Anna Halprin (13 July 1920- ) helped pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance. Halprin, along with her contemporaries such as Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, and Robert Morris, collaborated and built a community based around the fundamentals of post-modern dance. In 1950s, she established the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop to give artists like her a safe haven to practice their art. Being able to freely explore the capabilities of her own body, she created a systematic way of moving using kinesthetic awareness. ^[1] Many of her works since have been based on scores, including Planetary Dance, 1987, and Myths in the 1960's which gave a score to the audience, making them performers as well.

Halprin, also, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1972. In order to understand her ailment, she documented her own experiences and compiled the information to make her own healing process called The Five Stages of Healing.^[2] In 1981, she applied The Five Stages of Healing to her community and developed large community pieces. Halprin has written books including: Movement Rituals, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance and Dance as a Healing Art. She currently does research in connection with the Tamalpa Institute, based in Marin County, CA, which she founded with her daughter, Daria Halprin, in 1978.

At the age of 15, she began studying the techniques of Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan. In 1938, she attended University of Wisconsin under the direction of one of her lifelong mentors Margaret H’Doubler. H’Doubler emphasized the importance of personal creativity and highly encouraged the study of anatomy in order obtain the most effective ways of moving.^[3] Halprin abandoned the stylized forms of modern technique to create her own way of reproducing the art of everyday life. ^[4] Merce Cunningham shared the same need to reject the emotional expressiveness of modern dance. However, instead of making chance as a way to make movement like Cunningham did, Halprin turned to improvisation to investigate ways in which individuals could make a community. ^[5]Her husband, Lawrence Halprin, whom she met in college, was also interested in the collaborative process.

After World War II, Lawrence Halprin’s work called him to stay there permanently. Anna Halprin wrote in a letter about her new journey saying she was ready “… to live a resourceful life with a connection to the soil and to the common pulse of ordinary people.” ^[6] Halprin founded with other dancers, like Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, and Simone Forti, and artists, like John Cage, Robert Morris, the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop in 1959. The purpose to establish this organization was to give her and others the opportunity to delve more into more explorative forms of dance and move away from the technical constraints of modern dance. ^[7] During the span of twenty years, she developed a working process that gave people the liberty to move freely with emotion and with a feeling a community. This technique came to be called human potential growth; the aim was to maintain the link between non-verbal behavior and examining the use of language and physical expression.^[8]

Her course of investigating her own way of creating movement called for understanding the limits of the body and the reactions the body makes when an intiation is made. ^[9] In her own words she describes being aware of one’s kinesthetic sense “is your special sense for being aware of your own movement and empathizing with others." (^[10] She compiled a group exercises named Movement Rituals that shape the way she and her students moved their bodies through space and time. Her movement patterns are based on the dynamic qualities such as swinging, falling, walking, running, crawls, leaps, and various ways of shifting weight. In the 1960's she developed the RSVP Cycles with her husband, Lawrence Halprin, which breaks down the creative process with the use of scores. It stands for Resources, Scores, Valuaction and Performance. She says, “I wanted to create something for a group of people to do in which they’re given the opportunity to explore the theme and find out what’s real for them…” ^[11]

In 1951, Halprin was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in her colon; this sudden shift in her life inspired her to investigate and create associations to make a formulized personal ritual that helped her healing process. Her quest for healing encouraged the community around her and, with her daughter in 1978, she co-founded the Tamalpa Institute. Together, they created a non-profit research and educational arm of the San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop that offers training in a creative process integrating psychology, body therapies, and education with dance, art, and drama, as a path toward healing and resolving social conflict. ^[12] In 1970s and 1980s she purely focused on collaborating with other individuals that were terminally ill or in recover from an illness. In 1987, she was invited to the Cancer Support and Education Center to work with individuals with cancer. There she would lead them through a series of body awareness exercises and have them make visualizations of themselves through an artistic medium. These exercises aided their struggle to create energy. Over the years, she continued to work with terminally ill patients. As well, she created works that confronted real life issues facing communities. One work she created that embodied her healing principles is Circle the Earth. The “creativity is based on an open-ended score that guides the group in an experience of gradually intensifying creativity, and culminating in the actual performance.” ^[13]

Anna Halprin's Official Website [1]