Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance

by Janice Ross, Richard Schechner (Foreword)

Anna Halprin pioneered what became known as “postmodern dance,” creating work that was key to unlocking the door to experimentation in theater, music, Happenings, and performance art. This first comprehensive biography examines Halprin’s fascinating life in the context of American culture—in particular popular culture and the West Coast as a center of artistic experimentation from the Beats through the Hippies. Janice Ross chronicles Halprin’s long, remarkable career, beginning with the dancer’s grandparents—who escaped Eastern European pogroms and came to the United States at the turn of the last century—and ending with the present day, when Halprin continues to defy boundaries between artistic genres as well as between participants and observers. As she follows Halprin’s development from youth into old age, Ross describes in engrossing detail the artist’s roles as dancer, choreographer, performance theorist, community leader, cancer survivor, healer, wife, and mother.

Halprin’s friends and acquaintances include a number of artists who charted the course of postmodern performance. Among her students were Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and Robert Morris. Ross brings to life the vital sense of experimentation during this period. She also illuminates the work of Anna Halprin’s husband, the important landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, in the context of his wife’s environmental dance work. Using Halprin’s dance practices and works as her focus, Ross explores the effects of danced stories on the bodies who perform them. The result is an innovative consideration of how experience becomes performance as well as a masterful account of an extraordinary life.

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Karina Malm]

MOSTLY FINISHED BUT LETS BE HONEST AND MOVE ON

It’s amazing to know that someone Out There is keen on getting every detail of the 4th / 5th foremost postmodern dancer. I appreciated the dance deck and the idea of their sea ranch experiments and Marin county home and her blind walks and especially the account of the Gropius house parties and time in Cambridge at the GSD. More dancers and architects should pair up and get married!
If I was more awesome I would have sat through more of the book but I got through most chapters and now it’s time to move on
I am coming back to certain chapters to see what insights her and Larry’s relationship bloomed..apparently her work led him to participatory community feedback sessions in the pre design phase Which is cool. Maybe will read more about him


ANOTHER BOOK IN MY READING JOURNEY ON THE TOPCI OF IMPROVISATION

[Boris]

A really good book on the history of the postmodern movement in dance and the life of Anna Halprin and her husband Lawrence Halprin.