Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, San Francisco
People on a Slant, 1953
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: “Newspaper Stand”: Ruth
Beckford, Jenny Hunter (Groat), Robert La Crosse, A.A. Leath; “Pedes-
trians on a Windy Day”: Welland Lathrop, A.A. Leath, Jenny Hunter
(Groat); “Figures in Collage”: Ruth Beckford, Sherrill Cowgill, Jenny
Hunter (Groat), Robert La Crosse, A.A. Leath; music: Doris Dennison;
costumes: Lawrence Halprin; premiere: May 1, 1953, San Francisco
4 Variations, 1954
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and San Francisco Dancers’
Workshop (SFDW) including Dick Ford, Welland Lathrop; music: Henry
Purcell; locations: toured the West Coast
Madrona, 1954
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: Alan Hovhaness;
costume: Jo Landor; location: Stern Grove, San Francisco
Steig People [The Lonely Ones], 1955
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: Norman Cazden;
costume: Ann Halprin; location: ANTA Theater, New York
Blind Song, 1956
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, A.A. Leath;
location: the Pacific Coast Art Festival, Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Branch Dance, 1957
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Simone Morris
(Forti), A.A. Leath; location: Halprin dance deck, Kentfield, California
Hangar, 1957
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, Simone Morris (Forti),
Norma Leistiko, Jenny Hunter (Groat), A.A. Leath, John Graham;
location: San Francisco Airport construction site, Millbrae, California
Flight, 1957
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, Jenny Hunter
(Groat), A.A. Leath; music: Peter van Deuson; costumes: Jo Landor;
location: Halprin dance deck, Kentfield, California
Lalezar, 1957
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: Alan Hovhaness;
premiere: December 3, 1957, University of Illinois, Chicago
Duet, 1958
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, A.A. Leath; music: Pieter
Van Deusen; location: Halprin dance deck, Kentfield, California

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS 409

 Trunk Dance, 1959
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: Ann Halprin, John Graham,
A.A. Leath, Simone Morris (Forti); premiere: San Francisco Playhouse, San
Francisco
Four Square, 1959
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, John Graham, A.A. Leath,
Simone Morris (Forti); location: San Francisco Playhouse, San Francisco
Flowerburger, 1959
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, John Graham, A.A. Leath;
artistic director: Jo Landor; poetry: Richard Brautigan; lighting: Patric
Hickey, Jo Landor; location: Jay Marks Contemporary Dance Theater, San
Francisco; International Avant-Garde Festival, Vancouver
Rites of Women, 1959
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, Simone Forti, John Gra-
ham, A.A. Leath; music: Warner Jepson; songs: Ida Hodes; artistic director:
Jo Landor; poetry: James Broughton; lighting: Patric Hickey; costumes:
Eliza Pietsch, Sarah Pietsch; location: premiere: May 15, 1959, San Fran-
cisco Playhouse, San Francisco
Mr. and Mrs. Mouse, 1959
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, John Graham, Daria Hal-
prin, A.A. Leath; music: Terry Riley, Warner Jepson; artistic director: Jo
Landor; poetry: James Broughton; lighting: Patric Hickey; location: San
Francisco Playhouse, San Francisco
Still Point, 1960
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, A.A. Leath, Hetty Mitchell;
music: Terry Riley, La Monte Young; lighting: Patric Hickey; premiere:
April 22, 1960, Schoenberg Hall, Los Angeles
Visions, 1960
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, John Graham, A.A. Leath,
Hetty Mitchell, Sandy Piezer; music: Terry Riley, La Monte Young; lighting:
Patric Hickey; premiere: April 22, 1960, Schoenberg Hall, Los Angeles
Birds of America, or Gardens Without Walls, 1960
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW including John
Graham, Daria Halprin, Rana Halprin, A.A. Leath; music: La Monte
Young (Trio for Strings); artistic director: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey;
location: International Avant-Garde Arts Festival, Vancouver; Teatro La
Fenice, Venice; San Francisco Contemporary Dance Theatre, San Francisco
The Four-Legged Stool, 1961
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and Dancers’ Workshop
Company including John Graham, A.A. Leath, Lynne Palmer; music:
Terry Riley; artistic director: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey; premiere:
September, 24, 1961, San Francisco Playhouse, San Francisco

410 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

The Five-Legged Stool, 1962
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and Dancers’ Work-
shop Company including John Graham, Daria Halprin, Rana Halprin,
A.A. Leath, Lynne Palmer; music: Morton Subotnick, David Tudor;
artistic director: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey; premiere: April 29,
1962, San Francisco Playhouse, San Francisco; toured to Rome, Zagreb,
and Helsinki
Esposizione, 1963
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, John Graham, Daria
Halprin, Rana Halprin, A.A. Leath, Lynne Palmer; music: Luciano Berio;
singer: Cathy Berberian; artistic director: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric
Hickey; Sculptor: Jerry Walters; premiere: April, 18, 1963, 26th Festival
Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea, Teatro La Fenice, Venice
Visage, 1963
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: Luciano Berio;
designer: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey; location: Teatro La Fenice,
Venice; Teatro Eliseo, Rome; Muzicki Biennale, Zagreb, Yugoslavia
Yellow Cab, 1964
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; music: Luciano Berio;
artistic director: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey; premiere: May 4, 1964,
San Francisco Tape Music Center, San Francisco
Procession, 1965
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin and Dancers’ Workshop
Company including John Graham, Daria Halprin, Rana Halprin, A.A.
Leath, Lucy Lewis; music: Morton Subotnik; artistic director: Jo Landor;
lighting: Patric Hickey; sculptor: Charles Ross; location: University of
California, Los Angeles
Parades and Changes, 1965–67 (12 versions); revivals: 1995–2006
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW including
originally Larri Goldsmith, Paul Goldsmith, John Graham, Kim Hahn,
Daria Halprin, Rana Halprin, A.A. Leath, Jani Novak; music: Folke Rabe,
Morton Subotnik; costumes: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey; sculptor:
Charles Ross; premiere: September, 5, 1965, Stockholm; other locations
1965–67: Poland; University of California, Berkeley; University of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles; San Francisco State University, San Francisco; “On the
Mall,” Fresno, California; Hunter College, New York; revivals: Footwork,
San Francisco (1995); American Dance Festival, Durham, North Carolina
(1997); Cowell Theater, San Francisco (2000); Centre Pompidou, Paris
(2004); Jewish Community Center, San Francisco, and Contemporary
Museum of Modern Art, Lyon, France (2006)
Trance Dance, 1965–78
choreography by Ann Halprin; performers: open; locations: Dancers’

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS 411

 Workshop Studio, San Francisco; Ohio State University, Columbus; Dance
Therapy Association, New York; Los Angeles
Apartment 6, 1965
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW including John
Graham, A.A. Leath; sound: performers’ vocal dialogue; designer: Jo Landor;
lighting: Patric Hickey; sculptor: Charles Ross; premiere: March 19, 1965,
San Francisco Playhouse, San Francisco; toured in Europe
The Bath, 1966–67
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW including
Karen Ahlberg, Daria Halprin, Michael Katz, Morris Kelley, Kathy Peter-
son, Nancy Peterson, Peter Weiss; music: Pauline Oliveros; artistic direc-
tor: Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey; vocals: performers; premiere: No-
vember 4, 1966, SFDW Studio, San Francisco; February 1967, Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
Ten Myths, 1967–68
myths: Creation, Atonement, Trails, Totem, Maze, Dreams, Carry, Masks,
Story Telling, Ome; choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and
SFDW with audience; music: Casey Sonnabend; lighting and environment
designer: Patric Hickey; sculptor: Seymour Locks; location: SFDW Studio,
San Francisco
Ome, 1968
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin and SFDW; music:
Casey Sonnabend; lighting: Patric Hickey; location: University of Oregon,
Eugene
Lunch, 1968
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, Gary Hartford, Norma
Leistiko, Larry Reed assisted by Kim Hahn, Annie Hallet, Daria Halprin,
Rana Halprin; music: Charles Amirkhanian; designer: Jo Landor; lighting
and environment designer: Patric Hickey; location: Associated Council of
the Arts conference, Hilton Hotel, San Francisco
Look, 1968
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW with audience;
music: performers; lighting: Patric Hickey; location: San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art
Ceremony of Us, 1969
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin, SFDW, and Studio Watts
School for the Arts; music: Billy C. Jackson, Casey Sonnabend; designer:
Jo Landor; lighting: Patric Hickey; premiere: February 27, 1969, Mark
Taper Forum, Los Angeles; also performed at Laney College, Oakland,
California

412 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

Event in a Chapel, 1969
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW; music: Casey
Sonnabend; lighting: Patric Hickey; location: University of the Pacific,
Stockton, California
Event in a Mall, 1969
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW; music: Ann
Halprin; designer: Patric Hickey; location: San Jose State College, San
Jose, California
The Bust, December 17, 1969
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW; location:
streets of San Francisco

PERFORMANCES FROM 1970S AND 1980S

Blank Placard Dance, 1970
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW; location:
streets of San Francisco
New Time Shu›e, 1970
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and Reach Out; music: Bo
Conley, Richard Friedman; lighting: Patric Hickey; premiere: October 3,
1970, Soledad Prison, Soledad, California; also at Harding Theatre, San
Francisco, and in Oakland, Richmond, and Sausalito, California
Kadosh, 1971
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW; collaborator:
Rabbi Samuel Broude; designer: Patric Hickey; premiere: February 12,
1971, Temple Sinai, Oakland, California
Orgonia, 1971
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW; premiere:
August 6, 1971, American Dance Festival, Connecticut College, New
London
West/East Stereo, also called Animal Ritual, 1971
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and SFDW; music:
Richard Friedman, James Fletcher Hall; lighting: Patric Hickey;
premiere: August 6–7, 1971, American Dance Festival, Connecticut
College, New London; other locations: University Art Museum,
Berkeley; George Washington University, Washington, DC; Williams
College, Willamstown, Massacusetts; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
Richmond, Virginia
Initiations and Transformations, 1971
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and men of SFDW;
location: New York City Center, New York

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS 413

 Ceremony of Signals, 1971
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin and Reach Out Company;
location: Richmond, California
“Exorcism,” or “Dark Side” Dance, 1975
choreographed and performed by Ann Halprin; location: 321 Divisidero
Street, San Francisco
Citydance, 1976–77
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin, SFDW, and people of
the Bay Area; collaborators: Jim MacRitchie, Jim Burns; location: San
Francisco
Ritual and Celebration, 1977
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin and SFDW with audi-
ence; assistant: James Nixon; location: Berkeley, California
Male and Female Rituals, 1978
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin and SFDW with audi-
ence; music: Natural Sound, Kirk Nurock; locations: City Center, New
York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Arcosanti Alive, 1978
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin, SFDW with architects
and residents of Arcosanti, Arizona; collaborator: Paolo Soleri; location:
Arcosanti, Arizona
Evolution of Consciousness through the Ages, 1979
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin and SFDW; music: Rody
Marymore: location: boat cruise, Greece; Acropolis, Athens
Celebration of Life—Cycle of Ages, 1979
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin, Keijura Kimura, Norma
Leistiko, and SFDW with members of the Western Gerontological Society
of San Francisco; music: Rod Marymor, Sandy Hershman; designer: Patric
Hickey; location: Hilton Hotel, San Francisco
Search for Living Myths and Rituals through Dance and Environment, 1980–81
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin and SFDW with people
of the Bay Area; collaborator: Lawrence Halprin; designer: Patric Hickey;
sponsor: Tamalpa Institute; location: College of Marin Fine Arts Theater,
Kentfield, California, and other sites in Marin County; San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
In and On the Mountain, April 10–11, 1981
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: Tamalpa Institute dancers
and workshop participants; music: Kirk Norwick; artistic director: Jo Lan-
dor; lighting: Patric Hickey; set design: Joan Sommers; poet and narrator:
Kush; sponsor: Tamalpa Institute; premiere: April 10, 1981, Mount Tamal-
pais, Mill Valley, California; other location: College of Marin Fine Arts
Theater, Kentfield, California

414 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

Thanksgiving Oªerings (part of Circle the Earth series), 1982
poet and narrator: Kush; leaders: Anna Halprin, James Nixon; premiere:
April 15, 1982, Mount Tamalpais, Mill Valley, California
Return to the Mountain, April 30–May 1, 1983
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: Tamalpa Institute dancers;
music: Bo Connley, Weldon McCarty, Shakti; set design: Joseph Stubble-
field; guest: Don Jose Mitsuwa; masks: Annie Hallet; narration: James
Cave and James Nixon; sponsor: Tamalpa Institute; location: Mount Tam-
alpais, Mill Valley, California; Redwood High School Gym, Larkspur,
California
Run to the Mountain, April 28–29, 1984
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: Tamalpa dancers and Norma
Leistiko; set design: Joseph Stubblefield; poet and narrator: Kush; sponsor:
Tamalpa Institute; location: Mount Tamalpais, Mill Valley, California;
Redwood High School Gym, Larkspur, California
Circle the Mountain, April 6–14, 1985
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: people from the Bay Area;
music: Brian Hand, Suru; set design: Joseph Stubblefield; workshop co-
leader: Jamie McHugh; poet and narrator: Kush; sponsor: Tamalpa Insti-
tute; location: Mount Tamalpais, Mill Valley, California; Redwood High
School Gym, Larkspur, California; Fort Mason Center, San Francisco
Earth Run (part of Circle the Earth series), June 21, 1985
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: people from communities
worldwide; sponsor: New Wilderness Foundation; director: Marilyn
Woods; locations: Central Park and United Nations Plaza, New York; Los
Angeles, Big Sur, and Sausalito, California; Woodland Park, Lexington,
Kentucky; Baca Grande, Colorado; Berlin, Germany; also in Israel, Egypt,
Japan
Circle the Earth: A Dance in the Spirit of Peace, 1986
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: people from the Bay Area
and around the world; musicians: John Gruntfest, Grant Rudolph, Wel-
don McCarty; guest composer: Terry Riley; poet and narrator: Kush; set
design: Joseph Stubblefield; altar: Eeo Stubblefield; location: Redwood
High School, Larkspur, California
Peace Meditation and Earth Run, June 18–22, 1986
created and led by Anna Halprin; sponsor: American Dance Festival;
location: Durham, North Carolina
Circle the Earth: A Peace Dance with the Planet, 1987
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: people from the Bay Area
and around the world; guest singer: Susan Osborn; musician: Brian Hand;
set design: Joseph Stubblefield; altar: Eeo Stubblefield; location: Redwood
High School, Larkspur, California

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS 415

 Planetary Dance, 1987–
created and led by Anna Halprin; performers: people from the Bay Area
and in communities all over the world; consultants: James Nixon and
Russell Bass; locations: Mount Tamalpais, Mill Valley, California, and
other locations around the world (see also 1990s on)
Circle the Earth: Dancing Our Peaceful Nature, 1988
presented by Anna Halprin and guest artists including James Nixon and
Native spiritual leaders; participants: people from the Bay Area; location:
Marin Headlands, California
Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line, 1989, 1991
led by Anna Halprin with Jamie McHugh and Tamalpa facilitators;
musicians: Brian Hand, Mark Katz, Jason Serinus; vocals: Marcia Paludan
and Carol Swann; performers: Steps Theater Company, Women with
Wings; narration: Allan Stinson; set design: Joseph Stubblefield; location:
Mount Tamalpais and Redwood High School, Larkspur, California

PERFORMANCES FROM 1990S ON

Planetary Dance and Earth Run (ongoing; see 1987)
yearly at Mount Tamalpais and other places; special locations: Mont Blanc
(Milano), Italy, July 10, 1991; Min Tanaka Festival, Hakushu, Japan, July
25, 1991; Humanistic Medicine Conference, Garmisch, Germany, Novem-
ber 2, 1991; Tanz Atttuel, Berlin, November 3, 1991; Caldecott Field,
Oakland, California, January 19, 1992 (directed by Anna Halprin for
community members after the Oakland fire; titled Earth Run after the Fire:
Planting Seeds of Renewal ); Society of Dance History Scholars Conference,
University of California, Riverside, February 16, 1992
Circle the Earth (ongoing from 1986)
led by Anna Halprin; location: Subud, Bali (1990); Essen, Germany (1991);
Frieburg, Germany (1991; sponsored by Galli Institute)
Carry Me Home, 1990
created and led by Anna Halprin with Allan Stinson; dancers: Positive
Motion participants; musicians: Jules Beckman and Norman Rutherford;
premiere: June 16, 1990, Theater Artaud, San Francisco
The Grandfather Dance, 1994
choreographed and performed by Anna Halprin; music: Flying Klezmer
Band; sponsor: Traveling Jewish Theater; premiere: February 2, 1994, Fort
Mason Theater, San Francisco
Circle the Earth (Excerpts), Seventy-fifth Birthday Retrospective, 1996
choreographed by Anna Halprin; performers: Anna Halprin, Rachel
Kaplan, Cydney Wilkes, Keith Hennessy, Jess Curtis, Jeª Rehg, Women

416 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

 with Wings, Steps Theatre Company; musicians: Jules Beckman, Norman
Rutherford, and Billy Cauley; narrator: Jim Cave; location: Dancers’
Group Footwork, San Francisco
Still Dance with Anna Halprin, 1998–2002
conceived and directed by Eeo Stubblefield; performed by Anna Halprin;
various locations
From 5 to 110, 1999
created and performed by Anna Halprin; music: Ray Lynch; premiere:
“Still Moving,” Theater Artaud, San Francisco, November 7, 1999;
other locations: Cowell Theatre, San Francisco (Part of “Memories from
My Closet”), 2000; Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York; “Art of
Aging” conference, San Francisco Hilton, San Francisco, 2004
Memories from My Closet: Four Dance Stories, Eightieth Birthday Retrospective,
2000
created and performed by Anna Halprin; assisted by David Greenaway;
dances: From 5 to 110 (1998)/music: Ray Lynch, The Courtesan and the
Crone (2000)/music: Arcangelo Corelli, The Grandfather Dance (1995)/
music: Flying Klezmer Band, Gratitude (2000); location: Cowell Theatre,
San Francisco
Intensive Care: Reflections on Death and Dying, 2000–
choreographed and performed originally by Anna Halprin, Lakshmi Aysola,
David Greenaway, Jeª Rehg; music: Miguel Frasconi; voice: Carol Swann;
premiere: June 2, 2000, Cowell Theatre, San Francisco; later core perform-
ers: G. Hoªman Soto, Taira Restar, Brian Collentina; additional music:
“Gotham Lullaby” by Meredith Monk; other locations: Mountain Home
Studio (2004); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004); Jewish Community
Center, San Francisco (2006)
Walking with the Dead, 2000–
ritual designed by Jeª Rehg with Anna Halprin; directed by Anna Halprin;
locations: Sea Ranch, California; Mountain Home Studio, Kentfield, Cali-
fornia; Stinson Beach, California, memorial performance (October 2003)
Be With, 2001
choreographed and performed by Eiko and Koma with Anna Halprin;
music: Joan Jeanrenaud; costumes: Eiko, Koma; sets: Eiko, Koma; pre-
miere: Terrace Theatre, JFK Center for the Performing Arts, Washington,
DC; other locations: Yerba Buena Theater, San Francisco (2002); Joyce
Theater, New York, New York (2002)
Forest, 2002
created by Anna Halprin with members of the Sea Ranch Collective;
performed by members of the Sea Ranch Collective; costumes by Eeo
Stubblefield; premiere: March 2002, Falkirk Community Center, San
Anselmo, California

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS 417

 Seasons, Part 1: Summer, 2003
created and performed by the Sea Ranch Collective; artistic director: Anna
Halprin; music/soundscape: Billy Cauley; performance coordinator: Lynn
Moody; rigging consultant: Karl Gillick; premiere: Mountain Home Studio
(outdoor sites), Kentfield, California
El Dia de los Muertos, 2003
created by Anna Halprin; performed by Terre Parker, Cindy Davis, Lesley
Ehrenfeld, William McCandless, Grady Cousins, Amanda Royce; masks:
Annie Hallatt; location: El Dia de los Muertos Parade, Canal Street, San
Rafael, California
En Route, 2004–
created by Anna Halprin with G. Hoffman Soto; originally performed by
G. Hoªman Soto, Lakshmi Aysola, Boaz Barkan, Alain Buªard, Sherwood
Chen, Anne Collod, Ivola Demange, Lesley Ehrenfeld, Frank Hediger,
David Greenaway; assisted by Terre Unité Parker; costumes inspired by
René Magritte; music: Ionel Petroï; premiere: Festival d’Automne, Paris,
from Residence Hôtelière Citadine Les Halle to Centre Pompidou, Sep-
tember 23–25, 2004
Seniors Rocking, 2005
created by Anna Halprin; performers: seniors in Marin County; music:
Billy Cauley; location: Marin Civic Center, San Rafael, California

FILMS AND VIDEOS

(Additional footage and archival films are contained in Anna Halprin’s
archives at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum.)
“Princess Printemps,” in Four in the Afternoon, 1951
directed by James Broughton; performed by Ann Halprin (full film also
includes dance by Welland Lathrop); music: William O. Smith; full film
30 minutes, black-and-white
Children’s Film, 1954
documentary produced by KQED-TV, San Francisco; 20 minutes, black-
and-white
Hangar, 1957
documentary by William Heick of performance by Ann Halprin,
Simone Forti, Norma Leistiko, A.A. Leath, John Graham, Jennifer
Hunter (Groat); San Francisco Airport; 15 minutes, black-and-white
Procession, 1964
documentary of performance; music: La Monte Young and Terry Riley;
produced by University of California, Los Angeles; 30 minutes, black-
and-white

418 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

Parades and Changes, 1965
documentary of performance; directed by Arne Armbom; produced by
National Swedish Television; 40 minutes, black-and-white
The Bed, 1968
directed by James Broughton; performed by Ann Halprin and others;
music: Warner Jepson; 20 minutes, color
Right On! (Ceremony of Us), 1969
documentary directed by Seth Hill; produced by KQED-TV, San Fran-
cisco; 30 minutes, black-and-white
The Golden Positions, 1970
directed by James Broughton; performed by Ann Halprin; 32 minutes,
black-and-white and color
Ann: A Portrait, 1971
filmed and directed by Coni Beeson; produced by American Film Insti-
tute; sound by Richard Friendman; 21 minutes, black-and-white
The Bust, 1971
documentary of 1969 performance; directed by Paul Ryan; produced by
KQED-TV, San Francisco; 15 minutes, black-and-white
How Sweet It Is, 1975
directed by Lawrence Halprin with Paul Ryan; 12 minutes, black-and-
white
“Exorcism” or “Dark Side” Dance, 1975
documentary by Coni Beeson of performance by Ann Halprin; 15 min-
utes, black-and-white
Dance for Your Life and A Ritual of Life/Death, 1988
documentaries with Steps Theater Company; 15 minutes each, color
Power of Ritual, 1988
documentary produced by Thinking Allowed Productions; 30 minutes,
color
Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line, 1989
documentary produced by Media Arts West; 40 minutes, color
Lawrence and Anna Halprin: Inner Landscapes, 1991
documentary directed by Joan Saªa; produced by KQED-TV, San
Francisco; 60 minutes, color
Positive Motion: Challenging AIDS through Dance and Ritual, 1991
documentary directed and produced by Andy Abrahams Wilson; 37
minutes, black-and-white
Embracing Earth: Dances with Nature, 1995
directed and produced by Andy Abrahams Wilson; creator and executive
producer: Anna Halprin; art director: Eeo Stubblefield; music: Norman
Rutherford; 23 minutes, color

CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS 419

 My Grandfather Dances, 1999
directed by Douglas Rosenberg; 12 minutes, color
Returning Home: Dances with the Earth Body, 2003
directed and produced by Andy Abrahams Wilson; artistic director and
body art: Eeo Stubblefield; dancer: Anna Halprin; music: Fred Firth; 45
minutes, color
Intensive Care: Reflections on Death and Dying, 2003
created and performed by Anna Halprin in collaboration with Lakshmi
Aysola, David Greenaway, and Jeª Rehg; directed and edited by Austin
Forebord; artistic director: Josephine Landor; music, Miguel Frasconi;
color
My Lunch with Anna, 2005
directed by Alain Buªard; performed by Anna Halprin, Alain Buªard,
Sherwood Chen, Lesley Ehrenfeld, and Karl Gillick; color
“Who Says You Have to Dance in the Theatre?” 2006
documentary directed and produced by Jacqueline Caux; color
Spark: Anna Halprin, 2006
documentary directed by Patrick Flaherty; produced by KQED-TV
San Francisco; color (online at www.kqed.org/arts/people/spark/profile
.jsp?id=5402)
Seniors Rocking, in process
documentary directed and produced by Ruedi Gerber; color

420 CHRONOLOGY OF WORKS

 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bloomfield, Arthur. “When Nudity Is Defensible in Dancing.” San Francisco Sun-
day Examiner and Chronicle, October 15, 1967, B4.
Burns, Stewart. Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy. Boston:
Twayne, 1990.

421
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———. “Jokes.” In Rethinking Popular Culture, ed. Chandra Mukerji and
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———. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Lon-
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———. Youth and Social Change. Chicago: Markham Publishing, 1971.
Ford, Richard. “Notes on Classes for Boys.” Impulse (1953): 8.

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Forti, Simone. Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse
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———. “Dancing Bodies.” In Meaning in Motion, ed. Jane Desmond. Durham,
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———. “Fillmore Abstraction—Light, Music, Dance.” San Francisco Sunday
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 tor Learning.” Mimeographed manuscript by Kramer Business Service, Madi-
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Halprin, Ann/Anna. “Children’s Class.” Impulse (Summer 1948): 27–29.
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———. “Community Art as Life Process.” The Drama Review 17, T-59 (1973):
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———. Dance as a Healing Art: A Teacher’s Guide and Support Manual for People
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Halprin, Lawrence. “The Art of Garden Design.” Journal of Popular Culture ( July
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———. “Landscaping a Small Plot.” Sunset, November–December 1949, 105,
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———. Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places, exh. cat. San Francisco: San Fran-
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———. “New York, New York: A Study of the Quality, Character and Mean-
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———. Notebooks 1959–1971. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972.
———. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Process in the Human Environment. New York:
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———. Sketchbooks of Lawrence Halprin. Tokyo: Process Architecture, 1981.
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Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. New York: Aperture, 1997.
Vertinsky, Patricia. “Sporting Women in the Public Gaze: Shattering the Mas-
ter Narrative of Aging Female Bodies.” Canadian Woman Studies 21, no. 3
( Winter–Spring 2002): 58–63.
Waring, Jim. “What Is the Ideal Technical Equipment for Today’s Theatre
Dancer?” Impulse (1948): 18–20.
Washburne, Carlton. Winnetka: The History and Significance of an Educational
Experiment. Englewood Cliªs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Woodard, Kathleen. Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

428 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
Zborowski, Mark, and Elizabeth Herzog. Life Is with People: The Culture of the
Shtetl. New York: Shocken Books, 1952.
Zimbardo, Philip. The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.
Zinsser, William K. “Culture: The New Joy.” Look, January 9, 1968, 8.

Additional material was drawn from extensive interviews conducted by the au-
thor over a period of a decade and a half, from 1989 to 2006, with Anna Hal-
prin and her colleagues, including Charles Amirkhanian, Jack Anderson, Paul
Baum, Jeanne Hayes Beaman, Ruth Beckford, Miriam Raymer Bennett, Sunni
Bloland, Rabbi Samuel Broude, Trisha Brown, Jim Burns, Remy Charlip, Gale
Randall Chrisman, Wanda Coleman, Bruce Conner, Maggie Creighton, Merce
Cunningham, Doris Dennison, George Dorris, Eiko and Koma, Simone Forti,
Kathelin Gray, John Graham, Kim Hahn, Daria Halprin, Lawrence Halprin,
Rana Halprin, Melinda West Harrison, Alma Hawkins, William Heick, Mary
Hinkson, Luca Hoving, Jenny Hunter Groat, Warner Jepson, Rhodessa Jones,
Kush, Jo Landor, Pearl Lang, Skip La Plante, Nina Lathrop, A.A. Leath, Norma
Leistiko, Murray Louis, Sydney Luria, Jasmine Nash Lutes, Vera Maletic, Jamie
McHugh, Nancy Cronenwelt Meehan, Meredith Monk, Robert Morris, Lousie
H’Doubler Nagel, Liam O’Gallagher, Irving Penn, Yvonne Rainer, Robert
Raymer, Larry Reed, Charles Reinhart, Terry Riley, John Rockwell, Juanita Sagan,
Benito Santiago, Richard Schechner, Albert Schuman, Ida Schuman, Stanton
Schuman, Ramon Sender, Kermit Sheets, Allan Stinson, Eeo Stubblefield, Mor-
ton Subotnick, Lynn Palmer Van Dam, Sir Lawrence Washington, James Woods,
and La Monte Young.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 429

 INDEX

Photographs appear in two unnumbered insert sections.

Aalto, Alvar, 52 American National Theatre and Academy

abstract expressionists, 109 (ANTA; New York), 107–8, 111–13, 115
Adams, Ansel, 116 Amirkhanian, Charles, 261–62, 264, 280
Adams, Howard, 260, 261 Anderson, Carl Albert, 186
African Americans, 84, 248, 255–59, 285– Anderson, Jack, 149, 192, 193, 298
86, 288, 292, 294; in dance classes, 84, 85, Angell, Roger, 64
372n42; politics of, 264–65; in prison, Animal Ritual, 296–98, 413
290–91; in Reach Out program, 285, 295, Ann: A Portrait (film), 419
298; in Studio Watts, 265–84, 394n54 Ant Farm, 250
aging, 331–57; of dancer, 333–35, 338–40, anti-Semitism, 12–13, 20, 23–24, 31, 32
350–53, 355–56; Seniors Rocking and, Antonioni, Michelangelo, 244–48
354–56 Apartment 6, 119, 121, 182, 188–91, 233, 297,
AIDS group, Anna Halprin’s work with, 298, 412, photo
324–28 Arbus, Diane, 154, 198
Air Primitive, 405 architects: Bay Area, 75–77; workshops
Albee, Edward, 156, 163; Who’s Afraid of involving, 49–54, 204–5, 248–54, 269,
Virginia Woolf ?, 157 273, 311. See also landscape architecture;
Albers, Anni, 50 specific architects
Albers, Josef, 50, 65 Arcosanti Alive, 414
Allegro Barbaro, 405 Arnaz, Desi, 120
Allen, Maude, xiv Arnbom, Arne, 187
Allis, Frances, 18 Artaud, Antonin, 226–27, 233; The Theatre
Aloff, Mindy, 93 and Its Double, 233–34
American Dance Festival, 295–98, 347; art-life interface, 119–22, 163–64, 195, 219,
Samuel H. Scripps Award, 194 275, 316, 318, 350–51, 356
American Humanistic Psychology Associa- Arts and Architecture, 138
tion, 400n31 ArtWeek, xv

431
 Ashton, Dore, 74, 109 Bennington College, 23, 24, 366n5; School of
Asian Americans, 285, 291, 292 the Dance, 24–28, 34, 43, 47, 65–66, 295
Associated Council of the Arts, 260 Bentley, Alys, 28
Auberg, Karen, 192, 228 Berberian, Cathy, 169, 174
Auden, W. H., 62 Berger, John, 207, 388n25
audience role, 160, 162, 185, 202, 257; in Berio, Luciano, 164–65, 169–74
Animal Ritual, 296–98; in The Bath, 204, Berliner, Paul, 131
205–6; in Ceremony of Us, 278–79, 282– Bernheimer, Martin, 282
83; in Happenings, 236–38; in Lunch, 260, Bernstein, Leonard, 394n49
262; in Ten Myths, 208–21, 224, 232, 239, Be With (Eiko and Koma with Anna Halprin),
240; as witnesses, 221–23, 313, 318, 328. See 349–50, 417
also community; participatory theater; Big Brother and the Holding Company, 206
spectatorship Bird, Bonnie, 65, 90
Avalanche No. I, 141 Birds of America, or Gardens Without Walls,
Aysola, Lakshmi, 345 139–41, 143, 146, 169, 171, 379n83, 410
Bitter Herbs, 80, 407
Bakar, Gerson, 310 Black Mountain College, 65
Balanchine, George, 197 Black Panther Party, 264–65, 277, 394n49
Ball, Lucille, 119–21 Blank, Carla, 181, 185
Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 19 Blank Placard Dance, 287, 289, 290, 413,
Banes, Sally, 153, 166, 219, 227–28, 392n112 photo
Barefoot, Spencer, 82, 83 Blau, Herbert, 157, 169, 221, 238
Bark, Jan, 171, 187 Blind Song, 409
Barnard College, 95 Blok, Helaine, 80
Barnes, Clive, 193 Bloland, Sunni, 144, photo
Barnes, Edward Larrabee, 49 Bloomfield, Arthur, 225–26
Barthes, Roland, 1 Blow Up (film), 244
Bath, The, 202–8, 247, 255, 319, 412, photos Blumkin, Rose, 34
Bauhaus, x, 49–52, 57–59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 173, B’nai B’rith, 35
379n83 Boal, Augusto, 258
Baum, Paul, 174, 180, 249, 250, 257, 273, 277, Boas, Francesca, 95, 190
280–82 Boas, Franz, 95
Bausch, Pina, Kontakthof, 354–55 Bolm, Adolph, 18
Bayer, Herbert, 50 Booker T. Washington Community Center
Beaman, Jeanne Hayes, 26 (San Francisco), 255
Beats, xiv, 74, 114, 122–25, 130–33, 145, 147, Boston Herald Traveler, 297
159, 201, 377n31 Branch Dance, 128, 409, photo
Beauvoir, Simone de, The Coming of Age, Brautigan, Richard, 123, 125, 137, 139
335 Breuer, Marcel, 50, 51
Bechtel Corporation, 129 Broude, Samuel, 292, 293
Beck, Julian, 177, 227, 385n98 Broughton, James, 74, 113–14, 117–18, 123,
Beckett, Samuel, 188, 233; Happy Days, 169; 125, 139, 212; Musical Chairs, 113
Waiting for Godot, 157 Brown, Trisha, 136, 144, 146–48, 151–53, 168,
Beckford, Ruth, 85–86, 286 180, 181, photo
Beckman, Jules, 327 Bruce, Lenny, 123, 154, 197–98
Bed, The (film), 118, 419 Buren, Daniel, 397n108
Beeson, Coni, 307, 389n47 Burns, Jim, 249, 250–52, 254, 279
Belgrade Film Festival, 301 Bust, The, 287–89, 413, 419
Bennett, Miriam Raymer, 8, 12, 15, 44, 66, Butler, Ethel, 34–35
364n27 Butoh, 334–35, 345

432 INDEX
Café au Go Go (New York), 197 City University of New York, 192
Cage, John, 65, 90, 91, 135, 141, 142, 144–46, Civil Rights Act (1964), 259
152, 160, 167, 237; Fontana Mix, 153 Claxton, Wayne, 44
California, as creative space, 71–74 Cleaver, Eldridge, 265; Soul on Ice, 277
California Dance Educators Association, 338 Coffee Pot, 408
Campbell, Joseph, 223–24 Cohen, Selma Jeanne, 19
cancer: Anna Halprin’s, 305–10, 315, 317, 321; Coleman, Wanda, 267–69, 274–75, 278,
Sontag on, 305; workshops for, 322–24 280–82; “A War of Eyes,” 276
Cancer Support and Education Center, 323– collective creativity, 250, 253–54, 310, 333
24; “Moving toward Life” program, 324–25 Collins, Janet, 112
Cándida Smith, Richard, 72, 109, 123–25 Columbia University, 249, 257; Teacher’s
Candid Camera (television program), 230–32, College, 24, 28, 29
262, 289–90 Communists, xi, 32, 372n43
Carry Me Home, 327–28, 416 community, 163, 27, 250–52, 254, 255, 258,
Cassidy, Rosalind, 34–35 290; of artists, 53, 64, 74, 125; audience as,
Castiglione, Countess de, 336 242; black and white, 255–56 (see also racial
Catholics, 124 issues); in Bust, 289; in Circle the Earth,
“Cathy Dance,” 56–57, 63 318–22, 325, 328–30; in Citydance, 311,
Cazden, Norman, 63, 64, 369n26 313–14; in Lunch, 260, 262. See also
Celebration of Life—Cycle of Ages, 414 collective creativity
Centre Pompidou (Paris), 353–54 Congress of Wonders, 196
Ceremonial, 406 Connecticut College, 295
Ceremony of Signals, 414 Conner, Bruce, 74, 123, 125
Ceremony of Us, 248, 266–84, 287, 289, 290, Connerton, Paul, 244, 256, 263–64
293, 295, 296, 412, 419 Copeland, Roger, 302
Chaconne, 406 Corn, Wanda, 201, 391n88
Chaikin, Joseph, 194, 254 Cornell University School of Agriculture, 38,
Charlatans, 196 42
Charles-Roux, Edmonde, 208 Cornish School (Seattle), 35, 66, 80, 90
Charlip, Remy, 167, 194, 195 Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, 265
Chicago Dance Council, 20, 21 Courtesan and the Crone, The, 346–47, 417
Chicago Dancer, 35 Cowell Theater (San Francisco), 345
Chicago Institute of Design, 65 Creighton, Magdalen (Maggie), 323
Chicago Review, 123 Cunningham, Merce, 87, 122, 142, 143, 145,
Chicago World’s Fair (1934), 20 152, 167, 302, 353, photo; in Bennington
children: classes for, 36, 53–59, 62, 65, 83–91, summer program, 35, 65–6; Cage and,
97–101, photo; games of, 271–72, 279 65, 134–35, 160, 237; dance deck lecture
Chrisman, Gale Randall, 83–85, 104, 372n43 demonstration by, 106–7; works: How
Church, Thomas, 75–76, 78, 79 to Kick, Run, Pass and Fall, 145; Story, 190;
Circle the Earth, 164, 209, 315, 318–20, 322, 325– Winterbranch, 380n105
26, 328–30, 396n81, 415, 416, 419, photo Cutler, Irving, 3
Circle the Mountain, 320, 415
Citizens for Interplanetary Activity (CIA), dadaism, 135, 238
230 Dagens Nyheter, 188
City Center (New York), 298 Dalcroze School of Eurythmics (London), 90
City College of New York, 40 Dalí, Salvador, 310
Citydance, xv, 71–72, 164, 309, 311–15, 414 Daly, Ann, 241
City Lights bookstore (San Francisco), 123, Dance as a Healing Art, 322, 324
125, 312 dance deck, Halprins’, 79, 103–7, 128, 160,
City Scale environmental happening, 312 222, photo

INDEX 433
 Dance for Your Life (film), 419 Ernst, Max, 49
Dance Magazine, 98–99 Esalen Institute, 154, 179, 180, 294, 314, 384n69
“Dark Side” (“Exorcism”) dance, 307–10, Esposizione, 165, 168–71, 174, 175, 181, 239, 411
401n48, 414 est training seminars, 292
Darmstadt Festival of New Music, 141 Evans, Walker, 62
Daughter of the Voice, 108, 127, 377n41, 409, Evanston Women’s Club, 20
photo Exorcism, 35
Davis, Douglas, 250 “Exorcism” (“Dark Side”) dance, 307–10,
Death, 407 401n48, 414
Dedication, 405 “Experiments in Environment” workshops,
Democratic Party, 5 204–5, 248–54, 269, 273, photo; Taking
Dempster, Elizabeth, 241 Part workbook, 250–52
Denishawn school, 16, 19, 20 Expressen, 188
Dennison, Doris, 90–92, 164
Dewey, John, 11, 24, 28, 29, 83, 86, 92, 161; Fallon, Michael, 201
Art as Experience, 29, 366n17 Federal Housing Authority, 52
Dewey, Ken, 312 Federal Theatre Project, xi
Dia de los Muertos, El, 418 Feininger, Lyonel, 50
Dilexi Gallery Foundation, 280 Feminine Intrigue, 407
Di Prima, Diane, 166 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 123
Donnell, Mr. and Mrs. Dewey, 78–79 Festival d’Automne (Paris), 353
Dorris, George, 192, 193, 298 Fillmore Auditorium (San Francisco), 196,
D-Q University, 222 229, 265
Draper, Paul, 112 Finley, Karen, We Keep Our Victims Ready,
Duchamp, Marcel, 201, 202, 230–31, 313, 342
391n88; Fountain, 202, 219, 233 Five-Legged Stool, The, 155–64, 171, 172, 185,
Duet, 407; (with Leath), 133–34, 409 188, 198, 411
Duncan, Isadora, xiv, 16, 19, 22, 69, 93, 167 Flight, 409
Dunham, Katherine, 286 Floating Bear, The (newsletter), 166
Dunn, Robert, 136, 151–53, 167 Flowerburger, 137, 410
Dunning, Jennifer, 92 Fluxus, 144
Duomo Choir, 165 Fo, Dario, Isabella, 186
Folk Suite, 406
Earth Run, 415. See also Planetary Dance Fonda, Peter, 301
Easy Rider (film), 301 Fontaroff, Nina, 35
Eichelbaum, Stanley, 156 Ford, Richard, 91, 93–96
Eiko, 335, 347–49 Forest, 417
Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, 5 Fort Mason Theater (San Francisco), 336
Ekman, June, 144, photo Forti, Simone, 121, 123, 126–32, 134–37, 143,
Elegy, or Hymn to Dead Soldiers, 33, 405 146, 147, 151–53, 167–68, photo
Embracing Earth (film), 419 Foster, Susan Leigh, 74, 241, 371n14
Emek, 377n41, 408 Foucault, Michel, 351; Discipline and Punish-
Emerson, Ruth, 144, photo ment, 13
Endicott, Jo Ann, 354–55 “found” dances, 201
Enright, John, 175–76 Four in the Afternoon: A Quartet for Poems
En Route, 354, 418 Moving (film), 113–14
Entombment, 82, 408 Four-Legged Stool, The, 155, 161–63, 380n100,
Epilogue, 407 410
Erdman, Jean, 223 Four Square, 410
Erhard, Werner, 292 4 Variations, 409

434 INDEX
Frankenstein, Alfred, 82, 157, 165–66 Sagan and, 180, 191; in “Sonics” concert
Frechette, Mark, 245–46, 248 series, 173; in summer workshop, 144; in
Freedman, Barbara, 240–41 Trunk Dance, 134, 135
Free Southern Theater, The, 257–58 Graham, Martha, 11, 18, 37, 66, 69, 90, 119,
Free Speech Movement, 228, 238 146, 152, 302; and American Dance Festival,
Freud, Sigmund, 175, 352, 363n4 107–13; in Bennington summer programs,
Fried, Alexander, 173–74 25, 26, 34, 35; career prioritized over mar-
Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 122 riage by, 46; interpretive approach of, 177;
From 5 to 110, 338–40, 346, 417 Lathrop and, 81, 86, 92, 94; myths retold
Frye, Marquette, 258 by, 223, 224; ritual invoked as spectacle by,
Fuller, Loie, xiv 157–58; works: American Document, 25;
Fuller, Rebecca, 296 Appalachian Spring, 112, 114; Deaths and
Funk style, 123 Entrances, 112; Diversion of Angels, 112;
Funt, Allen, 230, 289–90 Night Journey, 112; Seraphic Dialogue, 112
Graham, Robert, 244
Garrett, Melvin, 284 Graham School, 143
Gerber, Ruedi, 355 Grandfather Dance, The, 331–32, 336–37, 339,
Gere, David, 326 346, 416, 419, photo
Gestalt therapy, 175–78, 182, 183, 188, 220, Grand Union, 136
267, 298, 306, 399n10; aphorisms of, 294; Grateful Dead, 196, 206, 265
cathartic experience in, 304, 308; develop- Gratitude, 346
ment of, 155; empathic bonding inspired Gray, Kathelin, 220, 389n54, 395n67
by, 273–74; films of sessions of, 179; “hot Gray Line Bus Company “Hippie Hop” tour,
seat” in, 185, 189, 201 199–201, 260
Ghirardelli Square (San Francisco), 162–63 Greeks, ancient: drama of, 238; mythology
Gibbs, Wolcott, 63 of, 223
Gilkerson, William, 225, 226 Greenaway, David, 345; photo
Gilpin, Heidi, 336 Groat, Jenny Hunter. See Hunter Groat, Jenny
Ginsberg, Allen, 133, 229; Howl, 123, 124, 131 Gropius, Ise, 52–53, 61
Gitlin, Todd, 229, 262–63 Gropius, Walter, x, xv, 49–53, 57–58, 61–62,
Glatkin, William, 261 65, 163, photo
Glover, Jerrie, 144, photo Grosz, George, 49
Goad, Donald, 288 Grotowski, Jerzy, 221, 234–36, 254; Constant
Goffman, Erving, 217, 220, 240, 241; The Prince, 235; Kordian, 235; Towards a Poor
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 232–33 Theatre, 234–35
Golden Positions, The (film), 118, 419 Group Theatre, xi
Goldsmith, Larri and Paul, 183, 385n84 Guggenheim Foundation. See John Simon
Goodman Theater (Chicago), 20 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Gordon, David, 168 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 239–41
Goree, Stanley, 290
Goya, Francisco, 335; Disasters of War, 62 Habima Theater (Moscow), 92
Graduate, The (film), 212 Hadassah, 38–40
Graham, Bill, 196, 229, 265 Hager, Bengt, 186–88
Graham, John, 81, 87, 114, 118, 127, 129–30, Hahn, Kim, 183–86
136, 147, 192, 312; in Apartment 6, 188–91, Hall, George Stanley, 11
photo; in Birds of America, 140, 169, photo; Hall, Robert, 306
on European tours, 169–71, 186; in Five- Hallett, Annie, 284, photo
Legged Stool, 155–56, 160–61; in Flower- Halprin, Anna (Ann); adolescence of, 16–24;
burger, 137–38; in Parades and Changes, aging of, 332–36, 338–40, 346–47, 350–57,
183, 184; in Perls’s group sessions, 175, 178; photos; in American Dance Festival, 295–

INDEX 435
 Halprin, Anna (Ann) (continued) formances of, 195–96; in San Francisco
98; artistic influence of Larry on, 58–59, postwar art scene, 74–75; on space, 59, 64,
64–65, 76–77, 95–96, 163, 254, 257; Bay 73–74; spectatorship concept of, 201–2,
Area dance apprenticeship of, 79–80; in 204–6, 208, 239–41, 287–88 (see also under
Beat culture, xiv, 114, 122–25, 132–33; in spectatorship); Stubblefield’s collaboration
Bennington summer program, 24–27, with, 340–44, 350, 352; summer dance
34–35; birth of, 7; birth of daughters of, workshops of, 127–28, 143–53, 180–81,
96, 101, 120; in Broadway musical, 67; 185, 219–20 (see also “Experiements in the
California landscape’s impact on, 71–74; Environment” workshops); Tamalpa Insti-
cancer of, 302–10, 315, 317, 321; childhood tute training program of, 315–18; task per-
of, 1–2, 5–16; children’s dance classes of, formance approach of (see task perfor-
36, 53–59, 62, 65, 83–91, 97–101; children’s mance); University of Wisconsin dance
games used by, 271–72, 279; dance deck studies of, 27–31, 36–37, 47–8; works,
designed for, 79, 103–7, 128, 160, 222; at 405–20 (see also specific works); workshops
Daria’s wedding, 301; debate over influence led by Larry and, 51, 61, 121, 204–5, 246,
of, 166–68; domestic life merged with 248–54, 318–20, 387n16
dance of, 119–22; Eiko and Koma’s col- Halprin, Daria (daughter), 71, 96–97, 101,
laboration with, 347–50; European tours 140, 170, 183, 192, 239, 283, 317, 336, 395n67;
of, 164–65, 168–73, 182, 184–88, 191, 192, adolescence of, 195; birth of, 96, 120; child-
198, 353–54; family background of, xi–xii, hood of, 99, 119, 121, 129; film career of,
2–7; films of, ix, 113–14, 117–19, 129–32, 244–48; marriage of, 301; in Studio Watts
307–8, 350–51, 409, 418–20; Haight- collaboration, 277, 281, 396n76; at Tamalpa
Ashbury studio of, 173, 182, 199; Harvard Institute, 315–16
design circle influences on, xv–xvi, 49, Halprin, Lawrence (Larry), x–xi, 37–48, 118,
52–53, 58, 61–62, 64; healing dances of, 120, 161–63, 222, 246, 295, 298, 307, 369n27,
303, 310, 317–18, 322–30; in Hillel, 31–33, photos; artistic influence on Anna of, 95–
35–38; iconoclasm of, xii–xiv; improvisa- 96, 163, 171, 254; on backpacking trips with
tion used by (see improvisation); instant daughters, 129; birth of daughters of, 96,
dance concept of, 116–17; and Judaism, 101; boyhood travels of, 39–41; California
1–2, 5–6, 12–13, 23, 28, 31–34, 108–9, 292– landscape’s impact on, 71–74; dance deck
94, 336–37; and Larry’s health crisis, 337– designed by, 103–6; at Daria’s wedding,
38, 344–46; during Larry’s navy service, xi, 301; family background of, 38–39; family
66–70; Lathrop’s partnership with, 80–83 life of Anna and, 119, 121, 125; films shot
(see also Halprin-Lathrop School); Marin by, 99; at Harvard, x, 46–53, 57–62, 64–
County homes of, 77–78, 101–3; marriage 65; health crisis of, 337–38, 340, 344; illustra-
of Larry and, 42–46; multiracial programs tion drawn by, 86, 95; and Judaism, 41–42;
of, 264–95; musical experimentation of, landscape architecture of, 75–80, 96–97,
141–43; myths used by, 223–24 (see also 102–4, 162, 310; marriage of Anna and,
Ten Myths); and natural environment, 59, 42–46; Mount Tamalpais home site chosen
60, 73–74, 106–7, 126, 128–29, 340–44, by, 101–2; in navy, 60, 66–71; in Palestine,
351; in New Hampshire summer program, 40–42; Polaroid camera of, 116–17; in San
59, 60; participatory performances of, ix– Francisco postwar art scene, 74–75; in
x, xvi, 208–23, 236–38, 242–43 (see also Stockholm, 186; at University of Wiscon-
under audience role; spectatorship; specific sin, 37–38, 42–47; urban design work of,
works); Penn’s photographs of, 206–8; Perls 158, 162–63, 249–50, 254–55, 257, 310–12,
as mentor of, 154, 174–80, 189, 201, 300; 343, 400n32; workshops led by Anna and,
poetry-dance collaborations of, 137–39; 51, 61, 121, 204–5, 246, 248–54, 318–20,
racial issues addressed by, 255–58 (see also 387n16
under racial issues); ritual defined by, 158– Halprin, Rana (daughter), 101, 140, 169–71,
59 (see also under ritual); rock concert per- 183, 336, 395n67, photo; birth of, 101, 120;

436 INDEX
 childhood of, 119, 121, 129, 385n84; in Hofmann, Hans, 49, 74
Studio Watts collaboration, 273–74, 281 Holm, Hanya, 16, 25, 26, 43, 46, 66, 92, 113
Halprin, Rose Luria (mother-in-law), 38–42, Holocaust, 80, 180, 212, 293, 309, 343
67–69, 111 hooks, bell, 248
Halprin, Ruth (sister-in-law), 39, 40 Hop, Skip and Dance (television program), 94
Halprin, Samuel W. (father-in-law), 38–42, Hopkins, John, 268, 281, 284
44, 67, 68, 111 Hopper, Dennis, 301
Halprin-Lathrop School (San Francisco), 81– Hopper, Ruthanna, 301
95, 111, 113, 143, 174, 190 Horst, Louis, 25–26, 34, 35, 94, 152
Hangar, 129–32, 409, photo House Beautiful, 78
Happenings, ix, 187, 205, 221, 236–38 House Un-American Activities Committee
Harmony at Evening, 407 (HUAC), 159
Hartfield, Ruth, 47 Hovhaness, Alan, 110
Hartford, Gary, photo Hoving, Lucas, 47, 111
Hartmann, Susan, 122 How Sweet It Is (film), 419
Harvard University, x, xv–xvi, 23–24, 46, 72; Huichol Indians, 320
Law School, 42; School of Design, 47, 49– human potential movement, 176, 294
53, 57–59, 61–65, 75 Humphrey, Doris, x, 18–20, 37, 43, 66, 107–
Hawkins, Erick, 25 8, 119, 282; and American Dance Festival,
Hay, Deborah, 204 107–8, 111–13; in Bennington summer
Hayden, Tom, 159 programs, 25, 26, 34, 35; career prioritized
H’Doubler, Margaret, xv, 28–31, 44, 95, 126, over marriage by, 46; after childbirth, 120;
147, 158, 213, 228, 282, 285, 291–92, 303, invitation to Anna to join company of,
photo; Anna’s classes at Wisconsin with, 21–22; musical choreographed by, 67;
30–32, 37, 48, 53, 75, 143, 242, 389n47; in Ninety-second Street Y dance center
Bennington summer program, 27; Leath directed by, 80; works: Day on Earth, 112;
as student of, 97–98; marriage of, 44, 45, New Dance trilogy, 19; Passacaglia in
47; movement investigations of, 86–88, C Minor, 25; Shakers, 19
101, 150, 252; pedagogical approach of, 28– Hungry i (San Francisco), 123, 197
30, 37, 57, 65, 83, 161, 329 Hunter College, 39, 192–94, 201, 203, 228
Headlights, 229 Hunter Groat, Jenny, 86, 87, 111, 113, 114, 117,
Heick, William R. (Bill), 129–31 125–29, photo
Hellebrandt, Beatrice, 37 Huxley, Aldous, 384n69
Hell’s Angels, 206
Henderson, Joseph, 180 Ikeda, Sue Yung Li, 310
Henry Street Playhouse (New York), 92 I Love Lucy (television program), 120, 121
Herbst Theatre (San Francisco), 117 improvisation, 86–95, 117, 126, 136–37, 146–
Hernton, Calvin C., Coming Together, 248 50, 153, 187, 256; with children, 88–90, 97,
Hickey, Patric, 183, 186, 188, 210, 212, 98–101; Forti on, 151; Grand Union and,
260–61, 266 136; in Hangar, 131; limitations of, 209–10;
Hill, Martha, 25 vocalization and, 134. See also spontaneity
Hill, Pepe, 270 Impulse magazine, 86, 88–91, 93
Hill, Seth, 270 In and On the Mountain, 309, 319–21, 414
Hillel Foundation, 31–35, 37, 38, 42 Initiations and Transformations, 413
Hinkson, Mary, 28–29 Institute for Creative and Artistic Develop-
hippie culture, 199–201, 206, 220, 227, 229, ment, 191
262–63, 265 Intensive Care, 344–46, 353, 417, 420, photo
Hitler, Adolf, 45 Interplay, 407
Hoffman, Abbie, 262–63 Intruder, 408
Hoffman, Dustin, 212 Ionesco, Eugene, 233

INDEX 437
 Isaacs, Reginald, 51 Kaprow, Allan, 221, 236–38; Eighteen
Ives, Burl, 10, 67 Happenings in Six Parts, 236
Kats, Madeline, 188
Jackson, Billy C., 270, 280, 396n87 Katz, Michael, 192
Jackson, Naomi, 377n41 Kelley, Morris, 192, 203
Jahnsson, Bengt, 188 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 154, 299, 303
Jazz Fantasy, 407 Kennedy, Robert F., 264, 299, 303
Jazz Workshop (San Francisco), 198 Kennedy Center ( Washington, D.C.), 347
Jeanrenaud, Joan, 348 Kenyan, Malka, 108, 110
Jefferson Airplane, 229, 265 Kerouac, Jack, 124, 132; On the Road, 159
Jepson, Warner, 118, 142 Kerr, Walter, 67
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, 41
Teachers Institute of, 39 King, Eleanor, 25; American Folk Suite, 25
Jews, x, xi, 2–7, 41, 53, 92, 197, 336–37, King, Martin Luther, Jr., 257, 264, 299, 303,
385n84; blacks and, 248, 265; in Chicago, 394n49
3, 5; Eastern European, 2–5, 39, 63, 124; Kirby, Michael, 237
German, 3, 95, 175; humor of, 9; in Ivy Kirkpatrick, William Heard, 24
League colleges, 23–24; Nazi extermina- Kirstein, Lincoln, 47
tion of (see Holocaust); at University of Klee, Paul, 52
Wisconsin, 31–35, 37, 38; in Winnetka, Koma, 347–49
10, 12–13, 364n27; Zionist, 32, 38–42, 47. Koner, Pauline, 112
See also anti-Semitisim; Judaism Kreutzberg, Harald, 18, 167
Job, Lenore Peters, 85; The Informer, 85; The Kristallnacht, 33
Picnic, 85 Kushner, Ed and Amelia, 293
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda- Kyberg, Sven, 187
tion, 198, 361
Johnson, Dennis, 141 Labanotation, 86
Johnson, Philip, 49 Laing, R. D., 399n10
Jones, LeRoi, 166 Land, Edwin H., 116
Jooss Ballet, 47 Land, Peter, 316
Joplin, Janis, 196 Landor, Jo, 119, 121, 169, 174, 183, 184, 186,
Jordan, David Starr, 73 188, 191, 194, 373n79
Joyce Theater (New York), 347 landscape architecture, 45–46, 50–51; of
Judaism, 6, 307, 308; burial practices in, Lawrence Halprin, 75–80, 96–97, 102–
342–43; dances influenced by themes 4, 162, 310
from, 34, 97, 108–10, 127, 292–94, 377n41; Laney College, 284
Orthodox, 1–2, 4–6; Reform, 5; Tzedakh Lang, Pearl, 18
tradition in, 314, 400n40; wedding tradi- Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism,
tions in, 43–44, 301. See also Jews 352
Judson Memorial Church (New York), 66, Lathrop, Nina, 81, 371n34
93, 133, 151–53, 166–68, 204, 219 Lathrop, Welland, 80–83, 85–87, 90, 92,
Juilliard School, 172 94, 96, 101, 103, 108, 113, 114, 127, photo;
Jung, Carl, 223 Drawing Room Comedy, 83; Hamlet, 83;
Jungian analysis, 180 Jacob, 108; Three Characters for a Passion
Play, 82. See also Halprin-Lathrop School
Kaddish, 293, 308 Latinos, 285, 291, 292
Kadosh, 287, 292–93, 413 Lauer, Eleanor, 147
Kadushin, Evelyn, 45 Lauterer, Arch, 79, 103–5
Kadushin, Max, 32–33, 44, 45, 48, 109, 367n23; Lawrence and Anna Halprin: Inner Landscapes
Organic Thinking, 32–33 (film), 419

438 INDEX
Leary, Timothy, 229 Magic Mountain Music Festival, 230
Leath, A.A., 97–98, 113, 114, 127, 129–30, 136, Mahaffay, Marni, 153
144, 147, 192, photo; in Apartment 6, 188– Mailer, Norman, 376n26
91, photo; in Birds of America, 140; Duet Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris),
created by Anna and, 133–34; in Five-Legged 208
Stool, 155–57; in Flowerburger, 137–38; in Malcolm X, 264
Mr. and Mrs. Mouse, 139; in Parades and Male and Female Ritual, xv, 319, 414
Changes, 183, 384n80; in Perls’s group Maletic, Ana, 383n52
sessions, 175, 178; Sagan and, 180, 191; in Maletic, Vera, 172
summer workshop, 144; in Trunk Dance, Malina, Judith, 177, 227, 385n98
134–36 Mandan Sun Dance, 222
Lee Strasberg School, 247 Margolis, Ken, 291
Léger, Fernand, 49 Marin, College of, 318–19
Leigh, Robert Devore, 366n5 Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative, 94,
Leistiko, Norma, 129, 175, 178, 260, 261, 279, 98–101
315, photo Marin Civic Center, 355
Leonard, George, 294, 314–15 Marines Memorial Theater (San Francisco),
Leonardo da Vinci, 335 96
Levi Strauss Corporation, 310 Martin, Anthony, 312
Levinson, Andre, 47 Martin, John, 112
Levy, Jacques, 194 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT):
Lewin, Kurt, 230 Press, 250; School of Architecture, 75
life-art interface. See art-life interface Mat Dance, 406
Limón, José, 111, 112; The Moor’s Pavane, 112; Maybeck, Bernard, 76
The Traitor, 112 McCarthyism, xi, 85
Lippincott, Gertrude, 47, 95 McClure, Michael, 74, 123, 124
Litz, Katherine, 119 McHugh, Jamie, 321, 325
Living Magazine, 78 McKay, Glenn, 229
Living Theater, 177, 199, 221, 227, 254, 257, McLuhan, Marshall, 226
385n98; Paradise Now, 227–28, 399n10 McNulty, Gay, 226, 388n31
Lloyd, Norman and Ruth, 35 Meehan, Nancy Cronenwelt, 91, 94–95, 143
Locks, Seymour, 210 Memories from My Closet, 346, 417
Lonely Ones, The, 62–65, 80, 96, 111–12, 407, Mendieta, Ana, 343; Silueta series, 343, 344
photo Mendocino State Hospital, 155
Look magazine, 206–8, 245 Merritt College, 295
Lord, Chip, 250 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York),
Los Angeles Festival of the Arts, 278, 279 207
Los Angeles Music Center, Mark Taper Mettler, Barbara, 59, 60
Forum, 278, 284, 396n76 Mickiewitcz, Adam, Dziady, 235
Los Angeles Times, 78, 282 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 50, 52
Louis, Murray, 86, 91–93, 95 Milgram, Stanley, 289–90
Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 24 Milk, Harvey, 314
Lunch, 260–64, 266, 287, 412, photo Mills College, 34–35, 65, 90, 107, 147, 164,
Luria, Lucille, 298 173, 180, 291, 296
Luria, Philip and Rebecca, 39 minimalism, musical, 140, 379n81
Luria, Sydney, 39–40, 42, 68, 298, 301 Minkus, Lee, 258
Mr. and Mrs. Mouse, 119, 139, 410
Mabry, Iris, 112 Mitsuwa, Don José, 320
Mademoiselle magazine, 101 Mobilus group, 313
Madrona, 374n79, 409 Modern Dance Center (Minneapolis), 95

INDEX 439
 Moholy-Nagy, László, 50, 51, 65 New York City Board of Higher Education,
Mondrian, Piet, 49, 64 193–94
Monet, Claude, 335 New York City Police Department, 193
Monk, Meredith, 121–22, 181, 384n80; Break, New Yorker, 62
181; “Gotham Lullaby,” 345 New York Herald-Tribune, 193
Monroe, Marilyn, 207 New York magazine, 349, 394n49
monster, concept of, 309 New York Stock Exchange, 41
“Monster Dance,” 325, photo New York Times, The, 92, 112, 193
Montano, Linda, Mitchell’s Death, 352–53 Ng[gE wa Thiong’o, 258
Monterey Pop Festival, 230 Nielsen, Lavinia, 47, 111
Moore, Charles, 205 Nijinsky, Vaslav, Rite of Spring, 304
Morris, Robert, 143, 147, 152, 153, 185; Tape Nikolais, Alwin, 92
Music, 186 Ninety-second Street Y (New York), 80
Morris, Simone. See Forti, Simone Noguchi, Isamu, 114
Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark, 256 Nordness, Lee, 194
Moscone, George, 164, 314 Northwestern University, 18
Moses, Gilbert, 257 Novak, Jani, 118, 181, 183, 191
Moving toward Life, 217 nudity, 220, 225–26; and The Bath, 203–
Mulvey, Laura, 241, 392n112 4, 206–8; in Parades and Changes, 185,
Municipal Art Society of New York Certifi- 186, 192–96, 251; in workshops/training
cate of Merit, 249 program, 185, 251–53, 316–17
Muto, John, 296
Muzicki Biennale Zagreb, 172 Oakland Tribune, xv, 192, 282
Myers, David, 130 Oberlin College, 186
My Grandfather Dances (film), 420 O’Connell, Jack, 244
My Lunch with Anna (film), 420 O’Gallagher, Liam, 271
myth, 223–25, 234. See also Ten Myths Oh! Calcutta! (musical), 194
Ohio State University, 172
Nagrin, Daniel, 112 Ohno, Kazuo, 334–35
Nash, Jasmine, 259, 286, 292, 315–16 Oklahoma! (musical), 68
Nash, Xavier, 259, 269, 284, 286 Ome, 242–43, 412
National Endowment for the Arts, 310, O’Neal, John, 257
397n103; Expansion Arts Program of, On the Town (musical), 67
284–85 Open Center (New York), 298
National Organization for Women, 264 Open City Press, 138
Native Americans, 14, 35, 222, 223, 321, Oppenheimer, Susi, 294
384n69; Northwest Coast, 95. See also Orchesis dance group, 33, 35
specific Native tribes Orgonia, 413
Nazism, x, 23, 33, 45, 50, 170 Overhoff, Jacques, 129
Neighborhood Playhouse School (New
York), 80 Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco), 114
Nelson, Lisa, 153 Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco),
New Age movement, 298 82
New Bauhaus, 65 Palmer, Lynne, 155–56, 160–61, 173, 312
New Deal, 58 Pandor, Miriam, 80
New Hampshire Landscape, 407 Parade Magazine, 301
New School for Social Research, 152 Parades and Changes, xiv, 113, 151, 181–88,
Newsweek, 250 191–98, 201, 203, 234, 239, 251, 252, 319,
New Time Shuffle, 287, 291–92, 413 328, 346, 353–55, 384n80, 404n43, 411, 419,
Newton, Huey P., 264, 265 photos

440 INDEX
Park, Sandy, 316 Power of Ritual (film), 419
Parrish, Maxfield, 16 Pratt, Alicia, 16, 19, 20
participatory theater, 123–24, 229–30, 236, Prayer, 406
238, 257–58. See also audience role; Halprin, “Princess Printemps,” 117, 119, 418
Anna, participatory performances of; Princeton University, 24
Happenings Procession, 411, 418
Pastoral, 20, 405 Progressive Architecture, 102, 249
Pater, Walter, 241 Progressive education, 11, 24, 29, 83
Pavlova, Anna, 19 Prokofiev, Sergei, 88
Paxton, Steve, 153 Prologue, 407
Payne, John, 261 Prophetess, The, 96, 108–12, 127, 377n41, 408,
Peace Meditation, 415, 416 photo
Peace Torch, 230 Protest, 406
Pearl Harbor, bombing of, 60 psychotherapy and art, 176–77, 180, 183, 294,
Pei, I. M., 49 296–98; in Apartment 6, 188–89, 191; in
Penn, Irving, 206–8, 247, photos Ceremony of Us, 267–68, 273–74. See also
People on a Slant, 126, 127, 409, photo under Gestalt therapy
People Unaware, 82, 408 Purim, 41
Pera, Paul, 144, photo
performance art, ix, 340–44 Rabe, Folke, 184, 186, 187
Performance Group, 194 racial issues, 255–56, 258–59, 295; in prison,
Perloff, Marjorie, 239 291–92; Reach Out program and, 284–87;
Perls, Fritz, 154–55, 174–80, 191, 200, 220, Studio Watts workshop/Ceremony of Us
267, 273, 294, 300, 303–4; death of, 178, performance and, 266–87
306; encounter group sessions led by, Rainer, Yvonne, 86, 136, 140, 143–44, 146–
177–78, 298; first meeting of Anna and, 48, 150–53, 167–68, 174, 181, 186–87,
155, 175–76, 182, 183, 249; guided recall photo; The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I (Trio
sessions with, 178–79; “hot seat” method A), 151; Ordinary Dance, 166–67; Tape
of, 185, 189, 201; as performance consult- Music, 186
ant, 189; polarities concept of, 308; theater Rambert, Miriam, 47
background of, 177. See also Gestalt Rappaport, Roy A., 158
therapy Rauschenberg, Robert, 168–69, 190; Bed, 169
Peterson, Kathy, 192 Raymer, Miriam. See Bennett, Miriam Raymer
Peterson, Nancy, 192, 203 Raymer, Robert, 15, 20
Peters Wright School of Dancing, 85 Reach Out program, 284–85, 295, 298, 304,
Petroviana, Tatiana, 18 318
Phelan, Peggy, 202, 331, 333 Read, Herbert, 86
Pierce, Robert, 297 reader-response theory, 200
Pink Grapefruit, Le (film), 310 “ready-mades,” 201
Planetary Dance, 309, 320–22, 416, photo Reagan, Ronald, 285
Plath, Sylvia, 331 Red Hill Nursery (San Anselmo), 103–4
Playhouse Theater (San Francisco), 130, 155, Redwood Retirement Community Center
163, 188 (Mill Valley), 355–56
Polaroid Land Camera, 116, 117 Reed, Larry, 259, 267, 268, 272, 273, photo
Polish Laboratory Theater, 234 Rehg, Jeff, 345
Pollock, Jackson, 74 Rehm, Rush, 238
Pomo Indians, 319 Reinhardt, Max, 177
Positive Motion dance group, 326–28; film Reinhart, Charles and Stephanie, 347
of, 419 Rembrandt van Rijn, 335
Poulenc, Francis, 20 Returning Home (film), ix, 350–51, 420

INDEX 441
 Return to the Mountain, 320, 415 San Francisco Ballet, 26, 165; school of, 94
Revolution (film), 244 San Francisco Call Bulletin, 71
Rexroth, Kenneth, 165, 233 San Francisco Chronicle, xv, 71, 84, 161–63,
Richter, Hans, 49 165, 188, 190, 225
Right On! (film), 270, 275–76, 280, 419 San Francisco Conservatory, 173
Riley, Terry, 139, 141–43, 145–46, 379n87, San Francisco Dance League, 69
380n100 San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, xi, xiv,
Rinne, John, 175, 296 173, 182, 190, 199, 228, 246, 247, 256, 259,
Ririe, Shirley, 144, photo 260, 296, 373n79; in audience participation
Rites of Women, 119, 139, 142, 410 events, 208–15, 224; European tour of,
ritual, 158–59, 161–64, 222–23, 296, 302, 315, 184–88, 191, 234; film of, 244; formation
322; Artaud and, 233; in Circle the Earth, of, xi, 377n31; multiracial training program
320–22, 329; in Lunch, 263; myth and, of, 286–88 (see also Reach Out program);
223–25 nonprofit research and educational arm
Ritual and Celebration, 414 of, 315–16; Penn’s photographs of, 206–8,
Ritual of Life/Death, A (film), 419 photos; rebuilding with younger dancers of,
Roach, Joseph R., 244, 257, 396n94 192; rock concert performances of, 195–96;
Rockwell, John, 208–9, 219, 220, 282–84, at Soledad Prison, 291; Studio Watts
388n37, 389n54, photo collaboration with, 265–84, 290, 394n54;
Rodin, Auguste, 343, 356 summer workshops of, 180–81, 285. See
Rolf, Ida, 296 also specific dancers and specific works
Romanticism, 50 San Francisco Examiner, 71, 156, 173, 201, 225
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 58, 311 San Francisco Foundation, 286–87
Rosenberg, Harold, 75 San Francisco Mime Troupe, Il Candelaio, 265
Rosenthal, Rachel, 333 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, xv, 313
Ross, Charles, 168, 183, 186, 188, 190 San Francisco Opera, 172, 175
Roth, William, 168 San Francisco Police Department Tactical
Rothko, Mark, 74 Squad, 288
Rothschild, Baroness Bethesbee de, 107, 108, San Francisco State University, 87, 192, 338
110, 111 San Francisco Tape Music Center, 173, 174,
RoundHouse, 310 184, 261, 312
Royal Theater (Berlin), 177 San Quentin Prison, 157
“RSVP” feedback loop, 253–54, 333 Santayana, George, 72
Rubin, Jerry, 229, 262–63 Sappington, Margo, 194
Rudolph, Paul, 49 Sarah Lawrence College, 181
Rudolph Schafer School (San Francisco), 81 Savio, Mario, 228
Ruhe, Herbert G., 197 Schechner, Richard, ix–xii, 23, 164, 189, 194,
Run to the Mountain, 320, 415 215–16, 224–25, 235, 257, 318, 321–22, 329,
Rutherford, Norman, 327 334, 382n22
Ryan, Paul, 287 Schiff, Charlie (uncle), 7
Ryman (critic), 187 Schiff, Hannah (grandmother), 6–7
Schiff, Jack (uncle), 7, 9, 35, 77
Sacramento Bee, 261 Schiff, Samuel (grandfather), 6–7
Sagan, Eugene, 180–81, 191, 399n10 Schlemmer, Oskar, 59; Pole Dance, 379n83;
Sagan, Juanita, 191, 399n10 The Triadic Ballet, 61
Saga of Youth, 21, 405 Schlicter Joseph, 192
St. Denis, Ruth, xiv, 16, 158, 167 Schneemann, Carolee, 201, 343
Saint Phalle, Niki de, 354 Schuman, Abe (uncle), 9
San Francisco Actors Workshop, 157, 165, 169 Schuman, Albert (brother), 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 17
San Francisco Art Institute, 214 Schuman, Ann. See Halprin, Anna (Ann)

442 INDEX
Schuman, Bertha (grandmother), 2, 3 Snyder, Gary, 229
Schuman, Herman (uncle), 3, 4, 8–9 Society for the Advancement of Judaism, 32
Schuman, Ida Schiff (mother), 6–10, 16–22, Society of Independent Artists, 219
24, 27–28, 35, 43, 96, 276, 306, 331, 336, Sokolow, Anna, 112; Rooms, 112
photo Soledad State Prison, 290–91
Schuman, Isadore (father), 2, 4–10, 16, 17, Solitude—Quest, 408
20, 24, 43, 44, 96, 192, 331, photo Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 336
Schuman, Nathan (grandfather), 2–5 Something Horizons, 407
Schuman, Ruth (sister), 7 Song of Youth or Refugees, 34, 405
Schuman, Sam (uncle), 3, 9 Sonnabend, Casey, 210, 212, 270, 396n87
Schuman, Stanton (brother), 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 17 Sontag, Susan, 163, 177, 300; Illness as
Schwabacher, James, 172 Metaphor, 305
Schwartz, Hermine, 19 Soto, G. Hoffman, 315–16
Schwartz, Josephine, 18 South End Settlement House (Boston),
Seale, Bobby, 264–65 54–55, 57, 63
Sea Ranch (Mendocino), 163, 205, 307, 311, Spark (television program), 354
340, 387n16 spectatorship, 163–64, 182, 239–42, 318,
Sea Ranch Collective, 404n43 328; of body parts, 317; in Bust, 287–88;
“Search for Living Myths and Rituals with Candid Camera, 230–32, 289–90;
through Dance and the Environment” Goffman’s ideas and, 232–33, 241–42;
workshops, 318 Grotowski on, 234–36; Happenings and,
Seasons, Part I: Summer, 418 236–38; voyeurism and, 202, 226, 232.
self-portraits, 295, 303–4; aging and, 335–36; See also audience role
and Anna Halprin’s cancer, 304–9, photo Spencer, Bill, 142
Selz, Peter, 196 spontaneity, 124, 126, 132, 183, 215–16. See also
Sender, Ramon, 173, 312 improvisation
Seniors Rocking, 354–56, 418, 420, photo Stanford University, xiii, 15, 73
sexuality vs. sensuality, 218, 229, 275–77. Stanislavsky, Constantin, 180
See also nudity Starr, Kevin, 73, 115
Shalom, 406 Steig, William, 62, 95, 111, 112; The Lonely
Shank, Theodore, 254 Ones, 62–64
Shawn, Ted, 16, 158, 377n53 Steig People, 117, 409. See also Lonely Ones
Shearer, Sybil, 192 Stella, 406
Shelton, Suzanne, 16 Stephansky, Ben, 34, 38
Shepard, Martin, 177 Steps dance workshops, xv
Shildrick, Margaret, 309–10 Steps Theater group, 324
Shiraga, Kazuo, Challenging Mud, 343 Stevens, Roger, 397n103
Short Story, 408 Still, Clyfford, 74
Siegel, Marcia, 195, 297–98 Still Dance with Anna Halprin (Stubblefield
Sierra Club, 73 with Anna Halprin), 332, 336, 340–44,
Simchat Torah, 1–2 350, 352, 417, photo
Singer, Norman, 193 Still Point, 139, 143, 410
Sing Out, Sweet Land! (musical), 10, 67, 68 Stinson, Allan, 326
Sitney, P. Adams, 114 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 141
Six Gallery (San Francisco), 123, 124 Stockholm Contemporary Music Festival,
Sketches, 406 182, 184–88, 192, 195, 198
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 129 Stojanovic, Josip, 172
Smith, Nancy Stark, 153 Straight Theater (San Francisco), 195–96
Smithsonian Institution Industrial Design Strasberg, Lee, school of, 247
Award of Excellence, 249 Strauss, Lisa, 144, 147, photo

INDEX 443
 Stubblefield, Eeo, Still Dance with Anna Tunnard, Christopher, 45–46, 50–51; Gardens
Halprin, 332, 336, 340–44, 350, 352, 417 in the Modern Landscape, 50
Studio Watts School of the Arts (Los Ange- Turner, Victor, 159, 215, 224
les), 259, 265–84, 290, 304, 394n54 Tynan, Kenneth, 194
Subotnick, Morton, 156, 165, 173, 183, 184
Sullivan, Louis, 76 United Farm Workers, 264
“Summer of Love,” 220 University of British Columbia, 150
Sunset magazine, 77–78, 96–97, 103 University of California: at Berkeley, xiv, 72,
Supreme Court, U.S., 372n42 85, 94, 141, 174, 196, 208, 228, 239, 264,
277, 311; at Los Angeles (UCLA), 96, 141–
Taliesin Fellowship, 45 43, 379n87
Tamalpa Institute, 315–16, 319, 320, 401n48 University of Chicago, 24, 180
Tamalpais, Mount, healing dances for, 318–22 University of Illinois, 23
Tamiris, Helen, 92 University of Michigan, 15
Tanaka, Min, 345 University of Oregon, 242
task performance, 117, 132, 148, 153, 158, 169, University of the Pacific, 284
174–75, 219–20; in The Bath, 203, 204; University of Southern California, 350
in Duet, 133–34; in Parades and Changes, University of Wisconsin, x, 24, 27–38, 42–
185; Rainer and, 150, 151, 166, 174; in 48, 53, 86, 98, 111, 228, 242, 367n31
workshops, 148, 150
Teatro Eliseo (Rome), 171–72 Van Dyke, Dick, 94
Teatro la Fenice (Venice), 165, 168–71, van Tuyl, Marian, 26, 147
382n37 Venice International Festival of Contempo-
Temple Sinai (Oakland), 292–94 rary Music, 164–65, 168–71
Ten Myths, 199, 208–30, 232–35, 238–42, 249, Vertinsky, Patricia, 335, 336
254–56, 266, 267, 412, photo Vietnam War, protests against, 71, 228–30,
Terry, Walter, 193 262–64
Thanksgiving, 320, 415 Visage, 169, 171, 172, 173, 411
Theater Artaud (San Francisco), 327, 338 Visions, 139, 143, 410
Theater of the Absurd, 157, 237 visualizations, 303–4, 323. See also self-
Theater of the Oppressed, 258 portraits
therapy. See Gestalt therapy; Jungian analysis; VJ Day, in San Francisco, 70–72
psychotherapy and art Voting Rights Act (1965), 259
Thorndike, Edward L., 11
Three Pages from a Diary, 35, 406 Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, Connecti-
Time magazine, 227 cut), 202–4
Tinguely, Jean, 354 Wakoski, Diane, 145, 166–67
Tircuit, Heuwell, 225–27 Walker, Alice, Meridian, 248
Tobias, Tobi, 349–50 Walker, Barbara, 346–47, 351
Tomko, Linda, 363n4 Walking with the Dead, 417
Torgovnick, Marianna, 302 Ward, Willis, 144, photo
Trance Dance, 411, photo War Hysteria, 406
Traveling Jewish Theater, A, 336 Waring, James ( Jim), 86, 91–93, 95, 122, 167,
Trilling, Blanche, 28, 36 168, 376n24
Trunk Dance, The, 119, 134–36, 410, photo Washburne, Carlton, 11–14, 17, 18, 29
Tuchman, Phyllis, 311 Washington, Sir Lawrence, 295, 305, photo
Tudor, Antony, 194 Washington Post, 301
Tudor, David, 141 Watson, Steven, 122
Tulane Drama Review, 234 Watts riots, 258–59, 264, 274, 277
Tulane University, 257 Wavy Gravy, 265

444 INDEX
Weber, Avril, 127, photo workshops: with AIDS group, 324–28; with
Wedding Dance, 406 cancer group, 322–34; with Marin commu-
Weidman, Charles, 16, 19, 20, 25, 66–67, 112, nity, 318–19; with seniors, 354; summer,
282; Lynchtown, 43 127–28, 143–53, 180–81, 185, 204–5, 219–
Weinberger, Eric, 257 20, 248–54, 269, 273, photo; in training
Weiss, Peter (dancer), 192, 228 program, 315–18
Weiss, Peter (playwright), Marat /Sade, 186 Works Progress Administration ( WPA), 58
West, Mae, 339–40 World War I, 238
West, Melinda, 168, 270, 275 World War II, x, 50–51, 60, 66–68, 70–73,
West /East Stereo, 296, 297, 413 122, 212, 234, 265
Whitman, Walt, x Wright, Frank Lloyd, 44–45, 68, 76
Whitney Museum of American Art (New Wright, Olgivanna Lloyd, 45
York), 122 Wright, Richard, 274
“Who Says You Have to Dance in the Theater?” Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons, 101
(film), 420 Wurster, William, 75–76, 96
Wigman, Mary, 59, 167
Wilson, Andy Abrahams, 350 Yadin, Yigal, 40
Wilson, Lanford, “The Gingham Dog,” 248 Yale University, 24, 230
Winnetka Plan, 10–14 Yates, Peter, 138
Winsor School (Cambridge), 53–54, 57–59 Yellow Cab, 173–74, 411
Winter, Ethel, 80 Yerba Buena Theater (San Francisco), 347
Wise, Nina, 336 Young, La Monte, 139–46, 167, 379n87,
Wolf, Naomi, 335; The Beauty Myth, 333 380nn100,105; Composition 1960 #2, 144;
Wolfe, Tom, 394n49 Composition 1960 #5, 144; Trio for Strings,
women: aging of, 333, 335–36; birthing dance 141, 146, 379n81
by, 278; crone image and, 346–47; house- Young, Lester, 131
wife image of, 119–22; spaces created by, Yuriko, 80
311
women’s movement, 264 Zabriskie Point (film), 245–48, 396n76
Women with Wings group, 327 Zemiach, Benjamin, 92
Woods, James, 259–61, 263, 266–67, 269, Zen, 175
270, 274, 277, 278, 280 Zinsser, William K., 207
Woodward, Kathleen, 351 Zionism, 32, 38–42, 47

INDEX 445
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