Anna Halprin: “Jews Are a Dancing
People”
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Anna
Halprin Leading a Women’s Peace Walk on the Rhoda Goldman Promenade, Israel,
2014
Courtesy of Sue Heinemann
Anna Halprin (front row, center) leads a peace procession on the Rhoda Goldman Promenade designed by her late husband, the renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. Next to her (our left) is Susie Gelman, daughter of Richard Goldman, who commissioned the promenade. |
Photographer Sue Heinemann remembers
traveling to Israel with the postmodern dance legend Anna Halprin in the fall
of 2014: “There she completed her trilogy Remembering
Lawrence, honoring her late husband, who helped found an early kibbutz and
designed several Jerusalem landmarks. Anna led over a hundred Jewish, Muslim,
Christian, and Druze women on a silent peace walk along the Goldman Promenade,
designed by Larry, situated between East and West Jerusalem.”
This interplay between Anna’s
dances and Lawrence’s landscape designs was one of the hallmarks of their
marriage and professional relationship. That it occurred in Israel is a natural
expression of the Halprins’ global connections and relationship to their Jewish
heritage.
“In the Bible it says, ‘Thou shalt praise the Lord in timbrel and dance.’ Jews are a dancing people.”
—Anna Halprin
The Grandfather Dance
Themes
from Judaism have influenced Anna and her work since her childhood, when she
watched her Hasidic grandfather in prayer:
“I remember at age five watching my grandfather praying at shul. He would jump up and down with great energy and joy, throwing his arms into the air as if he were possessed by some higher spirit. With his white hair and long, white beard he looked like God to me, so I thought God must be a dancer. This experience gave me the image of dance as something special, and inspired me to spend my life looking for a dance that would mean as much to me and others as my grandfather’s dance meant to him.”
The Grandfather Dance grew out of Anna’s desire to celebrate her
relationship with her grandfather, an immigrant who escaped the pogroms
(massacres of Jews) in Russia. In it, Anna wears a black silk outfit and
pearl-white tallis (prayer shawl), re-creating her memories in dance to klezmer
music—a musical tradition from Eastern Europe.
The Grandfather Dance is part of Anna’s series Memories from My Closet, which she performed at her 80th birthday
retrospective in 2000. Two of the dances in the series recall her Jewish
background. In making the series, she
says, “I took different articles of clothing out of my closet that evoked
memories and also became my costumes.” For The Grandfather Dance, “A pair of beautiful
old silk pajamas led me to talk about my grandfather, who was a tailor.” Anna
had premiered the dance on February 2, 1994, at
San Francisco’s Fort Mason Theater, dedicating it to her grandchildren as a way
of helping them understand their heritage.
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Julie Lemberger (Photographer), The Grandfather Dance, 1999
Courtesy of the Museum of Performance + Design
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Watch a preview of The Grandfather Dance
Anna’s
autobiographical expressions of her culture and religion are also illustrated
in her choreography of the 1950s, particularly The Prophetess, Emek, and
Daughter of the Voice. As her
biographer Janice Ross writes, these dances “focus on Jewish heroines
who became inspirational leaders for their people [and] fit into the
post-Holocaust dances that Naomi Jackson describes as creating ‘uplifting, timeless
images of a positive Jewish identity.’”
“My connection to Judaism, the idea that you don’t bow down before a golden idol, implied for me a sense of intellectual freedom, artistic freedom. It gave me the sense of being myself and acknowledging other people to be who they were.”
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Edloe Risling (Photographer), Anna
Halprin in The Prophetess, 1955
Anna
Halprin Digital Library, Courtesy of the Museum of Performance & Design
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Watch a 2015
re-staging of The Prophetess
Ceremony of Us
“Anna’s Jewishness,” Douglas Rosenberg
notes, “is written on her body. It is written in her commitment to community
and to repairing that which is weakened or broken.” Anna has applied this
concept of repair and community, known in Judaism as Tikkun Olam, to dance.
“I don’t think it [Tikkun Olam] is inborn. I think it is trained, from the time Jewish children are sent home with tzedakah [charity] boxes. I think it is a way in which Jewish children learn to legitimize their choice of art as a profession. A commitment to making the kind of dance that is going to affect social change.”
Following the 1965 Watts Riots
in Los Angeles, Anna began a series of workshops in Los Angeles with the all-black Studio Watts School of the Arts, headed
by James Woods, and a corresponding series with all-white dancers from her San
Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. In 1969 she brought the two groups together in a
dance of healing called Ceremony of Us.
It was the Dancers’ Workshop’s “first confrontation with a major social issue,”
according to Libby Worth and Helen Poynor.
As Judith Brin Ingber notes, “Anna’s work creating
manifold rituals for communal and individual healing . . . seems to flow naturally from a religion and
history that emphasizes compassion and social justice.”
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Tylon Barea (Photographer), Ceremony of Us
at the Mark Taper Theatre, Los Angeles, 1969
Courtesy of
Anna Halprin
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“I think that my Jewish heritage is why I was drawn to the Watts project. . . . Our approach was to maximize the differences, and to find the common ground.”
Kadosh
In 1970, Anna choreographed Kadosh (“Holy” in Hebrew), which incorporated Judaic traditions. She premiered the dance as part of a Friday night
service at a Jewish temple in Oakland. Created during the time of the
Vietnam War—protested heavily in the Bay Area—Kadosh “challenged the relevance
of Judaism and God in contemporary society at the time of the Vietnam War,”
notes Libby Worth and Helen Poynor.
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"I think it had to do with putting my faith to work for me. At one point, after my surgery, I was in an altered state of pain and confusion. I wasn't sure I wanted to go on. Then I saw a black bird and I thought it was the Angel of Death, come to take me to Zion. . . . That was kind of a wake-up call, and I knew I wanted to live. I couldn't give up."
And so began Anna’s journey into
self-healing through dance, a concept she has shared with communities on a
global level.
Israel 2014
Anna’s work in Israel has spanned
decades. Most recently, in 2014, following the Women’s Peace March illustrated
above, she taught a workshop
at Moa Oasis, an ecological retreat in the desert in southern Israel, along the
ancient spice trading route, at a kibbutz in the valley where David fought Goliath,
and at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.
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Sue
Heinemann (Photographer), Moa Oasis
Workshop, 2014
Courtesy
of Sue Heinemann
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“There’s such an intense desire for peace, the women in particular.”
Born Ann Schuman in 1920, after
surviving colon cancer Ann changed her name to Anna, which, she told the San
Francisco Chronicle, was closer to
her Jewish birth name, Hannah.
Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic
Projects Manager
Sources
- Roland Barthes, Why She Danced: 1920–1938) in Janis Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: UC Press, 2007)
- Anna Halprin, “God Must Be a Dancer,” interview, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, July 21, 2005
- Eri Herschthal, “Anna Halprin’s Dance Therapy,” The Jewish Week, April 26, 2010
- Liat Ishay/Peaceful Living, Highlights of Anna Halprin’s Recent Trip to Israel, http://www.liatishay.co.il/heb/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Anna-Slideshow-Israel-FINAL.pdf
- Drew Himmelstein, “Marin Dance Pioneer Anna Halprin Reaches Out to Israel,” jweekly.com, March 12, 2015
- Rachel Howard, “95th Birthday Tribute to Anna Halprin, Postmodern Dance Pioneer,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 30, 2015
- Judith Brin Ingber, ed., Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2011)
- Joyce Morgenroth, Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004)
- Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging (New York: Riverhead Books, 2000)
- Douglas Rosenberg, “Tikkun Olam: To Repair the World,” College Art Association Conference, Boston, February 24, 2006
- Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)
- Suzanne Weiss, “Famed Dancer Marking Her 80th with a Retrospective,” jweekly.com, May 26, 2000
- Libby Worth, Helen Poynor, Anna Halprin (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2004)
Learn more about Anna Halprin at
the California Historical Society’s exhibition Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966–1971 (January
21–July 3, 2016) and at http://experiments.californiahistoricalsociety.org/blog/.
“I am delighted that Experiments in
the Environment will be coming to its home base in San Francisco, the home
of radical, humanistic, and participatory innovation. The exhibit excites me as
well because it is including a new section describing my collaboration with
Larry and our work beyond the
Experiments. As Larry inspired me with his sensitivity to the
environment which influenced my experiments, I influenced him in my use of
movement audience participation as I pioneered new forms in dance. This combined exhibition shows the impact we
had on each other throughout our lives and I hope it helps people understand
our work better.”
—Anna Halprin, 2015
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