Anna Halprin's Urban Rituals Author(s): Janice Ross Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 49-67 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488551 Accessed: 03/11/2010 10:47Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

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Anna

Halprin's

Urban

Rituals

Janice Ross

Introduction The applicationof contextualeducationaland philosophicalhistory is essentialto the writing of anypostmoderndancehistory,particularly the 2oth in century when ritual was embracedas a performancemethodology and aesthetic.Jane Desmond has noted, "Althoughdance scholarship expanded has in dramatically the lastfifteenyearsor so, it remainsfarbehindrelatedfieldsof artscriticismboth in the amountof work and in the level of analysis" ([1982]2001:256).

of differentdancepedagogicsystemsin the formationof a choreographer's vision. Too often it is the content of dance training,the style or genre of dance being learned,ratherthan the pedagogythroughwhich each disciplineis inthat transmitted, dancescholarshavestudied.'In the caseof Anna stitutionally Halprin'suse of ritual,her educationalexperiencesareparticularly important becauseshe enactedher innovationsfirstas a teacherand then as a choreographer.Moreover,it was her earlydance educationin college that revealedto her how the most prosaic actions could become springboards choreofor and discovery, personaldisclosure. graphicinvention,theatrical This essayexploresthe originsand contoursof Halprin'sinventionof what I am calling "urbanritual"and the mechanismsfor conveying meaning that this contributedto contemporary danceaesthetics.Halprin"urbanized" ritual in partby rewritingthe role of the spectator,makingher a witness: individan ual who is presentat the performanceto supportit with her attentionrather thanlook to it for diversionor entertainment. Halprin'sambitionis to change individuals althoughas she told RichardSchechpresentat the performance, ner when pressed,this is an experiment that has spannedher entire career Stool (Schechner1989).It is an experimentthatbeganwith TheFour-Legged in Critical to this discussionis the argumentthat the considerationof a I96I. educationalandphilosophicalhistoryis essentialto the writchoreographer's to ing of any postmoderndance historyand particularly the considerationof ritualas a performance and strategyin the 20othcentury. methodology As Halprinforged her genre of urbanritualin the early I96os, she incorin poratedthe real-life dynamicsof tasksand relationships her performance The structure the artist's of educational repertoire. experiencehasspecialreleTheDrama Review48, 2 (T182),Summer 2004.? 2004 New YorkUniversity theMassachusetts and Institute Technology of

I want to add to Desmond's lament the serious neglect of the role

49

50 Janice Ross

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vance when discussing the choice to invoke ritual, because educational systems are themselves a type of cultural performance, and, like ritual, influential models for how we structure our lives. My contention is that the first full-length dance work in which Halprin realized the urban ritual genre she pioneered was the dance theatre piece The Stool (1962). An absurdistdance portrait of the emptiness and isolaFive-Legged tion of postwar domestic life, this dance disappearedsoon afterits San Francisco premiere in April 1962 and subsequent tour to Rome, Zagreb, and.Helsinki in September 1962. The Five-LeggedStool was choreographed and performed by Halprin and three of her dancers:John Graham, A.A. Leath, and Lynn Palmer.

Anna Halprin 51It featured a commissioned score by Morton Subotnik and the close collaboration of painter Jo Landor and lighting designer Patric Hickey. Nearly 40 years later, on the cusp of her eighth decade, Halprin turned toan acutely intimate use of ritual in Still Dance (1997-200oo), a series of 20

works that she was led through as private collaborative site-specific outdoor events with her former student, Eeo Stubblefield, who had developed this form of audienceless performance tableaux in the early I980s. The fourdecade arc between the broadly public dimensions of Halprin's inaugural invention of urban ritual and the intensely private concluding style of Still Dancesdescribes Halprin's own evolution from domestic to environmental ritualism at the same time as it reveals her astute eclecticism. Halprin is usually presented as one of the generative figures in postmodern dance. She is often cited as a teacher who used improvisation, tasks, and slow or repeated gestures to create dance theatre works that were deliberate confusions of life and art. In the late 195os and early i96os she led a series of innovative outdoor dance workshops that influenced postmodern choreographers and artists including Simone Forti, TrishaBrown, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, La Monte Young, and Robert Morris, all of whom attended Halprin's workshops. Halprin was raised in a suburb of Chicago where she studied the Doris Humphrey style of modern dance. She was educated in the model progressive education program of the Winnetka public schools and attended college at the University of Wisconsin where she studied dance with the pioneering dance educator, Margaret H'Doubler, a John Dewey enthusiast. Halprin moved toSan Francisco with her husband, Lawrence Halprin, in 1945. In 1955, after

seven years of sharing a San Francisco dance studio with Welland Lathrop, a Graham-trained dancer, she struck out on her own. She began teaching on a dramatic outdoor deck, designed as an open air dance studio, that was perched below her home in a grove of redwood trees on the side of Mt. Tamalpais. Her early works primarily had been personal solos that explored formal identities, as when she delved into her Jewish heritage by seeking identification with famous biblical heroines (Halprin 1994).

Then, in the late 195os, after a couple of years of working experimentally on the dance deck, Halprin began to assemble her first theatre works. In these pieces, she culled from her years of improvisation to create sparse studies of the human body interacting with urban environments and crackling with domestic tensions. "Movement Ritual" was what she called the set of daily exercises she used to prepare the body to move to these emotional rhythms. These were a sequence of individual warm-up exercises that began with a focus on the simple act of breathing and progressed through four ritual sets of actions from lying down to leaping through space. This sequence was designed to awaken what Halprin called "body consciousness." It also had the effect of loosening the mind's anticipatory schemata so that the body could relax into a state ofnaturally responsive actions (Halprin 1979).

The Five-Legged StoolThe Five-LeggedStool was created in early 1962, the year following the controversial premiere of its poorly received predecessor, The Four-LeggedStool (I961). The Five-LeggedStool signaled a radical break in the customary use of ritual in modern dance up until this point. Here Halprin sought to initiate an experience of perceptual awakening for the performers and audience rather than to invoke ritual as a spectacle of decorative and highly theatrical entertainment, as her modern dance predecessors Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn had done.

52 Janice Ross

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houseTheatre,San Francisco: the Halprin probed formalenvironment the of theatre spaceas if it werean architectural playground. (Photoby WarnerJepson)"Dances that change and transform our lives can be called rituals in the way I am using this word," Halprin said of her emerging definition. "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," she continued, claiming for contemporary Western life the right to create its own rituals (in Kaplan 1995:3 7). The political time and social place of 1962 America was much more than an "anywhere, anytime" setting for the alienation, absurdity, and cynicism of domestic ritual that The Five-Legged Stool describes. On 13 October 1962, a scant six months after Halprin's dance/theatre work premiered, Edward Albee's abrasively realistic and absurdist nuclear age drama, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), opened on Broadway. Albee's play and Halprin's dance both live in the same once-sacred landscape where the American dream of family, happiness, and purpose was imploding. Through similar theatrical techniques of repetition, parallelism, farce, wit, and dramatic states of failed communication, violence, and shattered relationships, Halprin's dance, like Albee's play, evokes the hollowness of lives without purpose, lives with traditions so bled of meaning they have become vacant rituals that numbly reproduce the urban condition. Halprin's working definition of ritual both embraces and contradicts traditional anthropological definitions. Anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport noted five attributes in his demarcation of ritual, only three of which Halprin's work includes. Their three points of agreement are that, "Ritual is performance. If there is no performance there is no ritual"; "In ritual performance transmitters are always among the most important receivers of their own messages"; and, "In ritual the transmitter, receiver and message become fused in the participant" (Rappaport 1992:249-5 2). All of these are true of Halprin's work, or at least her aspirations for it. However, two critical attributes of ritual on Rappaport's list do not appear on Halprin's: that ritual is "the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not encoded by

Anna Halprin 53 the performers"; and "ritual is a form or structure" (250, 255). Halprin rewrote these last two attributes: her performers were presenters of highly variable acts and utterances, both of which they essentially coded themselves. Halprin explains her concept of ritual as a nested relationship to sensory life, beginning with experience then moving to body, story, symbol, and finally arriving at myth: "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" (in Kaplan 1995:2o3). This belief in writing the experience of the body through performance echoes Halprin's lifelong essentialist belief in the body as a fount of deep knowledge that can be nudged into expression through performance. The Five-LeggedStool presents a movement account of how rituals for Halprin are rooted in our bodily experience of the most mundane and profound aspects of daily life. In this 90o-minute, four-person work, she shaped minimyths as symbolic actions through which the performers and individual audience members might construct meaning. Prompting audiences to participate in this intensification of the prosaic, she hoped to nurture new perceptual skills. She wanted to take both audiences and performers to that "strange liminal space in all of us," which Victor Turner identified as where, "life discloses itself at a depth inaccessible to observation, reflection and theory" (Turner 1982:15). Halprin's Five-LeggedStool aimed, awkwardly at first, at this sensorial territory where ritual "heightens our consciousness of what is normally inaccessible to observation and reason" (I6). Halprin also uses ritualistic actions in The Five-LeggedStool to rewrite the Cold War hierarchy of the senses, which prioritizes the visual: she posits that the kinesthetic is as truth-bearing as the visual. In a climate of high social anxiety over innuendo and appearances she instead celebrates the ambiguity of relationships and the elevation of physical experience over visual truth. There was a hint of irony as well as defiance in staging this message in San Francisco, a city that in May 1960 had been the site of a demonstration against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). HUAC was holding two weeks of hearings in San Francisco, investigating disloyalty and subversion in the Bay Area. On Friday 13 May, later dubbed "Black Friday," a crowd of 200 antiHUAC protesters in front of City Hall were beaten by the police and sprayed with fire hoses. The nosiest demonstrators were flung one by one down the steps and flushed to the street by the torrents of water the police aimed at the crowd (Miller [1987] 1994:46). This symbolic cleansing and casting out was highly performative as well as metaphoric of a cleansing and casting out of sinners, although the police likely did not think about it so symbolically. The injured and soaked protesters became martyrs for radicals. When the Michigan student activist Tom Haydn hitchhiked to California a few weeks later, inspired by Jack Kerouac's Beat narrative, On the Road (1957), he came to the Bay Area in particular to see the site of this confrontation, the "stage" of this coercive performance (Miller [1987] 1994:46). The legacy of the Beats was clearly also still a vital activist and performance presence in the city and Halprin was aware of it (Halprin 2001). The activists' belief in the value of physical engagement over rhetoric paralleled Halprin's interest in bypassing dialogue in favor of a more immediate and physical connection with her audiences in The Five-LeggedStool. Actions were not only louder and more persuasive than words at this moment in American social history, but also deemed by many to be more trustworthy. Symbolic and metaphorical meanings seemed to be present in even the most spontaneous real-life situations.

54 JaniceRoss "This theatreevent is meant to appealdirectlyto the sensesand primarily the kinestheticsense,"Halprinwrote of her 1961 versionof Stool: Anythingstirringup the mind would only serve to build up wallsof pre-conceivedideas,of habitsof perception.The point of reference here is in the tensionsof muscles,nervesand the total humanresponsive intelligence. (Halprin1961:2) In keepingwith this belief Halprindid not want programs be distributed to to the audience."It is stronglyrecommendedthat no programs given out at be any time duringthe performance,unlessthe programcan be treatedas an independent,poetic event of its own," she wrote in her 1961productionnotes: with academicverbalization The customary program explainingthe drama would serveonly as a distraction.[...] Ideallythe role of the audience is thatof a groupmemberof the composition.They aregiven the freedomto discoverand select out of a seriesof possiblecombinationsof A relationships. single centerof focus is neverimposedon them. They areparticipants the very act of composition.The elementsof indeterin minacyutilizedin the compositionmakethispossible,the non-fixed Choice is a freedom spaces,and the open implicationsand associations. built into the compositionfor the benefit of the spectator.This involvement is the audiencerole. (Halprin1961:2) This is a remarkable declarationof Halprin'suse of chance as a perceptual method and of her dance theatre as a ritual practice. It aligns with similar emerging sentimentsin the visual arts and in Merce CunninghamandJohn Cage's experimentaldance and music work in New York.Fouryearsearlier, on 13 July 1957, Cunninghamand Cage had visited the Halprinsat their on home, where Cunninghamgave an afternoonlecture-demonstration Halprin'sdancedeck in which he specificallypraisedher outdoordancestudiofor its capacityto affecta changein the performingconsciousness the dancer: of Ordinarilythe dancerdealswith a fixed spaceset by outside convention, the dimensionof a box with a view from one side. But here on the dance deck there is a totallydifferentsituation.Aside fromthe obvious there is anotherfreedomfor arrangement opennessin the architectural the dancer.There is no necessityto face front, to limit the focus to one side. (Cunningham1957:2) Stool Halprin'sdescriptionof the goalsand processesof TheFive-Legged reveal how she brought this sensibilityfrom her outside space into the formal environmentof the theatre.She exploredthe indoor spaceas if it were an arStool chitectural playground.TheFive-Legged opens with an incursioninto the viewer'sspaceand time, as actions,sounds,and eventsunfold at curiouspaces as and in odd placeswithin the theatre-as much an architectural a theatrical of investigation the locale. Halprinsaidshe was very deliberately tryingto get her performers use the whole spaceof the theatre,from the balconyto the to aislesto the lobby (Halprin2002). Lynne PalmerVanDam, who was part of that throughoutthe performance the originalcast,remembered John Graham repeatedlystrolledfrom the lobby to the stage, walking straightthroughthe audience,carryingwith him a portableradiotuned to a local stationwith the volume turnedall the way up. "John'srole was all about enteringand exiting

Anna Halprin 55 through the audience," Van Dam recalled. "It felt almost like he was a delivery man" (Van Dam 2003). At another point Van Dam and Graham ran through the house with flashlights. Later they stood in the aisles and screamed. At one point a chorus of people Halprin scattered throughout the theatre began singing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," and the audience spontaneously joined in the hymn (Moffit 1962: I I). Halprin was using a broad range of devices to bridge the divide between performer and spectator. On opening night Halprin and a male dancer, A.A. Leath, began the show by each standing in frozen postures near the audience on the apron of the stage as people slowly filtered into their seats. For the next 20 minutes, until the formal start of the show, Halprin and Leath continued to shift 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 hanging around his neck, was positioned in one of the boxes. Halprin, dressed in thrift shop finery with a red embroidered and fringed Victorian shawl, 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 of the fashionable bouffant hairstyle of the time. Van Dam: In those days people were ratting their hair and doing these tall things. Anna and I had extreme hairdos. We had a hairdresserfriend 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. (2003) This costuming extreme introduced an Albee-like element of social farce to the performance. This little drama between Leath and Halprin faded out without ever resolving, and other solo events began to unfold on the stage. John Graham repeatedly lunged across a darkened space on the stage, which had been hung with strips cut from shiny black oilcloth. A dozen feet above the stage, in a small suspended box-like room framed with an oval opening cut in a sheet of the same oilcloth, Lynne 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 Palmer would slowly survey the scene below by gazing at it through a hand-held mirror. Meanwhile, on the floor below, a bicycle wheel spun across the stage, followed seconds later by Leath, pantless and with the tails of his white dress shirt trailing as he dashed after the wheel. No sooner had he caught and removed it than he repeated this whole sequence of chasing, catching, throwing, and chasing again and again. Later, Halprin, 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 too was repeated to a point past boredom until it once again became interesting (Eichelbaum 1962). The two-act work was filled with more than a dozen vignettes like these. Among the most written about was the extended repetitive task Halprin performed: systematically gathering Ioo empty wine bottles and then stealthily handing them up, one-by-one, to a disembodied hand that reached down from the rafters as she stood on her four-legged stool. Van Dam remembered Halprin's actions as being like those of a praying mantis as she stretched her torso, legs, and arms as long as possible to gather the bottles from the wings and then reach them upward in an attenuated gesture as she stood balanced on the stool (Van Dam 200oo2).The climactic moment in the dance came when

56 Janice Ross

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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 Halprin as she stood atop the stool. Leath clutched her thigh and bellowed in a wordless wail as Halprin responded with a similar guttural cry in a tone somewhere between pain and passion, full of effort and impotency at the same time (Eichelbaum 1962). In the final moments of the dance, the labor of Halprin's bottle passing was reversed poignantly as a giant cloud of white feathers noiselessly rained down onto the stage on the same spot where she had so tirelessly cleared the bottles. This scenario embodied the qualities of repetition and parallelism that Theatre of the Absurd dramatistswere also using in an effort to convey the fallibility of communication. There was nothing evidently narrative in any of the actions in Stool, and yet they seemed clearly to be about the desperation and agony of communication and partnership and the impossibility, at times, of having both. Yearslater Halprin remarked that when she saw Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot (1953) for the first time, she immediately understood that The FiveLeggedStool lived in the same existential territory (Halprin 2002). Curiously, Halprin knew nothing of the legendary Godotproduction her studio neighbor,

Anna Halprin 57the San Francisco Actors Workshop under the direction of Herbert Blau, had staged in November 1957 at San Quentin Prison just across the freeway from her home in Marin. Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco's leading arts critic at the time, said of the dance: 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 sensibilities had not been sharpened by watching the rest of The Five Legged Stool. (1962:I) Morton Subotnik's score further sharpened the senses with what Stanley 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." (1962:37) On Sunday 29 April 1962, the week The Five-Legged Stool opened at the Playhouse Theatre in North Beach, the San Francisco Chronicle published a lengthy essay discussing the significance of the work. In this essay, Halprin's husband, Lawrence Halprin, a celebrated landscape architect, endeavored to set up an informed reception for Halprin's dance theatre piece, which had been trounced by the critics and public the previous year in its first incarnation as The Four-Leqged Stool. Lawrence Halprin discussed the new relationship between an art event and its audience inaugurated by the reconstituted The FiveLegged Stool. This relationship, he said, is both ancient and innovative. Anna Halprin was taking her art back toward ritual as a social model and at the same time propelling it forward by deploying ritual as a contemporary aesthetic strategy. Her goal was to re-engage the gestural vocabulary of everyday life as art and to cast the spectator as a more active participant. This last point had been the site of the most serious miscalculation of The Four-Legged Stool. The arts as the "sharpened expression of life" that Lawrence Halprin referred to have one critical element Anna's work previously had lacked: a primed and knowledgeable audience that is receptive to the communal experience being offered and comfortable with the role prepared for them. Instead, the public reacted to Halprin's piece with hostility and anger. Responses ranged from jeering and walking out to, at a couple of performances, hurling verbal insults and objects at the performers onstage. Concerned that this might happen again, she coached her dancers: [I]f this theatre 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 theatre. This cannot be avoided and the entire cast must develop the skill to maintain concentration and continue giving as strong a performance as possible. (1961:2) Halprin believed that it was the absence of the traditional performance anchors of gestural narrative and logic that distressed the audience. "We werejust scrambling, that's all, just scrambling things up," Halprin said: Sometimes in rehearsal we'd try to scramble things up so that we'd do everything backwards and we'd start at the end instead of the beginning.

58 JaniceRoss We were tryingto breakthis habitof causeand effect predictability, which is in a way what collagesdid. And the firstpartof this dancewas just really,visually, like a collage. (2002) Architecture and Ritual In his SanFrancisco Chronicle elearticle,Lawrencefocuseson the archetypal ments of Anna'swork, idealizingits capacityto takeart "backto its basic,ritualistic beginnings when men were simpler and art was only a sharpened expressionof life" (1962:1). He writes: She is makingtheatreout of physicalimagesin ordinary life, of simple occurrencesand the most deeply rooted relationships between people. if [...] She wantsmost, I think, to createan environment-a landscape, are will, within which both audienceand performers partof the you cast and the eventsarecommon to them both. (3) A theatrewhose physicalimages and events are drawnsimply and directly from life, whose content reflectsdeep relationships,and whose setting is a landscapewhere audienceand performersfuse-all are attributesof a ritual. They also describeaspectsof LawrenceHalprin'sown evolving architectural vision from that time and especiallyhis belief in the natural world as the ideal model for art. In 1962 LawrenceHalprinwas beginning work on the conversionof San Francisco's Ghiradelli Squarefroma 19th-centurychocolatefactoryinto a deof terracedplazas,fountains,courtyards, Invelopment shops,andrestaurants. tegrated into this plan was what might be called his desire to choreograph tiered platforms people's movement throughrampedand winding staircases, and fountainsand balconiesthat offeredviews of the San FranciscoBay, AlcatrazIsland,and AquaticPark.At its completion, six yearslater,it would be lauded as one of Halprin'sfinest examplesof "creatingspace as theatre"(L. Stool, performedTheFour-Legged wasa few blocksawayin thissameSanFrancisco neighborhood. At the sametime, LawrenceHalprinwas also embarkingon the designsfor the Sea Ranch developmenton the Mendicino Coast of Northern California. Here his challengewas to preservethe characterof the land while putting a relativelydense developmenton it. His solution was to clustercondominium units and individualhouses to offer views and privacywhile preserving maximum open space as common areafor the entire community.This is a design solution that has social as well as aestheticand theatricalresonance.Like his Albee, Halprinwascommentingthroughhis wife, and the playwrightEdward medium on the postwarstateof Americandomesticlife. His designsoffereda physicalspace of change where the individualcould engage with natureand communallyminded neighbors. One's "community"thus became environmentalas well as personal,and a model of social redesignwas markedon the and landscape its edifices.It was a solution Gropiuswould haveapplauded. In the early 1940s, Anna hadjoined Lawrenceas a studentspousewhile he at architecture Harvard's School of Design completedhis degree in landscape underWalterGropius.While there,she alsoabsorbed elementsof the Bauhaus to aesthetic.She wasparticularly attracted its model of designasa collaborative enterpriseamong artistswith differentareasof expertiseall workingtogether to change and improvesociety. She would use these impressionsin creatingHalprin 1962:I26). The Playhouse Theatre, where Anna Halprin created and

Anna Halprin 59 her vision of theatre as space in which to educate and activate awareness art. throughcollaborative Chronicle LawrenceHalprin'sSan Francisco essaychampionsAnna'sart for theatreas a communalevent of"suits immediacyandits capacityto resurrect in premeimportance" citizens'lives, "to speakto people in a languagewhich they can understandthrough all their senses" (1962:n.p.). Of the dozen or almostall are qualiof more attributes his wife's art that Halprinenumerates, with this notion of art as "only a sharpenedexpressionof life," ties associated a slice of ordinary experience,framed,intensified,andset out for aestheticregard.This is ritualas art. the Anna was beginning to explore performatively same territorybetween theatreand anthropologythat Richard Schechnerand other scholarswould in exploretheoretically subsequentdecades.ThroughHalprinthese aspectsof danceperformance. To ritualpracticewould become modelsfor experimental designatea movement vocabularyof task-likeactions and fracturedprosaic narrative "ritualistic" as gavethe movementa specialutility in citizens'lives as well ashighersocialvalence.It alsoindirectlyhighlightedone of the greatiroart: nies of avantgarde the more like life artbecomes the smallerits audience. Truerealismrarelyequateswith accessibility. PedagogyAs Ritual Halprin'searly experience as a dance student significantlyinformed her practiceas a teacherand her subsequentuse of ritualmethodologiesas a choof She reographer. arrivedat the vanguard experimentaldance theatrein the I960s from the distinctivepaths of dance education and, secondhand,pragmatic philosophy.As a young dance majorin the Universityof Wisconsinat Madison'sdanceprogramin the 1930s,Halprinencounteredthe experienceH'Doubler and, through basededucationalpracticeof her teacherMargaret her, the theoreticalideas of H'Doubler'steacher,John Dewey. In particular Halprin'swork would invokeDewey's regardfor artas: somethingmore thanthe mere technicalskill requiredby the organsof it expression: involvesan idea, a thought, a spiritualrenderingof things, andyet it is other thanany numberof ideasby themselves,it is a living union of thoughtand the instrumentof expression.(Dewey 1934:30) H'Doubler had been a student in Dewey's academic circles at Teachers' College, ColumbiaUniversity,from 1916 to 1917, a time when he was developing his philosophyof experience. Dewey consequentlytaughtTheories of Experience and The Analysisof Experience, coursesin which he sought to thatrealityis to be identifiedwith experienceinsteadof eternalpheestablish nomena.At aboutthis sametime, Dewey wasalsoclarifyinganddefendinghis theory of knowledge and his position that thinking, or reflection, is inquiry and that factorsinvolvedin thinkingor knowing must be viewed within that view of realityas a readycontext. This was in sharpcontrastto the prevailing madefixed worldwaitingto be known (Dewey 1934:22). The implicationsof thisview of cognitionbasedon experiencearesubstantialfor dance,andin factall the arts,aswell asritualpractices,becauseartdeals fromlife, the art with bringinginto being the unknown.Insteadof a departure frameDewey opened, suggests process,viewed throughthe new philosophical in the disorderof creationin the artsas a vivid model of how understanding the worldproceeds.ForHalprinit wasa smallstep fromthisto acknowledging

60

Janice Rosshow the essences of a cultural ideal are transmitted across generations through the experientially rich events of ritual. Halprin was not the first 20th-century dance artist to embrace a philosophical system as part of her vision of dance but she was unique in having come into dance from four years in a university program designed to create dance educators. Her exposure to Dewey came in college where Dewey's Art As Experience (1934) was the direct model for H'Doubler's writing and dance pedagogy. Both of these scholars' works would, in turn, become blueprints for Halprin's engagement of ritual in dance performance, and, most importantly, for her ritualization of task as part of the physical vocabulary of dance. It was in H'Doubler's college dance classes that Halprin was introduced to dance as a series of small acts of self-discovery and to the body as the repository of inherent knowledge. While lying on the floor, each student was talked through a set of basic physical investigations of the fundamental laws of the body'sjoint and muscle mobility. As if revisiting the way an infant tests the body's fitness to walk, Halprin investigated each incremental action necessary to drag the body forward in a crawl, or unfurl it into the upright pose of standing. For Halprin it was a short step from this exercise to the expression through dance of cultural truths about herJewish American female body. She explored the revelation, through performance, of the history and cultural memory of the body in a series ofJewish-themed dances, which she made and performed at the University of Wisconsin's Hillel. Three decades later, in The Five-Legged Stool, Halprin advanced this project toward a gradual discovery of muscular logic in the bodily actions necessary for executing prosaic tasks. The group of two men and two women who performed The Five-Legged Stool, through their actions as performers, were also beginning to inquire into the task-like quality of interpersonal encounters. These kinds of little truths about one's body, one's daily actions, and one's social interactions were the building blocks of Halprin's urban ritual. In the same way that Schechner has spoken of "performance consciousness" that activates alternatives as a transformation of being or consciousness to her added the term "ritual consciousness" (Schechner 1985:6), Halprin of "body consciousness" to denote the conceptual shift that acconception companied her regard of behaviors as ritualistic. She defined ritual consciousness as "a way of shifting awareness from an automatic, habitual way of living your life to one of active awareness and to using dance with (a) purpose" (in Kaplan 1995:37). When she wrote this in 1979 as part of the text for her dance manual, Movement Ritual I, the purpose she identified was "to heal." Over the years the scale of this healing grew from private emotional ceremonies to a civil ceremony structuring a citywide response to the murder of San Franto the massively cisco's mayor, George Moscone, in City Dance (1976-77); scaled Circle the Earth (1986) for groups of people confronting life-threatening illnesses; and finally to international rituals advocating world peace Planetary Dance (1987).

Experience in PerformanceIn The H'Doubler people to ences and enhanced Five-Legged Stool, Halprin took the theoretic work of Dewey and to its logical conclusion. If the goal of education and art is to help become human and whole by enabling them to reflect on experito use this reflection to illuminate life, how might this process be by dance, with its capacity to express ideas and emotions through

Anna Halprin 61 physical action? Dewey was known to abhor dualisms and so here too Halprin functions as a distant disciple, invoking ritualism to triumph over another dualism, that of perception and representation, creation and reception. It was in this capacity that her work met its greatest challenge. Halprin discovered that just designating the whole theatre as a performing site wasn't sufficient to give the audience tools for real engagement. She had built her myths and rituals collectively with the performers, recognizing implicitly that 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 hadn't yet thought to prepare the audience similarly. Several weeks of rehearsalscould achieve this for the performers, but what about the viewer who arrives at the theatre with no more preparation than an essay in the newspaper? She also refused to distribute programs, claiming they would "build up walls of preconceived ideas and habits of perception" (in L. Halprin 1962:2). As Susan Sontag has observed, one of the characteristics of modernity is thatpeople like to feel they can anticipate their own experience (2002:97). By in-

voking ritual Halprin both enhanced and thwarted that desire. Halprin's theatre set up a relationship, similar to that of the spectator in visual arts, where the audience didn't lose consciousness of self, where meaning was more important than linear narrative, but where the actual experience disrupted expectations.

Still DanceAt the age of 77, Halprin began rehearsalsfor the final ritual of life, the passage to death. Over the next several years, and working collaboratively with Eeo Stubblefield, the originator of these tableaux vivants called Still Dance, Halprin performed a series of 20 Still Dances-meditative works, often nearly static, and set deep in rugged natural settings. Here she danced nude and alone with Stubblefield and her camera as the only witnesses. With her body coated by Stubblefield with mud, molasses, straw-dry grasses, clays, plants, bark, or body paint, performance is used in these works to envision Halprin's own eventual return to the earth. These dances are situated aesthetically between feminist body art of the and earthworks. At times they even gesture toward the subsequent genre 1970os of extreme art in the degree of physical discomfort-the cold, wetness, and endured. Stubblefield uses Halprin's nude, aging, and reitchiness-Halprin markably beautiful body as the medium in these works: Halprin rolling in the hollow of a rotting redwood as she buried herself in compost and dead leaves, or crawling along the cold damp sand at the ocean's edge, encased in a sheer white shroud. Stubblefield thus shapes Halprin to render what is customarily thought of as the least likely stage of life to be exalted in performance, old age, as an intensely ritualistic and highly theatrical condition. Representing her as both image and medium, Still Dance was visually evocative of Ana Mendieta's Silueta (1976) series in which Mendieta posed nude

lying in soft earth or dry grasses. For Mendieta, as a visual artist, the images of her own body emblazoned onto the earth suggested metaphoric associations between the generative earth and the female body (Duncan 1999). Similarly Halprin's body in the environmental Still Dance created narratives about the fragile, fleeting existence and the contradictory meanings of an old female body. Halprin, guided by Stubblefield, and Mendieta both use their nude bodies and

62 Janice Ross

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coated Hal4. Stubblefield prin's bodywith straw-dry grassesto envision Halprin's Conclusions own eventual return the toearth. Still Dance (19972001). (Photo by Eeo Stub-

the layering of dead vegetation, dry grasses, and straw to coat their bodies and remind us of the inevitable decay of all organic matter. The images also referenced the metaphoric and essentialist notions of the earth as a link to ancestry, a burial site and a site of rebirth. "I use the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools," Mendieta once remarked of her Siluetas (in Duncan 1999:154). This is a statement that Stubblefield might just as easily have made about Still Dances with Halprin where, as in Mendieta's work, the desire, sexuality, and aggression present in nature is evoked and palpably performed on a woman's body. In Still Dances however, these qualities are much more muted than in Mendieta's self-portraits of sexual and social violation. In making their work, Stubblefield and Halprin analogized Halprin's aging, woman's body with the most ritualistic and final stage on which we come to perform-the moist embrace of soft earth. In Still Dance the din of the domestic nihilism of The Five-LeggedStool softened into the gentle whisperings of nature, which exists as a comforting space outside of not just conventional life but conventional art as well. Unlike Mendieta, whose Siluetas incorporated violence, blood, fire, and references to Santeria rites, Still Dancepresents its own brand of essentialist ecofeminism and spirituality.

blefield)

5. In Still Dance (19972001) the din of the do-

mesticnihilismof TheFive-Legged Stool has

softenedinto thegentle whisperings nature. of Halprin crawlsin the cold dampsand at the ocean's edge, encasedin a white shroud. (Photo by Eeo Stubblefield)

In The Five-Legged Stool, Halprin implicitly challenged the routinized use of ritual as a theatrical touchstone by I940s and '5os modern dancers. With her urban ritual she inaugurated the rougher life-as-art dance theatre ofpostmodernism. Forty years later, in Still Dance, she gleaned from Stubblefield how to parse her genre of urban ritual even closer to its essence. Led by Stubblefield she shed audience, choreography, and all but the most elemental movement vocabulary, so that what remained was the essence of the performer. She wore her age, her female identity, and her private history as an aged woman on the edge of eternity as her costume. Halprin began her work in ritual as a dialogue with her modern dance heritage. Unlike the early modern dancers whose invocation of ritual tended toward spectacle, usually coded to evoke eras and cultures outside the author's own, Halprin employed ritual as a system of nonrelationships, monologues, extreme repetition, and, in Still Dance, near stasis. In the extremes of her ritual practice, she consistently withheld a clear plot, logic, and dramatic shaping. In lieu of a printed program for The Five-Legged Stool, Halprin crafted the following statement to be distributed to the audience: The Five-Legged Stool was created by dancers and is performed by dancers but it is not a dance. Words are employed as freely as motion and yet this is not a play. The close collaboration of a painter, a musician, and a

Anna Halprin 63 lighting designer brings as many elements into focus as an opera, or a musical comedy, and yet it is not an opera or a musical comedy, even in the most modest sense. The Five-Legged Stool does not fit into any school, style or conventional form. It has instead evolved its own direction and its own forms. (Halprin 1962:I) In other words, there is no familiar frame for viewing the unfamiliarity of this work. In her early notebook entries Halprin jotted down the following schematic ideas about the piece: There are three people who are involved in realistic actions. These people have no names, they come from nowhere and go nowhere. They do not attempt to change each other. [This preceding sentence was later crossed out.] There is no plot. (1962:5) Indeed she didn't invent characters so much as generate a real-time context in which her performing associates could live with her onstage. "I have only been a leader and a catalyst," she wrote her dancers in a 1962 letter after the premiere of The Five-LeggedStool-as much a shaman as a choreographer. As a means of re-imagining ritual, Halprin makes the performer's quest for wholeness a public search, and one that implicates its witnesses in a process intended to be transformational for them as well, at least on the perceptual level. Her dance thus becomes a form of total theatre; her myths, real-life allegories. It was not just the performers as characters or non-characters that Halprin was re-imaging, but the space of the theatre, the role of the spectator, and the performing body as both representational yet real. In the decades be-

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64 Janice Ross tween The Five-LeggedStool and Still Dance she would continue to use ritual to investigate the role of the live body in making dance a socially efficacious act. She would also eventually use ritual to explore and celebrate sexuality in her work by linking the ritualistic with the spiritualistic and the carnal with both. "How people perform their own story of their body is their ritual," she stated. The task was how to discover what the script should be. The Five-LeggedStool also allowed Anna Halprin to jettison the predictability of cause in favor of a closer modeling on the random order of nature: [W]hy come to the theatre to see what you can see anywhere? I say yes it is good that it is like life but [it] is different too. It is like the process that nature uses when wind, sun, salt air, water and time carve out great monumental sculptures on the rock in the Sierra or reshape the cypress trees along the coast. But it is different because we are not nature but people using nature's processes to create our own humanistic creations. (1962:I-2) Halprin was trailblazing a concept of spectatorship that was novel for contemporary Western theatre at the time and one that seemed to draw as much from the world of environmental design as from the world of art. In proclaiming herself a student of nature's processes she places herself in dialogue with the environment much as Lawrence Halprin was. Her statement also parallels Cunningham and Cage's contemporaneous claim of using nature as their teacher "in her manner of operation," a lineage that makes their radical new art seem, in fact, very ancient (Vaughan 1997). In enumerating the attributes of Anna's new theatre, Lawrence Halprin ended up describing performance framed by a series of new ritualistic strategies such as "speaking to people in a language they can understand through all their senses," and "evoking direct responses free of conditioned habits and preconceived notions." These statements describe performers who have a transformed vision of their role as artists. Yet in direct counterpoint to these claims about its accessibility, The FiveLeggedStool would prove to be part of a decade of puzzling and controversial dance theatre works by Halprin. She had begun in the late 195os by showing the socially ordered body in a world of chaos and broken communication where the imposed order of repetition only made things less sensible and more absurd. Her larger project became the creation of a ritual body. Working in the genre of dance, her means would eventually become her end. Ritualizing the medium of dance-the body-she discovered, would ritualize its content. As she aged, the spectacle of ritual in Halprin's work also became increasingly freighted with spirituality. This spiritual framing transformed the live display of her own nude body in Still Dance from a sexual act to a mystical experience. In the Still Dances, Stubblefield and Halprin framed the search for wholeness that Dewey and H'Doubler saw as that which propels us through life, as, in fact, a search for the natural body. In The Five-LeggedStool Halprin had been preoccupied with using ritual to describe the world she found; in Still Dance she began using ritual to address the world she wanted. Notei. Education theorist Lee Shulman calls this "pedagogic knowledge" in contradistinction to the customary "content knowledge," on which most education focuses (1987).

Anna Halprin 65

ReferencesCunningham, 1957 Merce Lecture demonstration given on Anna Halprin's Dance Deck, Kentfield, CA. Unpublished manuscript from Halprin's personal archive.

Desmond, Jane 2oo0 [1982] "Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St. Denis's Radha of i9o6." In Moving History/Dancing Cultures, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and Ann Dils, 256-70. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Dewey, John 1934 Duncan, M. 1999 Eichelbaum, 1962

Art As Experience. New York: Capricorn Books. "Tracing Mendieta." Art in America 87, 4 (April):i 10o-13, 154. Stanley "Playhouse Dance Bedlam." San Francisco Examiner. Anna Halprin papers, San Francisco Performing Arts Library.

Frankenstein, Alfred "Puzzle and Pathos of'5-Legged Stool.' " San Francisco Chronicle. Anna Hal1962 prin papers, San Francisco Performing Arts Library. Halprin, Anna 196I1962

1979 19942001

2002

"The Four-Legged Stool." Unpublished manuscript from Halprin's personal archive. Program notes for ThieFive-Legged Stool. Movement Ritual I. Kentfield, CA, Tamalpa Institute archive. Interview with author. Kentfield, CA. Interview with author. Kentfield, CA. Interview with author. Kentfield, CA, 24 May. Stool." San Francisco Chronicle, from Hal-

Halprin, Lawrence "A l)iscussion of the Five-Legged 1962 prin's personal archive.

Kaplan, Rachel, ed. 1995 Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Miller, John 1994 1I9871

Democracy Is in the Streets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rappaport, R.A. "Ritual." In Folklore, Cultural Performancesand Popular Entertainments, edited 1992 by R. Bauman, 249-60. New York: Oxford University Press. Schechner, Richard Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University 1985 Press. "Anna Halprin: A Life in Ritual." TDR 33, 2 (T122):67-73. 1989

of Pennsylvania

Sontag, Susan 2002 "Looking At War: Photography's View of Devastation and Death." The New Yorker78, 38 (9 December):82-97. Shulman, Lee 1987 "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform." Harvard Educational Review 57, I :I -22.

Turner, Victor From Ritual to Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal Press. 1982

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Anna Halprin 67 6. In the Still Dance, Halprin is led by Stubblefield to shed audience,choVaughan, D. and Merce Cunningham Fifty Years.New York: Aperture. 1997 reography, all but the most elementalmovement so vocabulary, that what remainsis the essenceof the performer. (Photo by in Janice Ross is a Lecturer Dance History at StanfordUniversity,California.Her Eeo Stubblefield) includeMoving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of publications Dance in American Education (Universityof WisconsinPress, 2oo000), "Revoand lution the Art of It: Anna Halprinand Avant-GardeDance," in Everything Was for Possible: (Re)Inventing Dance in the 196os, editedby Sally Banes (Universityof WisconsinPress, 2003). She is the recipient a 200ool Guggenheim a book on the of for danceworksof Anna Halprin.Van Dam, Lynne Palmer Interview with author. Salt Lake City, Utah, 25 January. 2003