Anna Halprin obituary

[In memory of Anna Halprin, who passed away on May 24, 2021 at the age of 101, I'm sharing my blog post of May 11, 2012 by expanding it.] 

 

Recently, while reading about Pina Bausch, I came across the name of Anna Halprin in one of the texts. So, I realized that it was time to watch the documentary Breathe made visible – Revolution in dance, Anna Halprin that had been waiting on my shelf for nearly a year. 

The 80-minute documentary, dated 2009 and directed by ruedi gerber, tells about the dancer, choreographer, “shaman” Anna Halprin, who was 86 years old at the time of filming.

The documentary, which opens with Halprin's words emphasizing the relationship of human, body and movement with nature, takes place almost entirely in nature. Halprin moved from east to west coast of USA, from New York to California in the early 1950s, as soon as she realized that urban environment is not a nurturing place for her. 

Her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin designed a wooden platform, the Dance Deck, on a gently sloping land in the forest-like garden of their house in Marin County, California, in 1951-54. Who hasn't moved on that deck where Halprin is still dancing at the age of 86: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and the legendary Merce Cunningham..

Dance Deck

Kentfield, Marin County, California

From the 1950s to the 2000s on that deck Halprin gave movement lessons to people of all ages, designed her own shows and performed her performances. Even through documentary footage, it is exciting and refreshing to witness emancipated bodies dancing under the trees, in the open air, in a place like almost stolen from heaven. 

It is also fascinating to watch how Halprin is in touch with nature throughout the documentary; now she is gently swaying here and there with the tide of the waves on the beach, then she is sitting in a cleft between the roots of a tree, with a bunch of bushes on her head, like a creature-forest nymph-“wizard”, whose naked body is painted blue, taking mud from the flowing water and putting it on her face and her breasts as if she blesses her old body, and later she is dancing among the ears of wheat grasses higher than she. The documentary is like the Halprin's beautification to nature.

Another strand of the documentary consists of footage of Halprin's pieces from the 1950s to 2006. In the early 50's she founded San Francisco Dancers' Workshop with A. A. Leath and John Graham. Halprin explains: “We broke as many barriers as we possibly could... we had to break the proscenium arch, we had to break the role of the dancer... we could speak, we could sing, we could create sculpture... you can just find the elements and you can scramble them in any way you want, and they are endless possibilities, they are not necessarily cause an effect; they just happen to happen at the same time..."

The 1957-dated Hangar must be the mother of Sasha Waltz's site-specific Dialogues. There are dancers in black tights who come to terms with the orange steel structures of a gigantic Hangar.

I don't know whether Esposizione, which premiered in the Venice La Fenice Opera in 1963 with the music of Luciano Berio, impressed Grotowski or whether Halprin was winking at Grotowski, but it is obvious that they proceeded through similar paths.

From the images of Parades and Changes of 1965 (the dancers were left naked by removing their clothes with very slow movements) or from the photographs of Apartment 6, I could easily assume that Halprin had a great influence on the generations that came after her.

Halprin says that in the early 60s she invited psychologists and psychotherapists to her studio work, worked in partnership with Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, and thanks to this, began to learn ways to express her emotional world as a dancer. And she adds: “I learned how to use those feelings, this part of expression... and that's when the theater world began to accept me, and the dance world began to reject me.”

After 18 years of collaboration with Leath and Graham, whom she says in the documentary, "They were my soul mates, I could never work with anyone like them again", at the age of 65, she gradually dedicated herself to social studies, rituals, healing sessions and movement therapies. 

After beating cancer thanks to the movement therapy she developed, she left the stage never to return for a long time. Only in 2002 when she was 82 years old she appeared before the audience again, with a solo performance in New York, where she last performed in 1968. From the footage of the performance, it is impossible to guess that the shaman-like woman on the stage, whose hair is in a mess, jumping from place to place with great energy, dancing and talking, is 82 years old.

Stating that she aimed to push the limits of dance, Halprin says: “The place where you will find our own experiences is our own mind and heart; The real theater is there”.

The documentary, which starts with a powerful sequence in which the 86-year-old Halprin, hiding behind a mask and a costume, slowly peels off her excesses as if she were peeling off her skin, ends with the footage of her 2006-dated performance, Intensive care, which this extraordinary woman staged after the loss of her husband and was inspired by his movements during the last month of his hospitalization.

Anna Halprin, born in 1920, is (was) one of the extraordinary and exceptional people who came to earth. Although I did not have the chance to see her live (may be "to experience" is a much more proper word when it comes to her), I am very glad to meet her, even if it is through a documentary film.