Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin (born Hannah Dorothy Schuman; July 13, 1920 –

May 24, 2021) was an American choreographer and dancer. She
Anna Halprin
helped redefine dance in postwar America and pioneer the
experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to
herself as a breaker of the rules of modern dance.[3] In the 1950s, she
established the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop to give artists like
her a place to practice their art. Exploring the capabilities of her own
body, she created a systematic way of moving using kinesthetic
awareness.[4] With her husband, landscape architect Lawrence
Halprin, she developed the RSVP cycles, a creative methodology that
includes the idea of scores and can be applied broadly across all
disciplines. Many of her creations have been scores, including Myths
in the 1960s which gave a score to the audience, making them
performers as well, and a highly participatory Planetary Dance
(1987). Influenced by her own battle with cancer and her healing
journey, Halprin became known for her work with the terminally ill
patients as well as creative movement work in nature. Anna Halprin at the University of
In 1978, together with her daughter Daria Halprin, she founded the San Francisco, November 2010
Tamalpa Institute, based in Marin County, California, which offers Born Hannah Dorothy
training in Life/Art process, their creative methodology. Halprin has Schuman
written books including: Movement Rituals, Moving Toward Life: July 13, 1920[1]
Five Decades of Transformational Dance and Dance as a Healing Winnetka, Illinois,
Art. A documentary film about her life and art, Breath Made Visible
U.S.
directed by Ruedi Gerber, premiered in 2010.
Died May 24, 2021
(aged 100)[2]

Contents Occupation Dancer

Spouse(s) Lawrence Halprin
Early years
Children Daria Halprin
San Francisco Dancers' Workshop Rana Halprin
Kinesthetic awareness and RSVP Cycles
Current group Tamalpa Institute
Working with the terminally ill
Dances Postmodern dance
References
Website annahalprin.org (ht
Sources
tps://www.annahal
Further reading prin.org/)
External links

Early years
Halpin was born in Winnetka, Illinois, the daughter of Ida (Schiff) and Isadore Schuman.[5] Born into a Jewish
family,[1] Halprin was exposed from a very early age to dance, due to her grandfather's involvement in
religious dancing.[6] At 4 years old, Halprin was enrolled by her mother in ballet class to satisfy young Anna's
urge to dance. Quickly realizing that the structured environment was no place for a mind and soul as creative
as Halprin's, her mother withdrew her from the class and put her into a class that was more focused on
movement. At the age of 15, Halprin 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 to obtain the most effective ways of moving.[7] Halprin abandoned the stylized forms of
modern technique to create her own way of reproducing the art of everyday life.[7] Merce Cunningham shared
the same need to reject the emotional expressiveness of modern dance. However, instead of using chance as a
way to make movement like Cunningham did, Halprin turned to improvisation to investigate ways of making
community.[7] Because of H'Doubler, Halprin understood the conception of where invention in dance begins,
and from this she could help form the basis of the next generation's ideas of postmodern dance.[8]

She met her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, while in college.

San Francisco Dancers' Workshop

After World War II, Lawrence Halprin's work called him to stay in San Francisco 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."[9] In order to ease the transition, Lawrence built his wife
a deck outside of their home for her to dance upon. Later this deck became a place of learning for herself, her
children, and her students.

After performing in New York at the ANTA Theatre in 1955, Halprin was disappointed after watching a
Martha Graham group and one of Doris Humphrey's. She thought everyone looked too similar to Graham and
Humphrey, stifling creativity. Thus, Halprin founded the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop in 1959 along
with several others, including dancers Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer, and artists John Cage
and Robert Morris. The purpose of this organization was to give her and others the opportunity to delve into
more explorative forms of dance and move away from the technical constraints of modern dance.[10] 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 of 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.[11] In addition to the workshop, Halprin continued to perform, dancing about "real life" in pieces
such as Apartment 6 with fellow dancers, John Graham and AA Leath.

Kinesthetic awareness and RSVP Cycles

Halprin's 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 initiation is made.[12] 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."[13] She compiled 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 1960s 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..."[14] It was her hope that through formalized scores such as the
Planetary Dance, (a formation of 3 circles, going in different directions, in which you're told to run, walk, or
stand still) the process of creativity would be sparked in both dancers and non dancers. Her training programs,
which can take up to a year, allowed participants to concentrate on the movement of each body part "taking
the body apart" and then later on in the program, reassembling it to move as a whole.
Working with the terminally ill
In 1972, Halprin was diagnosed with colorectal cancer.[15] This
sudden shift in her life inspired her to investigate and create
associations to make a personal ritual that helped her healing process.
She used the investigative and therapeutic tools she had learned from
Fritz Perls in order to understand and duplicate the psychological
behaviors put into performances.[16] The disease also inspired her to
release her emotions through dance in pieces such as Darkside
Dance. Afterwards, she ceased to perform publicly.

Halprin documented her own experiences and compiled the

information to make her own healing process called "The Five Stages
of Healing".[17] In 1981, she applied "The Five Stages of Healing" to
her community and developed large community pieces. Halprin stated
"I believe if more of us could contact the natural world in a directly
Anna Halprin experiential way, this would alter the way we treat our environment,
ourselves, and one another."[18]

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.[19] Her "Life/Art
Process" inspired workshops dedicated to therapeutic, transformational, and psychological needs. Using tools
of the body, movement, dialogue, voice, drawing, improvisation, performance, and reflection, she was able to
provoke others to explore themselves and use art as a therapy to heal themselves. On occasion, participants
return to the Mountain Home Studio to dance on the deck that started it all in Halprin's own home.

In the 1970s and 1980s she purely focused on collaborating with other individuals that were terminally ill or in
recovery 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. One work she created that
embodied her healing principles was Circle the Earth in spring of 1981. 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."[20] Halprin, along with her illness based dances, began making dances concerning
critical and social issues. She no longer wanted spectators watching her work because she wasn't there to
entertain. Instead, she wanted people who could realize the dancers were there for a purpose – "to accomplish
something in ourselves and the world" which is why her dances had these political issues.[21]

References
1. Wittmann, Schorn & Land 2015, p. 16 (http 8. Ross 2007, p. 48.
s://books.google.com/books?id=q-NNBAAA 9. Ross 2007, p. 69.
QBAJ&pg=PA16) 10. Halprin 1995, p. 254.
2. Tsioulcas 2021. 11. Worth & Poynor 2004, p. 19.
3. Ross 2007, p. xiii. 12. Ross 2007, p. 53.
4. Halprin1995, p. 31. 13. Halprin 1995, p. 33.
5. https://content.ucpress.edu/chapters/10547.ch01.pdf
14. Halprin 1995, p. 14.
6. Ross 2007, p. 6.
15. Kale 2016.
7. Halprin 1995, p. 3
16. Ross 2007, p. 300. 19. Ross 2007, p. 315.
17. Halprin1995, p. 67. 20. Halprin 1995, p. 242.
18. Halprin n.d. 21. Ross 2007, p. 318.

Sources
Halprin, Anna (n.d.). "Artist Statement" (https://www.annahalprin.org/artist-statement).
annahalprin.org. Retrieved 27 May 2021.
Halprin, Anna (1995). Rachel Kaplan (ed.). Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of
Transformational Dance. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press/University of
Press of New England. ISBN 9780819562869.
Kale, Shelly (January 19, 2016). "Anna Halprin: Dance as a Healing Art" (https://experiments.c
aliforniahistoricalsociety.org/anna-halprin-dance-as-a-healing-art/). California Historical
Society.
Ross, Janice (2007). Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (https://books.google.com/books?id=
fN9i9LSRJI8C). Foreword by Richard Schechner. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ISBN 978-0-520-26005-4.
Tsioulcas, Anastasia (May 25, 2021). "Choreographer Anna Halprin, Who Redefined Dance As
A Tool For Healing, Dies At 100" (https://www.npr.org/2021/05/25/1000217732/remembering-a
nna-halprin-a-pioneering-choreographer). NPR. Archived (https://perma.cc/ZRR4-2NWE) from
the original on May 26, 2021. Retrieved May 26, 2021.
Worth, Libby; Poynor, Helen (2004). Anna Halprin. London and New York: Routledge.
ISBN 9780415273299.
Wittmann, Gabriele; Schorn, Ursula; Land, Ronit (2015). Anna Halprin: Dance – Process –
Form. Translated by Anne Oppenhaimer. Forewords by Anna Halprin and Rudolf zur Lippe.
London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley. ISBN 978-1-84905-472-0.

Further reading
Halprin, Anna (2019). Rachel Kaplan (ed.). Making Dances That Matter: Resources for
Community Creativity. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.
ISBN 9780819575654.

External links
Official website (https://www.annahalprin.org/)
"Anna Halprin" (http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/halprin-anna) by Janice Ross, Jewish
Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia
Anna Halprin papers, 1940–2008 (http://archives.nypl.org/dan/19000), held by the Jerome
Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
"Ein Idol feiert Geburtstag" (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/ein-idol-feiert-geburtstag-wipfel
-der-kunst-1.4964685) by Doris Weickmann, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12 July 2020 (in German)

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This page was last edited on 27 May 2021, at 06:59 (UTC).

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