by janet silver ghent
correspondent
When Janice Ross began writing dance criticism as a Stanford graduate student in the late 1970s, her East Coast colleagues repeatedly asked her, “What’s that crazy Anna Halprin up to now?”
Over the course of nearly 87 years, the Marin maverick has shattered nearly every taboo in the dance world, shedding the stylized expression of Martha Graham, which emphasized discipline and technique, for a freer-form approach that took root in the landscape of the West.
On the Kentfield dance deck designed by her husband, noted landscape architect Lawrence Halprin — as well as in nature, on urban streets and anywhere the spirit moved her — Anna Halprin celebrated the body. Cracking conventions, she danced nude and wore her frizzy red hair in a “Jewfro”; broke boundaries between audience and performer; partnered white women with black men; and ventured into dance as a healing art for individuals, cities, even the planet.
Halprin also worked with other artists as well as therapists, including human potential notable Fritz Perls. Dance, she insisted, is not just for dancers.
“She was ground zero for the most critical figures in postmodern dance and postmodern music, but she was written out of the history because she’s up there on a mountain in Marin, where she’s been living for 60 years,” said Ross during an interview in her office at Stanford, where she is associate professor of drama.
With the publication of “Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance,” Ross wrote Halprin into that history. The 462-page biography, documented with 66 pages of endnotes, is not only scholarly but entertaining, with extensive interviews with Halprin, family members, colleagues, students and others, conducted over a 15-year period.
With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship and other grants, Ross wrote the book while raising two children, teaching and completing other writing projects. Ross, who lives in Atherton and is a member of Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City, is also a former contributing editor to Dance Magazine.
When she first encountered Halprin, Ross was skeptical about her touchy-feely, avant-garde methods. But while working as the Oakland Tribune’s dance critic in the 1980s, she became increasingly intrigued, particularly after Halprin launched a dance workshop for people who were HIV-positive. At the time, Halprin was also working with cancer patients and had used art and movement as a form of healing when she had colorectal cancer in the 1970s.
Because such work was not going on in the East Coast dance world, Ross, who is a past president of the Dance Critics Association, decided to bring Halprin to a New York conference. There she encountered a woman who was “captivating, funny, sharp, dazzling to look at,” she said.
“I discovered there was an amazing story, and I spent the next 15 years pursuing that story” through various professional pursuits.
Ross and Halprin share more than a dance background. Both raised two children while pursuing their professions, both have Eastern European Jewish heritage and both married men with Zionist ties. Ross’ husband is Israeli, and their two children have dual citizenship. Lawrence Halprin, who designed the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem, spent several years on a kibbutz as a teen.
Ross was drawn to Halprin as a Jewish mother. “I celebrated her as an older woman who managed to be a successful mother and an artist.”
Interestingly, the book begins with an image of Halprin as a young girl in a Chicago suburb, viewing her grandfather swaying before the ark on Simchat Torah, flinging his arms and stamping his feet in “the rhythm of devotion.”
“I just thought this was the most beautiful dance I had ever seen,” Halprin said in an interview for KQED quoted in the book.
The final chapter, “Choreographing Disappearance,” focuses on Halprin’s embrace of the aging process, decreased mobility and the end of life.
In 1994, Halprin created “The Grandfather Dance” for Traveling Jewish Theatre in San Francisco, exploring old age and ritual, using a tasseled scarf as a tallit.
It was not her first foray into ritual dance. In the 1970s, Halprin was invited by Oakland’s Temple Sinai to incorporate dance into monthly Shabbat services. Rabbi Samuel Broude was moved to tears by “Kadosh,” which emulated the davening of Eastern European Jews and portrayed the Holocaust through twisted gestures and extinguished candles.
The work “was pretty radical for its time,” said Ross, who perused old synagogue newsletters in which congregants expressed their outrage.
Halprin is still dancing and teaching. “As we’re speaking here right now, she is teaching her 10 o’clock Thursday morning class on the dance deck,” after doing her daily morning movement ritual.
“Anna Halprin: Experience of Dance” by Janice Ross (445 pages, University of California Press, $34.95).
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California