Marin Women's Hall of Fame

Anna Halprin

 By Rita Gardner  
In conjunction with the Writer's Center of Marin

     On a hillside filled with redwood trees, a young woman carrying a drawing pad picks her way carefully down a series of steps carved into the steep slope.  These lead to a small wooden building perched on the edge of the hill.  A path behind the structure brings the visitor to an outdoor dance platform nestled among the trees.   Gnarled branches make a shady canopy over the worn wooden planks.  Near enough to touch, a squirrel chatters at the newcomer and scrambles away. Next to the deck a narrow walkway leads to the open doorway of the building.  Tall windows on three sides fill a large room with sunlight, revealing a dance floor glowing a warm honey color.   A lone dancer stands near an open window. The youthful figure glides smoothly across the floor, wearing  loose cotton pants and a cropped t-shirt.  The room fills with the sound of drumbeats and flute.  The dancer stretches, moving her body to the music.  A study in poise and concentration, she suddenly thrusts her arms outward like a flying bird as the rhythm intensifies and then slows.  The visitor pauses, not wanting to disturb.  The dancer turns to the door, and breaks out into a wide smile.  “Welcome”, she says. Now the visitor can see a freckled face, twinkling eyes, and yes, some wrinkles. It’s Anna Halprin, eighty years young.  Today she’s welcoming the first of a group of students for a weekend dance and art workshop at her Mountain Home Studio.

      Anna Halprin is one of the 20^th century’s foremost figures in dance and choreography. After over fifty years inspiring other dancers, artists and just plain folks all over the world, she could be sitting quietly at home now, knitting or taking it easy like many older people.  Instead, she continues to learn more about dance, to explore new ideas, and – best of all - to share what she’s learned with students young and old.  Her simple, yet comfortable Marin studio has inspired artists of all kinds and of all ages.  Renowned dancers and choreographers like Merce Cunningham have leapt across these smooth planks.  John Cage and other composers explored new pieces of music here among the whispering trees. Painters, writers and poets – famous or unknown, have sculpted, painted or been moved to write new works at this quiet and magical place.

 “At the age of five, I danced for the fun of it”.

    Anna Halprin never planned to live on a woodsy slope in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais.  She was born and raised far from California in the Midwest, near Chicago.  As a small child, her favorite times were the days she spent with her grandfather. Their Saturday ritual was always the same.  They met first at the Jewish temple where he worshipped, and she’d spend the rest of the day with him.  At the temple, little Anna would run happily upstairs to the balcony, where the women and girls were allowed to sit.  She’d peer over the railing until she could spot his beard and white hair among the other men down in the main hall  “My very first dance experience was when I was four, seeing my grandfather pray at temple”, she recalled.  “Because he was a Hassidic Jew, he would pray by singing, jumping up and down, and flinging his arms in the air.  I thought this was absolutely beautiful. I adored my grandfather.  He had this long white beard that moved when he whirled around.  I thought he was God – and that meant God was a dancer.”  After the service Anna would meet him downstairs and they would walk together to his home.  “I would skip and dance along the way, just like he did when he prayed.  I figured that was just the most special thing to do in life.”  And follow that special path she did.

 “When I was a young girl, I danced to rebel!”

    Like many children, Anna Halprin was first steered into ballet lessons.  She hated them, felt awkward, and just didn’t fit in.  The other students didn’t help matters.  “Everybody laughed at me” she remembered. “My mother, thank goodness, finally took me out of ballet classes and introduced me to modern dance.”  This was the beginning of Anna’s lifelong exploration in dance.  It was so important to her, that in high school, Halprin even spent lunchtimes tap dancing with the gym teacher.  Later she continued her studies with the new masters of modern dance – a group that consisted of people like Martha Graham and other students of Isadora Duncan.  These dancers had worldwide influence, and their works are still studied and danced today.  Soon, however, Anna began to rebel against their style, and started to create her own way of dancing.  She was influenced greatly by science courses she had to take in college.  She explained:  “In 1940, the University of Wisconsin was the first college in the world to offer a dance major.  So, in order to prove we were not just frivolous – waving scarves around and such – they approached dance from a scientific point of view.”  As part of the curriculum, Halprin studied physics, biology, human anatomy, and even human dissection.  While these classes were hard, they provided her with a new way of looking at how bodies work and how people move.

     During college, and afterwards, Anna also taught dance to children, and what she learned from their innocent joy and creativity found its way into her movement work later in life.  Starting in 1947, Anna taught dance for children in Marin County for twenty-five years.  In 2000, there are still countless people who can trace their creative paths to classes held four decades ago.  One woman, 54, recounted in 2000 how she still remembers her first dance classes with Halprin at age 6.  Even today, Anna Halprin continues to share her love of dance with young people.  “Children are such naturals –all they have to do is move” she says. “They don’t have to learn anybody else’s style.  Dancing can such a beautiful expression of their feelings, even if they’re sad, or angry, or frustrated.   I remember when I was young – I was insecure and felt I was misunderstood.  Dance was my salvation.”

     When she was still quite young, Anna married landscape architect and planner Lawrence Halprin.  When he went off to the Pacific in World War II, Anna continued to explore dance. She went to New York and soon was performing on concert stages.  With a lead role in a Broadway production and a promising new career as a comedian, Anna was on an exciting new path.  But her theatrical plans were not to be.  After the war, Lawrence Halprin’s work sent him to the West Coast.  In those days, wives dutifully followed their husbands, so Anna joined him in San Francisco.  She was 25.  After the excitement and richness of her new creative life in New York, she remembers feeling absolutely devastated by the move.  She was disoriented by the isolation – the Bay Area was so far away from the world she’d known.  She said it felt as though “there was nothing here – that it was the end for me.”  Even so, she vigorously pursued dance, working solo and with a group in a San Francisco.

     Before too long the family moved to a new home in Marin County, on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais.  The house, designed by her husband, had sliding glass walls that opened wide to terraces and the sloping hill beyond, and far views of the San Francisco Bay to the east.  The design created a sense of being in the outdoors, even when inside.  The Halprin's had two daughters, Daria and Rana.  Wanting to stay close to her young children, Anna spent less time at her San Francisco dance studio.  Lawrence Halprin built a separate outdoor dance deck for her further down the hill on their wooded property, and later an indoor dance studio.  As Anna spent more and more days on her dance deck, a deep healing began to take place. The redwood trees, the birds and their songs, and the rustling of deer had a profound effect on the disheartened dancer.  “Being such a part of the natural world changed my life”, she said. “It changed how I perceived dance, and how I viewed myself. What I thought was the end instead turned out to be a beginning”.  She began improvisational workshops, working with some of her former San Francisco students. 

     In an interview with Yvonne Rainer in the book “Moving Toward Life”,  Halprin reveals the monumental shift that began to take place with her work.  “Because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or what I wanted to teach, we set up a workshop situation in which I gave myself permission to explore.  For a long time, to rely solely on improvisation.  I was trying to get at subconscious areas, so things would happen in an unpredictable way.”  Halprin later incorporated voice as an integral part of movement.  “Free-association became important part of the work.  We began to deal with ourselves as people, not dancers, and incorporated actions that had never been used in dance before,”  “Who said we couldn’t speak, sing, build environments?  You didn’t have to go around with bare feet, you could wear shoes, dresses, or no clothes at all and go naked.”  Anna gave experimental workshops with other dancers, and invited artists of all kinds to join.  The result was the Dancers’ Workshop Group, which created new and unusual theater pieces using music, poetry, visual art, theater and dance. 

     In 1955 Anna formed the San Francisco Dancers Workshop to further explore this idea of “total theatre”.  Because of her daring and experimentation, Anna Halprin received her share of notoriety, especially in the 1960s.  A new work, “Parades and Changes” which included nudity, was presented in New York. It shocked some people and created an uproar among critics. For the next ten years, the troupe performed new and controversial theatrical pieces in the U.S. and abroad.  In these unusual and avant-garde works, audiences were often invited to participate.  “I remember once my company gave a performance in Rome.  Afterwards, a member of the audience was so outraged, he came storming down the aisle, and stood in front of the stage and yelled: ‘For this, Columbus had to discover America??”  Sometimes the international press was kinder to her innovations than her San Francisco critics.  She recounted a dance in Sweden that also had some nudity on stage.  She said: “In the Swedish press the dance was referred to most reverently, as ‘a ceremony of trust’.  When we came back to San Francisco, however, the headline in the Dateline section of the Chronicle read “The No-Pants Dancers Return”.

 “When I was half a hundred, I danced for peace and justice.”

    Halprin described that period in her life as difficult and full of surprises.  Anna’s unconventional ways brought fame, but also criticism, and the criticism was painful to bear.  She continue to follow her own artistic path with a deep passion.  That path took a turn outward, to include others, especially minorities.  She began a yearlong workshop for all-black artists in Watts, a Los Angeles ghetto.  At the same time, she trained an all-white group in San Francisco.  At the end of the year, she brought the groups together to develop a dance based on the experience of working together. As the two races met the first time, the air was charged with excitement and danger, with distrust and fear.  Anna stated: “The two groups essentially spent 24 hours a day together for 10 days.  We developed a dance based on our encounter, our prejudice.” As the days progressed the two groups began to relate to each other in entirely new ways, and to trust each other just as dancers, not as enemies. By the end of the ten days, they were a close group, no longer separate.  The joint performance, “Ceremony of Us” premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1969, even as the country was still reeling from race riots in Detroit and Watts. At the end of the performance the dancers gathered the audience together, and everyone began dancing with each other.  It was a miraculous healing moment – whites and blacks together, friends and strangers coming together in expressions of forgiveness.  After this experience, Anna turned the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop into a multi-racial performing company. She established a new program called Reach Out,  providing training to minorities.

     By the early ‘70s, Anna was exploring the use of imagery as a means to understand how the mind works in relation to the body.  She said, “I found it wasn’t enough to create images in the mind’s eye.  I wanted people to draw their own images, reflect  upon them, and begin to learn physically the language of these images.”  She developed that process as a way to “dance” the images that welled up from the unconscious.  “It became clear I was receiving messages from an intelligence within the body, an intelligence deeper and more unpredictable than anything I could understand through rational thought.”  Anna was soon to find out this inner wisdom was about to bring her face-to-face with her biggest battle yet.  One day in 1972, while participating in the Psychokinetic Visualization Process, Anna found her self drawing a round ball in her pelvic area.  The image showed her unable to dance.  She didn’t understand why her drawing had turned out that way, and decided it meant nothing.  However, that night, she began to think her drawing had something to tell her – something she wasn’t listening to.  The next day, she made an appointment with her doctor.  “I asked him to examine me precisely where I had drawn this round ball.  He diagnosed cancer.”

     After very difficult surgery for colon cancer, Anna started the slow process of getting well.  It was not easy, and it took her a long year to learn how to walk again.  “I was 55, and I thought my ability to dance was lost forever.” She worked with her doctors, even as she coped with feelings of discouragement, frustration, and futility. It was a time that tested her belief in the healing powers of movement, but she didn’t give up.  She began intensive research to understand how it was possible to receive body information through a drawing.  While she never found an answer, she became clear that what worked was the process.  “When people danced their images and moved back and forth between dancing and drawing, the messages would be made clear through the movement and drawings.”  She began further exploration into myths and the universal connection of different symbols.  Her recovery also brought an unexpected gift.  “The process of rehabilitating myself gave me a new vision of what could be. I learned how to help others.  It was one of my great lessons”. She wrote: “After my own illness, my concerns became more about life and death and healing ourselves, not only physically but also in our aloneness and our separateness and our relationship to larger issues that affect the earth and our survival.”  She developed a process called the Five Stages of Healing, which she began to use with people battling AIDS, terminally-ill patients and the elderly.  In 1978, Anna and her daughter Daria founded Tamalpa Institute as an expressive arts center.  Daria now heads the Institute, and has continued to develop and expand the Five Stages of Healing. It remains one of the key elements of Tamalpa work, along with other popular courses and workshops.

     For many years now, Anna Halprin has led “Circle the Earth”, a dance ritual that has not only become a part of Marin history, but also has been adapted by other cultures and countries and performed around the world.  This dance had its beginnings in the early 1980s, during a time when the entire San Francisco Bay Area was gripped in fear.  In Marin County a killer was stalking and killing women on the trails of Mount Tamalpais.  “It was a terrifying time,” Halprin recalled.  “the police hadn’t been able to catch the killer, and the mountain was closed to everyone.”  During that time period, Anna and her husband planned a series of ten community workshops.  These were to focus on environmental and other problems.  But in the workshops, which used dance and drawing, participants kept drawing one common image over and over again.  It was always of Mount Tamalpais.  It turned out that what people really needed to express was their fear and anger about the Trailside Killer, and how helpless they felt as a community.  With the whole mountain off limits for over a year, and the killer still at large, people felt cut off from a very important part of their lives and their landscape.

     “In response to this outrage, Anna recounts, “we designed a performance called “In and On the Mountain” – just as a way to reclaim the mountain, to heal ourselves.  After ten workshops over a nine-month period, we developed a common language of movement, a common concern for the environment.”  Finally the day came to do a dance performance.  It was held in two parts.  In the theatre at the College of Marin, the dance group enacted the killings.  “It was such a personal and real event for the whole community”, said Anna Halprin. “Even the parents of the women who had died were there.  Someone even called the police because the imaged the killer was present – but that wasn’t true.”

    The following day eighty people were taken by bus up to the top of Mount Tamalpais for the second part of the performance, “On the Mountain”.  Performers and witnesses brought offerings and prayed for the mountain and for healing.  “We planted trees, read poetry, and sang songs” recalled Halprin.  “After the ceremony, and for the first time in two years, all eighty people hiked down the trails.  We reclaimed the mountain.  A week later the killer was found and caught.  It was such a remarkable coincidence.”

     What followed was also remarkable.  A Huichol shaman, a Mexican traditional healer, heard about the mountain and its story and came to Anna.  He told her that she must continue to perform this dance ritual for five more years, that the mountain was not yet healed from the trauma of the killings.  She continued the annual event. and would have stopped doing it except it had taken on a life of its own.  The idea of this healing dance was taken to other parts of the world – to Germany, Sweden, Australia and other countries.  It became known as the Planetary Dance, and is now performed in 36 countries that confront their own real-life difficulties.  “More and more people continue to perform this ritual. Families bring their children.  We’ve been doing it for over nineteen years now” Halprin said.  In Berlin, the Planetary Dance: A Prayer for Peace” was performed at an event commemorating the treaty which ended World War Two.  Over four hundred people attended, including the Dalai Lama and Henry Kissinger.  In 1995, Anna Halprin was invited by Mikhail Gorbachev to present an invocation at the State of the World Forum.

     Anna and Lawrence Halprin have now been married sixty years.  His landscape projects are internationally famous, and he continues to design new works. In 1997 he designed the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C.  In 2000 he designed the campus for what will be the new Lucas Arts complex at the former Presidio Army base in Golden Gate Park.  Their daughter Daria directs the Tamalpa Institute.  Anna Halprin has written many articles and several books, including the 1997“Moving Toward Life” (edited by Rachel Kaplan), and “Dancing as a Healing Art: Returning to Health with Movement and Imagery.” (2000).

     1998, Anna Halprin was honored as a “Woman of the Year” by the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame.  After being introduced to the audience, she glided onto the stage in a flowing kimono-style outfit, curly brown hair bouncing softly as she walked.  After the introduction, she moved the podium aside, stating “It is much easier for me to express myself from my heart when I dance, rather than in words.”  Her slender figure began dancing – first showing a child’s awkward yet joyful gestures, then progressing through movements describing different eras of life.  As she danced, she interjected simple statements with each group of movements:

“At the age of five, I danced for the fun of it.

When I was a young girl, I danced to rebel!

When I was half a hundred, I danced for peace and justice.

When I was seventy-two, I danced to understand the ants, the insects, the birds, fish, the mountains, deer, the rolling hills, and the ocean.

And when I will be eighty, I will seek to be a healer.

And when I become ninety, I will dance the essence of things…

And when I’m a hundred, I will sing and dance REALLY hard!”

     If Anna Halprin is now an elder, it’s clear her work is by no means done.  Most importantly, Anna continues to dance and choreograph memorable pieces of art.  In the summer of 2000, Anna performed her “80^th Year Retrospective” at the Cowell Theatre in San Francisco.  The program included excerpts from older pieces  along with recent works.  A solo performance by Anna offered vignettes of narrated recollection and reflection.  Titled “Memories from My Closet: Four Dance Stories,” it evoked her dance ambitions from age 5 to age 110.  The final piece, titled “Intensive Care, Reflections on Death and Dying” illustrated her 25 years of work with healing.  As noted by a New York Times article, “what made these retrospective pieces so moving was (Anna’s) ability, enriched by a lifetime of desire and human drama, to refocus her experience back into art.  And the power of choreography was conveyed by the remarkable agility and expressively of her movements.”  The article concluded by stating that Anna Halprin is still “very much of the present – so much so that her aspiration to be dancing at 110 seems hardly far-fetched at all.”

     As an elder now, Anna continues to honor her true path in life.  And in doing so, she touches those who meet her with her sense of wonder, playfulness and love.  May we all learn the gifts that Anna Halprin continues to share with all, young and old.

     It’s a blustery winter afternoon, and the rain beats against the wall of windows at Mountain Home Studio.  Inside, a group of students have just finished a vigorous session where they danced wildly to the recorded sounds of drums, didgeridoo, guitar and flute. They now spread sheets of drawing paper on the polished wooden floor, and help themselves to colorful handfuls of pastel crayons.  “Draw what you just experienced; draw what you feel” says the instructor. A young woman picks  up a green stick of pastel and without thinking, starts filling the paper with furious strokes.  Now blue, yellow and orange and yes! – red -  fill up the paper with movement and color. Quickly, a  rough sketch of a figure emerges drawn in wiggles and squiggles.  The student, still pulsing from the energy of dancing, applies even more colors to the page.  Suddenly a self portrait completes itself as if by magic – surprising the student, but not the teacher.

###