Anna Halprin: “Jews Are a Dancing People”

Anna Halprin: “Jews Are a Dancing People”

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.”

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING — The 50th Anniversary of L.A.’s Watts Riots: Anna Halprin and the Studio Watts Workshop

  

Arson and Street War, Life magazine, August 27, 1965

Courtesy California ephemera collection, UCLA Library Special Collections

Fifty years ago, from August 11 to 17, 1965, a community was shattered. A city was torn apart. Property was destroyed. Lives were lost.

The Watts Riots in Los Angeles—to some a riot, to others a rebellion—were set off by the arrest of a black drunk driver and the altercations that followed. While the McCone Commission’s investigation rooted the turmoil in inequality, poverty, and racial discrimination, a 1970 Institute of Government and Public Affairs survey of almost 600 Watts-area residents cited poor neighborhood conditions, mistreatment by whites, and economic conditions.