Anna Halprin

At 87 years old, Anna Halprin speaks about dance as though it is an unavoidable part of being alive. As she reflects on her past, telling stories of her dancing Jewish grandfather, achieving cancer remission through movement, and indigenous rituals she’d been taught by family, it becomes clear that Halprin is uninterested in preserving dance as something precious or elite. For her, movement belongs equally to children, the dying, elderly women in rocking chairs, and anyone else still capable of inhaling and exhaling. Halprin, ever ponderous under the redwoods of Northern California, shares with us the belief that the body is constantly revealing truths long before the mind catches up to them, and gives the marriage advice of getting mad and screaming at each other before going back to your own business.

TRANSCRIPT:

Tania Ketenjian:
Last week, an exhibit titled "At the Origin of Performance" opened at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. It chronicles the life of postmodern dancer and performer Anna Halprin through videos of her dance performances around the world, images of her daughters, drawings made by her students, and for me, most affecting of all, a series of photographs of Halperin herself in her 80s. It's a series in which she melts into the elements of the California coastal environment. In one shot, she has covered her entire naked body from head to toe in molasses and hundreds of fine bits of tree bark as she becomes a chameleon with a redwood. In another shot, she is wrapped in a white fabric, moving with the frigid Northern California tide like a long piece of white kelp that has found itself on the shore. How does a woman in her 80s so fearlessly engage with the world around her? Well, Miss Halprin is hardly a fearful person. She's one of the first people to ever use nudity in dance. To contemplate death through performance, and to combat her own disease with cancer through movements and approaches she created herself. This is Sight Unseen. My name is Tania Ketenjian, and I spoke with Anna Halprin when she was at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts previewing her exhibition created in her honor. Please stay tuned for her insights on this week's Sight Unseen.


Anna Halprin:
I used to go visit my grandfather every Saturday on Shabbat, and I'm a Jew, so Shabbat was the time when my grandfather would go to shul. That's a temple. I would go to meet him, but the women were to sit upstairs and the men were to do the prayers downstairs. And first I was so proud to be with all the grown-up women. But I'd look down over the balcony and look for my grandfather. Then I would see him and he would be praying. And as he prayed, he would be jumping up and down and lifting his arms ecstatically in the air. And he would put his arms around people that were praying near him. Then they'd make a circle and they'd circle around the altar. And then I would meet him afterwards, and he would pick me up and hug me, and he couldn't talk English, so there was just a lot of touching. He only spoke Yiddish. And then we would take hands and we would slowly walk back to his house. But my grandfather had a long white beard, and long silky hair, and I was 5 years old and I thought that he was God. That's what my image of God was at the age of 5, that he was a man with a long white beard and silky hair. But what I didn't know was that God was a dancer. And so that's when I first started to dance, when I made that connection.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, as you were, you know, as you were saying that, I was just envisioning that the notion of movement, of hugging someone, of touching someone, that's just as much a dance as, say, being in a ballroom or being in a studio space. I don't think people really think of it that way, but it sounds like that's kind of what you're saying. Is that so?


Anna Halprin:
Well, I think what I'm saying for me at that, as I started growing up, was that using movement this way was so meaningful to him. And being able to share it with others was a powerful spiritual experience. And so I, what I, what I, I was thinking when I even look at this exhibit that is here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, I was thinking that, you know, I think all my life I've been looking for something in dance that would be as meaningful to me as that dance was for him. And I think that the connection that I have been making between how you can use dance as a form of communication with your highest levels of spirituality. It is an enormous gift that we all have. And I called that ritual because I felt that the intention of dances can be transformative rather than only entertainment. So, that little memory I have says a lot about what has driven me to maintain my connection to dance as a form of highest expression throughout the years. I mean, I just keeps getting better and better. So at the age of 87, I feel, well, that's another kind of dance one does. It's not that you stop dancing, it's that your dances change as your life experience change. I never thought of dance in relationship to actual healing until I was stricken with cancer. And what was interesting about that experience— It's more than interesting. What was revealing to me about that dance was that I discovered I had cancer through an image that I created when I was in a dance modality.

One of the things that I use as a teaching tool is doing a life-size self-portrait. And dancing all the parts of your body. What do your arms have to say? What is your— what does the spine have to say? What does your pelvis have to say? What are all the different parts of your body? Because each part of your body has its own mythology. And when I was working on my self-portrait, I drew something that was very ominous to me and I intellectually began to— put certain kinds of intellectual meaning to it. But I wouldn't dance it. And that was a signal that I was avoiding something. And I had the intuition to go see a doctor. And when he examined me where I had this, this mass of gray matter in my pelvic area, discovered that I had actually drawn a tumor that was in my body. And as a result of that experience, I began to examine other people's images and look at them very carefully and began to work with a very sophisticated and disciplined process of— feedback between movement and feeling. For example, if you make a fist out of your hands, that will generate a particular feeling that if your hands are open and facing up, or if your hands are facing down, or if your hands are facing— all the levels of movement has a feedback process. To how you feel. And that feedback process between movement and feeling also is very unique to each person. And that's what I co— began to call myth. That's your story.

So I began to really work hard on myself. Uh, I had an operation and the doctor said "Oh, you're just fine now, you're cured." And I said, that's funny, thank you for curing me, but I don't really feel healed. I'm very frightened, I have no idea how I got this or whether, you know, it'll spread or whether I'll get it again. And he said, well, if in 3 years it doesn't come back, you're scot-free. Well, in 2 years, in 3 years it did come back. And so I madly, I said to the doctor, "How much time do I have?" He said, "Oh, I'll give you a month, you make up your mind what you want to do." Because I didn't want to go into surgery again. So I worked very hard on a feedback process. And I kept dancing at this time. I kept dancing over and over again and drawing and dancing and writing. And I went into spontaneous remission. And so that's what— and that wasn't unusual. I mean, since my own experience, I've heard about research that's been done and how the mind can inform the body, how the body can inform the mind. And that connection between mind and body, I had never really made before. And it was like, instant enlightenment at gunpoint. It was like, you better get this and you better get it fast. And that's when I started using the word myth and ritual. And that's when my dances began to address people that had health issues. I spent 25 years working with people with cancer and AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses, created dances for their caregivers and themselves. And some of the most powerful dances that I've experienced and created with people with illness and their caretakers have been around the issues of healing.

You know, healing is a big word. You can't really be healed until you're emotionally at peace, until your body has some holistic connection to your mind. Healing is becoming whole. It's not just curing a disease. And when I've worked with people, some people get so caught up in a New Age theory about healing that they just throw the medical profession out the window. And I keep saying, don't do that. Use every resource available, but participate. Don't try to lay it all on your doctor. He can only do certain things for you, but you have to participate and do something for yourself. So dance became for me a very powerful way to be useful to people.


Tania Ketenjian:
It's amazing how useful you have been to people, especially as I've done research about your work, about your life. And when I think of the terms being whole, or when I think of the terms of, you know, when I think about dance and really being in your body, it's so scary for some people, for a lot of people. And I'm sure you came across that many times.


Anna Halprin:
Oh, yeah. Of course. Well, I imagine that fear is the bottom line for all of us. Certainly is for me. One of the most delightful experiences I've had recently is working with a group of seniors, and we did a performance recently called seniors rocking and they were in rocking chairs. So everybody could move, everybody could take a pulse, you know, just rocking. And then people of different physical abilities could spring out of the rocking chair and do something very spontaneous or they could move their legs or their arms, they could hold hands and move. And it was just a delightful, experience to realize that you could dance no matter how old you were, yeah. And I noticed that this exhibit is called Origins of Performance. And when I think of the origins of dance, I think of indigenous cultures. In our own American Indians, if you have ever been to their festivals and seen their dances, little kids, grandmas and grandpas, young Braves. It's totally multigenerational. It's totally a part of their life. Originally, dance was the way you gathered strength and courage for the hunt or the way you would welcome the rain or the way you would pray for the crops to grow. It was— my son-in-law is a— a Cheyenne American Indian, and he once said to me, "I never knew that dance was supposed to be beautiful. I just thought it was part of life." I think that that's my vision and my— what drives me is to keep up with life around me.


Tania Ketenjian:
There was a great quote, and I'm sure you've been asked this before, where, you know, upon your illness, you had realized that prior to that, your art had that your— excuse me— your life had defined your art, and after that, your art began to define your life. And I just wanted to talk about that statement, what that really means.


Anna Halprin:
Well, I think at the beginning— and you would see this in the exhibition that's out there— but I think in the beginning, dance at that time was based on the idiosyncrasies idiosyncratic style of these great modern dancers. If you know your history of the big revolution that came after World War II was the breakaway from ballet. Actually, Isadora Duncan was the first. It was long before World War II. But it wasn't really picked up and participated in. It was just Isadora Duncan was the great, woman who revolutionized dance. It was picked up by members of her company, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and the most popular was Martha Graham. And I was invited by Martha Graham to come to New York and participate in a festival of modern dance. And I was, you know, so excited and so flattered. I was in my 30s at the time. Oh, this was just the best. So when I went there, I saw 2 weeks every day of modern dance. And I began to have doubts because I said, well, what is philosophically the difference between this and ballet?

In ballet, you learn a cultural style. But in modern dance, you're learning a personality style, because everybody in Martha Graham's company looked like Martha Graham. Everybody in Doris Humphrey's company looked like Doris Humphrey. And I began to doubt that this was, this was something that I wanted to identify with. And so, I came back home, and I didn't know quite where to start, but I decided to start with the body itself. And how does the body function according to the natural forces of nature? I had to do human dissection. So I did human dissection for one year to study the skeletal structure and the physiological structure. And then I noticed that once I took away the style, an imposed, preconceived style, which we call idiosyncratic style, that it sort of released armor. So you could go directly from a very natural movement into a movement feeling. Well, I remember in class that I was teaching one time, I was trying to help a student open up their chest and I used my hand to to simply remind, to bring his attention here. And he started to weep, just cried and wept. And I was stunned, I was absolutely shocked. I didn't know what I had done that had brought about this reaction.

At about the same time, I was introduced to a Gestalt therapist, a famous Gestalt therapist called Fritz Perls. And it was the beginning of the New Age movement where people were taking the sophisticated psychology and adapting it to everyday people. Instead of, you know, you have to be crazy and you have to, you know, deal with this as a terrible disease. No, they were beginning to deal with the emotional impact on one's life as something that was of value to everyday people, to ordinary people. And so working with Fritz for 8 years, I began to develop the confidence that I had an objective approach to helping people use dance as a way of confronting their emotions and going through whatever changes they chose to go through, to transform their lives. And I gradually began to develop certain processes that enabled dance to become more personalized. And I, as a teacher, began to teach processes, like a 3-part process. How do you get a feedback going between movement, feeling, and imagery? Or a 5-part process. How do you confront, how do you identify an issue in your life? How do you confront that issue? How do you release it? How do you change? How do you apply it to your life? So I began gradually to find an objective series of methods, if you will, but I prefer to call them approaches, that generated creativity in other people. No longer could I identify with myself as a modern dancer. And I don't to this day consider myself a modern dancer. I'm more interested now in using dance to generate individual creativity and to use dance as a way of expressing your— who you are, who you are in a relationship, who you are in a group, who you are in community. And most important of all, who you are with the earth.


Tania Ketenjian:
I noticed that there was this great kind of— I don't know if it would be one of your approaches, but it was about going out into nature and spending, you know, not necessarily a tremendous amount of time there, but going out there and seeing, you know, really trying to understand the lessons that it gives you.


Anna Halprin:
Well, my studio— I have an indoor studio, that bridges to an outdoor dance deck. So I am in an oak and redwood grove. I am in nature all the time. That's where our work is. I'm very aware of no boundaries. I'm very aware of the birds overhead, their movement and their sounds, the deers that go past, the little red foxes. The snakes, everything is right there. So I never am apart from the natural forces. But I think that, as I said before, I'm 87, and I think if I have gained any wisdom at all, and I think it just takes a little time, not— I think if you're stupid when you're young, you're stupider when you're old. So I don't— I don't care about the word elder. I just say I'm a senior. I'm an old woman. And I'm not necessarily wiser because I'm older. I've just had more time to grow. And in that growing process, I've come up against some pretty challenging situations in my life. And I've learned from going through those challenges. The more difficult the situation is, the more I've learned. But I think where I am now is that where I find my greatest peace is when I'm in direct contact with the natural world and when I'm in contact .Yeah, with the earth.


Tania Ketenjian:
And, you know, I think, I mean, in, I mean, you know, there was a— I was reading your, um, your bio, and I really— on your website, and I really love that your husband had written something about you as well. It was like your statement and then your husband's view.


Anna Halprin:
The, the home page, that's his self-portrait of me.


Tania Ketenjian:
It's just beautiful that you've been married for 65 years.


Anna Halprin:
Yeah, I was just, I was 19 and had just turned 20. He was 23, just turned 20, 24, and he helped me understand and develop an acute awareness to the importance of the environment, and my work has been very much influenced by that awareness, and we've collaborated on everything he does, everything I do. So we've had a great time.


Tania Ketenjian:
I've asked many people, you know, what their secret to their marriage is and just creating a life with someone else, and, you know, what has done it for you?


Anna Halprin:
I think it's being able to accept our differences, but strengthen our commonalities. And we have a lot of commonalities. We're both artists. We both come from a Russian Jewish background, which is very important. Russian Jews have a particular temperament, and it's helpful to, you know, be able to deal with that. And we've both— enjoyed having a family, having daughters. And I think it's, you know, I remember reading in the newspaper about an Italian couple who had been married very, for a very long time and they were asked, "How have you, what's the secret?" And the little old Italian lady said, "Well, we get mad and then we scream and yell at each other and then we just go back to our business." I thought, well, that's a good one.


Tania Ketenjian:
That's what my grandparents would have said, definitely.


Anna Halprin:
Yeah. You know, they didn't have therapy in those days. And the wife was so dependent on the husband too. Now it's so much easier to separate because women are so much more independent. So, I'd say we had enough commonalities to deal with our differences.


Tania Ketenjian:
Yeah, it sounds like it. You know, I interview so many people, and sometimes when I really observe their life, I just think, "How did they do it? How did they create such a great life for themselves?" You know, in the case of your life, You know, you've kind of exercised your passion. I mean, you've done what you truly, deeply want to do in life. And it's hard to really do that, I think, for a lot of people. You live in this extraordinary part of the world. It's so beautiful. You transform people's lives by, you know, kind of, you know, getting them to understand themselves and their bodies and healing them through that. It just sounds absolutely amazing, and I just kind of— You know, how does that happen?


Anna Halprin:
I just lucked out. I really did. I just lucked out. Everything just fell into place. I married the right guy. I lived in the right place. I had two beautiful, healthy daughters. It was just luck.


Tania Ketenjian:
Yeah, I guess that's what happens.


Anna Halprin:
I mean, I got sick and I overcame it. I've just really been lucky.


Tania Ketenjian:
A friend of mine— I was telling a friend of mine that I was going to be interviewing you yesterday, and he said, you know, I'd really be curious to know how it feels as, as a dancer now that you're older, now that you're an old woman, to—


Anna Halprin:
You're not afraid, that word, old lady.


Tania Ketenjian:
Now that you're an old lady, how does it— you know, it's like you're, you know, dance based on the vibrancy and the health and the abilities of the body. So, what's that— how's that transition like?


Anna Halprin:
Well, you know, people, their definition of dance is terribly youth-oriented, where you can do these extraordinary movements. But I used to define dance by saying, dance is the breath made visible. As long as you can breathe, as long as you have an ounce of life in you, it translates into some kind of either stillness or movement. And there, you know, if you look at the breath, you breathe in, so you're taking in from the outer world. You pause. You're in a moment of stillness. You breathe out, you share it with others, and then there's a moment of total peace where you're not breathing in and you're not breathing out. You can sit, you can stand, you can lie down and be absolutely still and out of that stillness you can emanate an expression. It's ageless, it's absolutely ageless, and it's sad to me when people feel that when their bodies are not as youthful as they were at one time, and they're not as agile, they're not as strong, they're not as well coordinated, that this means that their life has somehow or other stopped. It's just not true. It's just not true. It's just that that word dance has in our culture been so associated with youth that it has denied us really the ability to connect to dance in a very powerful, meaningful way.


Tania Ketenjian:
Those were the words of performer and postmodern dancer Anna Halprin. The exhibition Anna Halperin at the Origin of Performance performance can be viewed at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. To learn more about Anna Halperin and to visit her studio, check out Anna Halprin official website. My name is Tania Ketenjian. This is Sight Unseen. You're listening to Resonance 104.4 FM, the UK's first radio art station.