Feeding the soul and healing the body through dance

By Heidi Landgraf

As I lie on the heated wooden floor of the Mountain Home Studio, eyes closed, Anna Halprin’s voice guides me to let go and sink into the floor. I remember the first time I came here, in 1997, and Anna gave me the same instruction—I felt my body release and surrender its weight in a way I had never experienced in my 25 years of dancing.

Today it is no different. Anna’s soothing instructions guide me into my body more deeply than in an ordinary dance class. But then Anna is no ordinary teacher. At 89, she is as sprightly as ever—her sparkling eyes dancing—and so impassioned by what she does that it’s infectious. We, her students, want to know our bodies as deeply as she does and experience the joy of dance together in the heavenly environment that she calls home.

Anna Halprin, standing, with students on the deck of the Mountain Home Studio in Marin County, California, in the 1960s. (Photo courtesy Anna Halprin)

The Mountain Home Studio is located on the side of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California. Anna has lived and taught there since 1945. But her journey into teaching dance began at age 12, when she would recruit the neighborhood kids and their mothers and teach them basic warm-ups and stretches that would later lead into improvisational group dances. She was experimenting early on with what would become a life’s work: teaching dance in community, to dancers and non-dancers alike.

Anna was equally avid in her study of dance. As a youngster in Winnetka, Illinois, she took dance classes as part of her public school’s curriculum. By the time she was in high school the dance classes had been replaced by athletics, so she sought out the football coach. “He did the soft shoe. So I’d meet him at lunchtime and he’d teach me soft shoe tap movements,” she says. “I was definitely a natural at dance, so [it could be] anything—folk dance or tap dance; I didn’t care. I even tried ballet, but that didn’t last too long because I was rebellious. I didn’t want anything so autocratic.”

During this time other dancers who rebelled against the rigid structures in ballet reapplied them into another codified art form: modern dance. Anna rebelled against this, too. She says, “Martha Graham used to say, ‘It takes 10 years to make a dancer,’ and I used to think, ‘Now what kind of dancer is she talking about?’ I’ve seen kids who are 4 years old who are dancing up a storm and having a great time and it’s affecting their lives in the most positive way.”

Anna has always taught with this philosophy in mind: Anyone can dance. She learned the foundation of her teaching style through Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Anna went there after she was denied admission to Bennington College and she says, “it was the best thing that ever happened to me because Margaret H’Doubler was such a great teacher.” H’Doubler focused primarily on the anatomy of the body and how its structure begets specific kinds of movement.

While Anna was in college, her teaching style became more involved with exploring the relationship between science and art. Though that approach can be highly structured, she found plenty of room for artistic freedom and creativity within it.

While pursuing her dance degree, Anna met and married Lawrence (Larry) Halprin. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Larry studied landscape architecture, and Anna began teaching children to dance as a way of supporting them both. She continued the practice for decades. Then, when she had children of her own, she formed a children’s dance co-op because she felt that the local educational system was too focused on athletics. She thought it neglected the deeper involvement of the body and the whole person in movement.

Anna became involved in the Sausalito, California, school system in the early ’60s, when the principal of one of the schools noticed a large gap in learning between the white and African American children. He wondered if integrating dance into the curriculum would help. Anna trained 10 people from the co-op in her style and they went into the schools to teach.

“The first thing they did was [have the students] hold hands, and they took partners according to height; everything they did required a racial mix. Within six weeks the learning process had equalized, and it was all done through movement,” Anna explains. “Dance is the fundamental education for kids. They learn how to trust themselves; they learn how to communicate with each other; they learn a creative process for problem solving. They learn a process of learning, which they can later apply to real-life situations.”

Working with this process of shaping learning into a creative process for making collaborative art (like a dance piece), Anna, Larry, and their daughter Daria created a system called “scoring.” Larry was looking for a way to incorporate into his designs the needs of the people who would be living in or using them. Together they found a basic structure: theme, intentions, activities, and “valuaction,” where the score’s effectiveness is evaluated.

Scores are sets of instructions, involving people in time and place, and Anna has used them to create many of her dance pieces. For Parades and Changes, her best-known dance, the basic score consists of the dancers facing someone and slowly taking off all their clothes, then slowly putting them back on again. They repeat this task until a designated time when they gather together and begin tearing large pieces of butcher paper. When this piece was performed in New York City in 1965, Anna and her dancers were nearly arrested for indecent exposure, which reinforced Anna’s reputation as a dance rebel.

Anna wanted her rebelliousness to encourage others to break boundaries and forge new ways of making art. Because of her seminal thinking about dance, many movement pioneers were drawn to study with her, including Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, and Yvonne Rainer, who went on to break boundaries of their own in postmodern dance.

Two beautiful contradictions exist within Anna’s work and personality: While she is known for being rebellious and breaking the mold, she is also highly structured and organized in her teaching and scoring processes.

“When you motivate the use of a particular area of the body, it begins to stimulate feelings, which begin to stimulate images, which begin to connect with your own personal experiences within your life theme. In this way it becomes a total education.” —Anna Halprin

Anna uses scoring in every class she teaches, as a skeleton for creating spontaneous, community-oriented dances. “ ‘Scoring’ is another way of saying ‘choreography,’ ” she says. “The nature of movement is space, time, and force. You can take movements like walking, falling and rising, or closing and opening, and keep layering very simple things [for instructions]—and then everyone is creating, and they love that!”

All of Anna’s classes begin with interior exploration, however, before she moves to the external, collaborative process of creating a dance. As we sit on the Mountain Home Studio’s deck, Anna says, “Just this morning in class we were connecting to the stunning architecture of the skeletal system, and it was interesting to me that this was an eye opener for so many people. There is a universe of unknown information [in our bodies].”

In that morning’s class, Anna had guided us in noticing how the sacrum and breastbone connect to each other in movement. She then let us explore moving on our own, with those basic movements of the spine serving as an entryway to access the universe of unknown information within ourselves. Called “Remembering the Body,” it begins as an exercise in experiential anatomy but progresses to encompass so much more.

Anna says, “Articulating the body as a fine instrument is just step one. When you motivate the use of a particular area of the body, it begins to stimulate feelings, which begin to stimulate images, which begin to connect with your own personal experiences within your life theme. In this way it becomes a total education. I call [what I teach] ‘integrative movement,’ by which I mean movement that integrates all the parts.” It’s similar to the holistic Gestalt concept that Anna was introduced to by the psychiatrist Fritz Perls in the early 1970s.

Take, for instance, the movement of standing and rolling down vertebra by vertebra, as dancers do in many classes. Anna tells us to pause when only the head is down. How does this posture feel? What stories from our lives do we connect to in that slumped-over position? And what about the reverse, in hyperextension? How do we feel with our chests puffed out? Often, we will then draw the images we’ve imagined, give the drawing a title, and perhaps do some writing. Then we might use the images as resources for further movement ideas. This three-part intermodal arts system, known in the field of Expressive Arts Therapy as the Psychokinetic Imagery Process, further integrates the feelings, images, and stories born from Anna’s movement exercises.

The images can reflect what is happening inside of us, as Anna discovered in the early ’70s, when she drew a dark circle with an X through it in her pelvis. This alerted her to the fact that something was wrong. As quoted in Janice Ross’ book Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, Anna said, “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.”

After surgery the cancer disappeared for three years, until Anna made a drawing indicating that it had returned. This time she postponed treatment and performed what she later called her “Dark Side” dance. With a small gathering of people, she danced in front of a life-size portrait of her shadow side (the shadow is a Jungian concept for all that is unconscious in us), releasing pent-up rage and any repressed emotions as a part of healing. She then imagined water cleansing the cancer out of her system. According to Anna, her cancer went into spontaneous remission.

This life-changing event was the catalyst for Anna’s focus on the healing aspect of the arts. Also in the 1970s, she co-founded, with Daria, the Tamalpa Institute (tamalpa.org), a nonprofit institute that teaches Expressive Arts Therapy, combining the tools discovered through Anna’s art and dance practices with traditional theories and methods of therapy.

Today Daria heads the institute while Anna continues to teach her integrative movement approach at individual, societal, and global levels. During National Dance Week she holds an annual Planetary Dance (planetarydance.org), a participatory dance ritual with a theme for healing. The ritual began as a need to reclaim Mt. Tamalpais from the Trailside Killer, who had killed several women on the mountain in 1980. Anna and others danced together with the intention of “healing” the mountain. A few days later the man was caught, and the Planetary Dance became a yearly ritual that is now performed all over the world at the same time on the same day.

Anna takes great inspiration from working in nature. In Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance she says, “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.” Last May Anna created an outdoor performance piece, Spirit of Place, to honor her husband. It was performed in the amphitheater that he designed at Stern Grove in San Francisco.

She goes on to say, “As a dance artist I am propelled toward the natural world by three beliefs. 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.”

Working holistically is the basis for Anna’s process, whether she is making dances in nature, teaching integrative movement in the classroom, or using all the art forms to create a spontaneous collaboration. “I think of dance as the mother of all the arts because it has every other art form inside of it—sculpture, music, meaning, which is like writing—it has everything,” she says. “And the beautiful thing about movement as a basis is that it connects to the whole person, and I think that makes the experience of learning dance a very special process. When you become a student of life through your body and start teaching from that point of view, you are always a student too, and that’s very exciting.”

And so Anna keeps on. Fascinated by her art form and by her students, she is a student of life. “If you think that at the age of 89 I know all there is to know about the body—that’s crazy!” she says. “I just know a little bit, and every time I teach a class, I know a little bit more.”

How to Learn More

Books by Halprin:
Returning to Health: With Dance, Movement & Imagery by Anna Halprin
Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance by Anna Halprin and Rachel Kaplan
Movement Ritual Created and Developed by Anna Halprin and the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop by Anna Halprin, Charlene Koonce, and Jim Burns

Books by others:
Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance by Janice Ross
The Expressive Body in Life, Art, and Therapy: Working with Movement, Metaphor and Meaning by Daria Halprin
Anna Halprin (Routledge Performance Practitioners) by Helen Poynor
The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment by Lawrence Halprin

Books recommended by Halprin:
Dance: A Creative Art Experience by Margaret H’Doubler
The Thinking Body by Mabel Todd

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