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Anna Halprin's Ceremony of us: pedagogy for collective movement and embodiment

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Content

Anna Halprin’s Ceremony of Us:
Pedagogy for Collective Movement and Embodiment

by

Amanda Courtney

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS

Copyright 2014 Amanda Courtney

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures………………………………………………………..iii

Acknowledgements………………………………………………......iv

Dedication……………………………………………….……………v

Abstract………………………………………………………………vi

Introduction…………………………………………………………...1

Chapter One: Making the Process Visible………………...……….....5

Chapter Two: Pedagogy in Motion…...……………………………..14

Chapter Three: Recycling and Evaluating the Pedagogy.…………...32

Conclusion…………………………………………………………..38

Bibliography…………………………………………………………43

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, 1970.……………...12

Figure 2. Ceremony of Us, Anna Halprin Archives, 1969…………..18

Figure 3. Ceremony of Us, Anna Halprin Archives, 1969…………..23

Figure 4. Ceremony of Us, Anna Halprin Archives, 1969…………..26

Figure 5. Ceremony of Us, Anna Halprin Archives, 1969…………..27

Figure 6. Ceremony of Us, Anna Halprin Archives, 1969…………..29

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest thanks go to my primary reader, Karen Moss, who
consistently guided me through this process every step of the way.
Thank you for your unwavering dedication, positive attitude and
tireless energy. Noura Wedell, thank you for helping me find my
voice over the last year and for allowing us to “grope into the
darkness.” A deep thanks goes to Brent Blair for pushing me to think
critically as well as to Connie Butler for your inspiration as both a
writer and curator.

Thank you Anna Haprin for your absolute gumption.

Lastly, all my gratitude goes to my mama, dad, and brother for your
endless love and support. Thank you for believing in me.

v

DEDICATION

To the late Wanda Coleman, dancing poet, for your fearlessness.

vi

ABSTRACT

Since the early 1950s, experimental dancer Anna Halprin had rejected traditional
modern dance in favor of a more humanistic approach to the art form by taking
inspiration from architecture, performance art, Gestalt therapy, and theatre. Halprin’s
emphasis on the physical landscape, audience participation and kinesthetic awareness
placed her at the forefront of experimentation, contributing to her consideration as a
pioneer of postmodern dance. In 1969, Halprin was invited to the Los Angeles
neighborhood of Watts where she created one of the first bi-racial projects to explore race
through movement, Ceremony of Us, for the Los Angeles Festival of the Performing Arts.
In Ceremony of Us, Halprin used the bodily memories and personal stories of the
dancers involved as pedagogical tools for bringing the two communities together. The
project is contradictory in that it was an honest, well-intended collaboration, and also a
failed utopic attempt to address racial tensions. Analyzing and deconstructing the project
today, Ceremony of Us could potentially be read as an essentialist, stereotyped portrayal
of blacks and whites. This is not taking into account the radical nature of the endeavor
and its effects on its participants. Halprin was one of the first artists to create a type of
durational community engagement in the provocative and racially divided context of Los
Angeles after the Watts uprisings. The failures and the lessons learned in Halprin’s
collaborative community performance can help provide us with useful ethical standards
for today’s socially minded collaborative practices.

1

“I see the artist no longer the solitary hero. I see a social artist as a catalyst
awakening the community to creativity and awareness through which a theatre of
the collective mind-soul will spring, reflecting vital authentic values within our
societal structure.” –Anna Halprin

Not so much a dance as a lived experiment in attempting to erase boundaries,
prohibitions, and taboos...
1
–Janice Ross, biographer of Anna Halprin

An awkwardness exists in our land. A group of blacks here, a group of whites
there. Tentative with each other. Too little trust for too long. The toll of
polarization touches all. Could art lead us from ourselves, from the boundaries
of ourselves, to find ourselves by finding others? We thirst for a personal life,
made rich and heightened by awareness of the movement within and of what
moves another, and another.
2
–James Woods, Studio Watts Workshop

Since the early 1950s, experimental dancer Anna Halprin had been rejecting
traditional modern dance in favor of a more humanistic approach to the art form by
taking inspiration from architecture, performance art, Gestalt therapy, and theatre.
Surrounding herself with early avant-garde artists of the San Francisco Bay Area,
Halprin’s emphasis on the physical landscape, audience participation and kinesthetic
awareness placed her at the forefront of experimentation, contributing to her
consideration as a pioneer of postmodern dance. Educated as a classical dancer, she self-
identified as a facilitator rather than a choreographer and took interest in the
idiosyncrasies of an untrained body.
3
In 1960, she founded the San Francisco Dance
Workshop (SFDW)—a collective of both trained and untrained dancers who collaborated
with visual artists, poets, psychologists, and musicians to explore methods of

1

Janice Ross, “Ceremony of Memory” in Experience as Dance, (University of California Press, 2007),
271.
2
James Woods, Los Angeles Performing Arts Brochure, Anna Halprin Archives, Museum of Performing
Arts, San Francisco.

3

Lawrence Halprin. Words From Lawrence. http://www.annahalprin.org/about_bio.html

2

improvisation, everyday movements, and kinesthetic awareness while ultimately
challenging the traditional, modernist dancers of the time.
In 1969, James Woods, director of Studio Watts Workshop, an arts center in the
Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, invited Halprin to create a performance for the Los
Angeles Festival of the Performing Arts at the Mark Taper Forum. In response, Halprin
insisted on developing a project “with a community instead of for a community.”
4

Inviting anyone regardless of training or experience, Halprin held an initial workshop at
Studio Watts where a group emerged leading to a six-month collaboration. Each
weekend, she travelled down from San Francisco to work with the Watts group, while
also developing her pedagogy with the SFDW during the week. After utilizing similar
movement techniques, games, and exercises with both sets of dancers—Halprin brought
the two groups together ten days prior to the festival establishing one of the first bi-racial
projects to explore issues of race through movement, known as Ceremony of Us.
Only four short years after the racial uprisings in South Central Los Angeles,
Ceremony of Us is an experiment of Halprin’s pedagogical workshop model of
collectivism, embodiment, and performance that attempted to produce self-
empowerment, collaborative communication, and transformation in a community.
Halprin used a pedagogy for creativity and collaboration developed with her husband,
landscape architect Lawrence Halprin known as The RSVP Cycles. This involves four
distinct components: resources, scores, “valuaction” (the Halprin’s invented term for
action and decision-oriented aspects of the process), and performance. The process was
developed by the Halprins throughout the year leading up to Ceremony of Us and was

4

Erika
Munk,
“Ceremony
of
Us:
Interview
by
Erika
Munk”
in
Moving Towards Life 5 Decades of
Transformational Dance (Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 156.

3

published in 1970. The book contains a comprehensive and illustrated manual for artists,
urban planners, architects, as well as community organizers who are interested in the
process of developing community and generating inspiration for artistic practices.
Ceremony of Us is contradictory in that it was an honest, well-intended,
collaboration and also a failed attempt between two divergent groups of people. In
attempting to analyze and deconstruct the project today, Ceremony of Us could
potentially be read as an essentialist, stereotyped portrayal of blacks and whites.
However, there are effective moments from the Halprin’s pedagogy to be extrapolated
from the overall experimental and maverick attempt in performance community
engagement. When we think of the recent surge in social practice over the last decade, it
is important to note that Halprin was one of the first courageous artists to do this type of
durational community engagement in such a provocative and racially divided context.
The failures and lessons learned in collaborative community performance through the
1969 project can help to provide us with ethical standards needed in today’s socially
minded collaborative practices.
What are the implications of using an individual’s resources (Halprin’s term for
personal context) or bodily memories as a kind of working material for shared movement
and performance through Halprin’s pedagogical model? What were the consequences of
this social experimentation for those involved? Lastly, how are The RSVP Cycles traced
to socially-minded performative practices today and what ethical standards can we
withdraw from the misunderstandings of the past?
Ceremony of Us included six months of separate workshops in both the Watts
neighborhood of Los Angeles and San Francisco, a ten-day workshop where the two

4

groups were brought together, and a culminating performance at the Mark Taper Forum
in Downtown Los Angeles. Through images, press reviews, and a documentary film
titled Right On!, which captures the collective groups’ ten-day workshop experience, an
interview with a key participant from the project—the late Wanda Coleman, a native of
Watts who later became regarded as “L.A.’s unofficial poet laureate”
5
— we can begin to
deconstruct the complicated and radical attempts for social change from both Halprin and
the collective Ceremony of Us.

5
Elaine Woo, “Wanda Coleman dies at 67; Watts Native, L.A.’s unofficial poet laureate” in Los Angeles
Times, November 23, 2013.

5

Chapter One

Making the Process Visible:
Collective Workshop Pedagogy through The RSVP Cycles

Anna Halprin crossed numerous boundaries in the exodus from modern dance
leading her to a milieu of investigations in theatre, music, and performance. Taking
influence from experimental artists, writers, and musicians, Halprin created
multidisciplinary and participatory works that intervened public space and often
questioned the relationship between the performer and the spectator. Biographer Janice
Ross writes, Halprin hoped “to create conditions for each dancer to find his or her own
presence, not by ‘making up movement’ but by responding to an external natural order.
She was looking for something new.”
6
The break from modern dance opened the door to
future avant-garde works that she developed over the course of her career, such as early
participatory theatre to socially engaged community workshops, and later in her life as
workshops for healing. “A cancer survivor, dancer, choreographer, performance theorist,
community leader, healer, wife, mother—through the stages of life from youth into old
age, Halprin has left one stage only to enter another.”
7
Halprin’s pioneering pedagogical
methods in experimental dance from the late 1950s through the 1960s up until the
Ceremony of Us were some of the most pivotal moments in her career. The development
of The RSVP Cycles arrived at the height of experimental dance avant-garde and led to a
prolific career of blending movement and critical social issues in the later half of the
twentieth century.

6

Janice Ross, Experience as Dance, 147.
7

Ibid.

6

Halprin first studied improvisation with her former dance teacher Margaret
D’Houbler while she was studying at the University of Michigan.
8
Both D’Houbler and
Halprin were highly influenced by Mabel E. Todd, author of The Thinking Body, who
believed “the individual is a totality and cannot be segregated as to intellect, motor, and
social factors…they are all interrelated.”
9
Drawing from various disciplines including
anthropology, science, and psychology, Todd was fascinated in the connection between
the mind and its effect on the structure of how the body moves. This holistic approach to
dance was carried throughout the rest of Halprin’s life and career. After moving to
California in the mid 1950s, she began teaching children, taking an interest in their ability
to generate an idea, expression, and movement without the constraints of technical
training. Improvisation became the foundation for her classes guided by each child’s
responsiveness in the particular moment. “I was trying to get away from cause and effect
relationships in performance. I wanted to free myself from preconceptions.”
10
Halprin’s
work with children was an important transitional phase in her development as an artist
and also helped to transform improvisation into a prime tool for avant-garde performance
in the 1960s.
This interest in holistic movement and improvisation led to the initiation of the
San Francisco Dance Workshop—a collective laboratory aimed to break away from
theatrical, traditional modernist dance and instead, explore movements intentionally
accessible to both performer and viewer. By inviting dancers, and also visual artists,

8
Janice Ross, “Anna Halprin and Improvisation as Child’s Play: A Search for Informed Innocence” in
Taken By Surprise A Dance Improvisation Reader (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,
2003), 41.
9
Mabel Elsworth Todd, The Thinking Body (New York: Dance Horizons, 1968).
10
From an archival curriculum sheet on the Marin Children’s Dance Cooperative, Anna Halprin Archives,
San Francisco: Performing Arts Library and Museum, undated.

7

musicians, actors, and psychologists, Halprin created multi-disciplinary collaborations
that emphasized process over product while using anatomy as a basis for movement. “We
began to deal with ourselves as people, not dancers. We incorporated actions that had
never been used in dance before.”
11

While studying architecture at Harvard University, Anna’s husband Lawrence
Halprin worked directly with Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus, and he
often invited his wife to accompany him to the lectures. Influenced by Gropius, Anna
Halprin later re-developed and revitalized her own understanding of the workshop. Her
use of “workshop” in the name of her dance collective was inspired by the direct
translation of the German Bauhaus “workplace” where an emphasis on process,
experimentation, and collaboration dictated the work ethic.
12
She wrote that a workshop
is “a way of learning which shifts emphasis from the individual-to-teacher configuration
to a situation in which individuals interact in a group process,”
13
which she felt was a
model of a successful community. As Halprin scholars Libby Worth and Helen Poyner
have observed, “the workshop ethos was central to the work, the process of creative
questioning and research was as important as the performances generated.”
14

More than many of her dancer contemporaries, Halprin was resisting severe
formalities and strict guidelines of a previous art form. She was faithful in paving her
own path. This was also in part because of the fact that she was physically removed from
the epicenter of New York where she was free to create her own rules. Halprin gathered a

11

Libby Worth and Helen Poyner, “Life and Work” in Anna Halprin (London and New York: Routledge
Performance Practioners, 2004),11.

12
Janice Ross, Experience as Dance, 146.
13
Anna Halprin, “Workshops and Objectives” Anna Halprin Archives, San Francisco: Performing Arts
Library and Museum, undated.
14
Worth and Paynor, “Life and Work”, 12.

8

small community of bohemians and artists around her at her home and outdoor studio in
Kentfield in Marin County, California. A large wooden deck designed by her husband
and surrounded by redwoods became a meeting point for artists, musicians, poets, and
fellow mavericks working in the Bay Area. Halprin’s early workshops took advantage of
the vast expansive landscape of the West by observing and offering participants the
chance to observe and respond with their bodies to the surrounding nature. Student
Simone Forti recalls the long observations spent in the woods, which were then used as
sources for movement on the dance deck. “We were not judging what kind of movement
we wanted” Forti writes, “we were hoping for awareness and the freedom to just use any
movement quality.”
15

For a 1959 summer workshop, many dancers from New York City traveled to the
West Coast including Yvonne Rainier, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Simone
Forti—all who soon after merged to shape the dance collective exploring task
performance at Judson Church in New York City. This workshop was a pivotal step in
many of the involved artists towards more experimental, postmodern movement and
sound. Composter and experimental sound artist, La Monte Young participated in the
summer workshop where he shared scores containing a series of simple tasks for the
dancers. Rainier felt his presence helped shape the workshop towards “the task, sounds
and actions outside of the traditional art nexus, the gap between art and life.”
16

Task based performance, often described as a series of pedestrian movements,
rejected modern dance by aligning itself with “found motions, rather than refined,

15
Janice Ross interview with Simone Forti in 2001, Experience as Dance, 126.
16
Yvonne Rainer, email to Janice Ross, August 21, 2001, Experience as Dance, p. 144

9

spectacular phrases that only a talented professional could possibly execute.”
17
Like the
San Francisco Dance Workshop, task performance strived to be accessible and populist,
and was deemed the “the people’s dance.”
18
Yvonne Rainer went on to produce Trio A
(1966)—a set of motions that can be taught by designated teachers to any individual
willing to memorize the methodical set of movements. The arrival and influence of Trio
A played a significant role in the inclusion of various types of bodies, the erasure of
narrative, and an overall rejection of classical traditions. Dance scholar Sally Banes has
regarded this significant turning point as “democracy’s body”
19
—a notion that
unquestionably pertains to Halprin’s explorations on the West Coast since the early
1960s. Yet unlike Rainier, Halprin wasn’t interested in memorizing a methodical set of
movements, she was interested in guiding the dancer to explore his or her own
potentiality in movement.
This initial involvement with improvisation and task performance with the San
Francisco Dance Workshop eventually led to Halprin’s dissatisfaction of “repeatedly
going up to a certain point and then just leaving it to go to something else.”
20
She began
to call her work “explorations” rather than improvisation—ensuring specific focus on a
single element of time, space, or force.
21
New inspiration came in 1966 when Lawrence
and Anna first collaborated in leading a summer workshop called “Experiments in
Environment.” They invited thirty participants to explore the relationship between

17
Pat Catterson, “I Promised Myself I Would Never Let it Leave My Body’s Memory,” Dance Research
Journal 41, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 3-11.

18
Ibid.
19
Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre 1962—1964 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1993).
20
Worth and Paynor, “Life and Work”, 67.
21
Worth and Paynor, “Life and Work”, 66.

10

architecture and dance through a series of exercises exploring people and the landscape.
22

Situated in northern California, the workshop invited participants to construct their own
cities on the beach out of driftwood where Anna would then lead movement exercises in
response to these newly constructed environments. Bringing together dancers and
architecture students, the group learned to work together by accommodating one
another’s choice of artistic production. One dancer recalls “using their own bodies as
human cantilevers to build groups,” which he adds might have made him nervous in a
normal setting, however thanks to the architects, he felt “anatomically safe and sound.”
23

Through this experimental work, the Halprins came across challenges in effective
communication while attempting to foster both individual and collective growth. The
need for more of an operational, communicative structure would inspire them to develop
a scoring system, and eventually an entire process for generating these types of creative
explorations, known as The RSVP Cycles. Published in 1969, The RSVP Cycles: Creative
Processes in the Human Environment emerged from the Halprins’ interest in the use of
the score as accessible instructions for participatory events and performances. Lawrence
Halprin defines scores as “notations that use symbols to describe processes over a period
of time” and are most depicted as graphic symbols, words, and sounds both written and
spoken.
24
He was interested in how the score could be used simultaneously in architecture
and dance, but more importantly how he could make the overall process (before and after
the development of the score) visible and accessible to the participants. “I hope to see

22
Ross, Experience as Dance, 204.

23
Worth and Paynor, “Life and Work”, 69.
24
Halprin, The RSVP Cycles Creative Processes in the Human Environment (New York: George Braziller,
Inc.., 1969), 5.

11

scores used as catalytic agents for creativity leading to a constructive use of change,”
writes Halprin.
25

Although he was aware of Allan Kaprow’s scores for his early happenings,
Lawrence Halprin was interested in the resource material leading up to the building of the
score. He was more interested in the process of making the score, differentiating it from
the actual performance, and also in the resulting feedback from both the artist and the
participants involved. Scores on their own, he believed, were not dealing with the
humanistic aspects in life situations like an individual’s wills and values. He was also
interested in breaking apart the entire creative process in relation to its context—how do
art objects, events, and buildings come to be.
As mentioned previously, The RSVP Cycles consists of four components:
resources, scores, valuaction and performance. (Figure 1) The process is cyclical and can
operate in any direction. Comprised of two levels: the private inner cycle of self and the
collective, community-oriented self.
26
The inner self or personal Gestalt is the
participant’s individual environment, interests, memories, and attitudes. The collective
self is composed of all the individual self-cycles engaged in scoring. The following
excerpt is a break down of the process by Lawrence Halprin:
The choreographer establishes an environment and a generalized ‘line of action’,
but does not form the dance in the usual way of telling the group what the patterns
should be. Instead, she invents situations, which evoke specific kinds of
interactions. As the dance proceeds over long and arduous workshop sessions,
selectivity by both the choreographer and the group itself is exercised and finally a
dance emerges, based on the original score which has been altered by a series of
Valuactions which are then ‘scored into’ a theatre piece.
27

25
Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, 3.
26
Ibid.
27
Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, 9.

12

By systematizing the creative process, Halprin hoped not to categorize, but to free the
artist by allowing him or her to visualize the possible obstacles that may stand in the way.

Figure 1. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, 1970.

Through scores, Lawrence Halprin wrote, “we can involve ourselves creatively in
‘doing’ from which, structure emerges,” he continues, “the score is the mechanism which
allows us all to become involved, to make our presence felt.”
28
Anna Halprin used open
scoring, or “lines of action” where each individual actively contributed to making the
process visible to the involved participants. Taking the role as more of a guide and less of
a choreographer, Anna states, “I was able to design scores that helped the participants
respond from a place of the reality of their own lives.”
29
Her intention was to create a safe
collaborative space where all inhibitions, self-conscious doubts, and most importantly
race were meant to become irrelevant.
Ceremony of Us was one of the earliest experiments in using The RSVP Cycles
methodology for effective communication and community collaboration. In the
workshop, scores were not goal-oriented, but rather process-oriented, allowing dancers to

28

Halprin,
The
RSVP
Cycles,
4.

29

In
an
email
with
the
author,
November
13,
2013.

13

visibly map out movements where individual resources (personal backgrounds,
memories) would help to shape the motivations of the collective self.
The collaborative pedagogy mutually created by Anna and Lawrence Halprin will
become a helpful framework in helping to deconstruct and understand the many layers
within Ceremony of Us. By putting the pedagogy in motion, we can look at the context
of the Watts community, specific exercises from the ten-day workshop, and the response
from the art world to the final performance at the Mark Taper Forum.

14

Chapter Two:

Pedagogy in Motion

As mentioned previously, the “R” in The RSVP Cycles refers to the participant’s
Resources—his or her own personal memories, desires, and motivations that are brought
to the collective. To better understand Ceremony of Us, it is important to briefly discuss
the artistic and political context of California in the 1960s and the specific socio-
economic conditions in Watts after the civil unrest of 1965.
California in the 1960s became a hub for artists looking for alternative modes of
art making outside of the considered art center of New York. Countercultures emerged as
artists began to respond as activists to the politically driven decade of civil rights and anti
war efforts. While these movements were taking place throughout the entire country,
these moments were heightened because of the state’s specific history of discrimination.
30

In northern California, the University of California, Berkeley led the 1964 Free Speech
movement, while shortly after the Black Panther Party formed in Oakland in 1966.
Political activity and art making joined forces as artists, including Anna Halprin, began to
look for alternative modes for social action. “For of all of these reasons and because of its
relative paucity of cultural institutions, traditions, and markets vis-à-vis New York,
California represented the future and freedom for experimentation of all kinds.”
31

For the participants in Ceremony of Us, the context of California in 1969 was
inescapable. Only four years prior in the Watts neighborhood, the median income of

30
Constance M. Lewellan and Karen Moss, “Introduction” in State of Mind (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 2011).
31
Ibid.

15

inhabitants was below the poverty line, and there was over 13% unemployment.
Between 1963 and 1965, sixty men from the community had been killed by police
officers, twenty-five of whom were unarmed, and twenty-seven shot in the back.
32

On August 11
th
1965, Marquette Frye and his brother Ronald were pulled over by
two California Highway Patrol officers for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic. A
crowd began to gather and watch the officers conduct a sobriety test as Frye became
increasingly belligerent. The officers then swung at him with their batons, and issued a
code for backup as they arrested Ronald and Frye’s mother. The community onlookers in
the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, grew angrier as more police arrived attempting
to disperse the growing crowd. Evidently, a police officer felt someone spit on him,
which led him to run into the crowd, grab a woman in a barber’s smock (resembling a
maternity dress) and arrest her. The crowd became infuriated, and started to throw rocks
and bottles at the vehicles. This incident evolved into what is now known as the Watts
Riots, leading to the tumultuous six days of uprisings between the residents of South
Central and the LAPD. The city was in opposing chaos as racist extremists urged Los
Angeles families to support their police department while simultaneously Black
Nationalism began to soar.
33

Following the Watts uprisings, there was a tremendous increase in community-
based projects and organizations that would contribute to cultural change and
revitalization. Elaine Brown, chair of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s urged the

32
Steven Isoardi, Watt’s Cultural Legacy: Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles
( University of California Press , 2006), 70.
33

Chief
Parker
of
LAPD
on
national
television
audience
Meet
the
Press,
stated
“It
is
estimated
that
by

1970
45%
of
the
metropolitan
area
of
Los
Angeles
will
be
Negro;
if
you
want
any
protection
for
your

home
and
family…you’re
going
to
have
to
get
in
and
support
a
strong
police
department.

If
you
don’t

do
that,
come
1970,
God
help
you.”

16

importance of art as a tool for the rapidly growing Black Pride claiming the “voice had to
be in the poems, the music, and the cultural things.”
34
Black Nationalism grew as the
Watts community strengthened and united leading to a cultural renaissance with the
opening of various art organization including the Watts Towers Arts Center, Watts
Writers Workshop, and Studio Watts towards the later half of the 1960s.
35

James Woods, an accountant and a doorman at a Hollywood Jazz club, opened
Studio Watts Workshop initially as housing for artists. The Studio then expanded into a
community space for art classes, acting and writing workshops, dance performances, and
festivals. In February of 1969, Woods hosted the month-long Los Angeles Festival of the
Performing Arts to “encourage young artists to create for the performing arts and to
provide an outlet for young performers to express themselves where all the events would
take place in the form of demonstration-participation workshops.”
36
After viewing
Halprin’s participatory work, Lunch, at an arts conference, Woods invited Halprin to the
festival, knowing her experimental work placed a similar emphasis on participation and
collaboration.
The six-month process that emerged was “a performative slice of that period, an
artist’s living document of these bodies.”
37
Rather than attempting to interpret the two
participating groups’ (African-American residents of Watts and middle-class whites from
Northern Californian) beliefs within their political context, Halprin intended to create a
safe space where the groups could examine, filter, and scrutinize their own

34

Isoardi,
Dark
Tree,
p.
71.

35

Ibid.

36

The
Los
Angeles
Festival
of
the
Performing
Arts
brochure,
Anna Halprin Archives, San Francisco:
Performing Arts Library and Museum, February, 1969.
37
Ross, Experience as Dance, 264.

17

understandings, desires, and tensions. Halprin’s intentions were naturally easier to
conceive before real life scenarios took hold. Janice Ross expands,
Ann’s struggle would be how to both notice and respond, and in responding to
actively cancel out the habit of ‘not noticing’…She needed to figure out how to
push for the visibility of race while at the same time curtailing her own
interpretations so that the performers might be both visible, vocal, and noticed on
their own terms.
38

Using the resources of each participant and the racial divide that had already been
embodied by recent protests and riots in America, Halprin hoped to provide the dancers
with an effective platform and means for communication—movement. Ultimately, she
aimed to confront racism by embodying and later abolishing it through the collective
workshop model. “I see the artist no longer the solitary hero. I see a social artist as a
catalyst awakening the community to creativity and awareness through which a theatre of
the collective mind-soul will spring, reflecting vital authentic values within our societal
structure.”
39
Halprin hoped the work in Watts would make a political statement and
thereby become a call for social action.
Rather than acting as an expert and inserting herself into the situation, Halprin
approached the project cautiously, emphasizing and acknowledging her own context as a
privileged, white female woman. She knew she needed at least a six-month period to
establish a relationship with the Watts community. Because of this lengthy process and
her own self-reflexive nature, she hoped the time commitment would allow each
individual’s resources to be transformed info effective scores used for movement. One of
the more illustrating accounts of the workshop is Right On!, an astonishing documentary

38
Ross, Experience as Dance, 256.

39
Anna Halprin, “Life and Work” Anna Halprin Archives, San Francisco: Performing Arts Library and
Museum, undated.

18

depicting the San Francisco Dance Workshop and Studio Watts’ ten day collective
workshop.

Figure 2. Ceremony of Us, 1969.

Seeing Vs. Imagining

The line between the real and the acted, between art and life, as portrayed in the
film of the workshop sessions and the memories of the performers, looms thin.
40

-Janice Ross

Right On!, shot on 16mm and filmed in the SFDW studio on Divisadero Street in
San Francisco, offers a peek into the elusive power of an Anna Halprin workshop.
Broadcasted on national television on May 14
th
, 1969, the film Right On! remains the
crucial visual documentation for the initial meeting and ten-day workshop between the
San Francisco Dance Workshop and Studio Watts Workshop. Photographed and edited
by Seth Hill, and produced by John Coney, the film offers an artistically provocative, but

40
Ross, Experience as Dance, 265.

19

subjective portrayal of the highly passionate discoveries and emotional explorations
between the two groups. The ten days of the workshop used the same format of exercises
developed from the previous six months: bringing in live situations and issues to the
studio through individual and collective movement explorations. Halprin wrote, “we
spent time breathing in and out of each other with our bodies; vocalizing, singing,
touching, looking, leading and following with eyes closed, acting out dreams, fantasizing
with dress-up costumes, acting out roles on street corners with pedestrians as audience.”
41

She added, “when things got too heavy, we’d play tag, have horse races, do red light-
green light, construct pyramids with our bodies.”
42

The tensions and intimacies that rise and hover over Halprin’s various exercises,
games and improvisations are captured by the film’s own subjectivity: fly on the wall
observation and non-traditional perspectives (some shots were taken by the participants
themselves). It is a portrayal of breaking down stereotypes, pushing boundaries, and
exposing racial tensions through collected moments of touching, kissing, shaking,
grinding, chanting. Because there is only written documentation of Ceremony of Us, the
film provides the necessary visuals for these initial score developments.
The following excerpt by invited participant, poet Liam O’Gallagher, is the
opening statement spoken aloud to the viewer prior to the start of the film:
You are about to be a witness to a film which reveals a lifestyle of two groups of
young people, black and white, who have come together—with the intention of
working through barriers that have kept Americans separate. What you will see is
an account of that experience—of its trials, joys, and tribulations. Their medium
of communication is dance, but they are not professionals. This is an authentic
statement of real people, living through a life situation. I’m proud to have been a
part of it. This is an expression of creative growth that is not only possible, but

41

Erika
Munk,
“Ceremony
of
Us:
Interview
by
Erika
Munk”
in
Moving Towards Life 5 Decades of
Transformational Dance (Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 156.

42
Ibid.

20

vital to change that must come about on planet Earth. If you find yourself
identifying with what you see, it will truly be a ceremony involving all of us.
43

Reflecting on this final sentence, the film creates a space for the viewer to be both
witness to a theatrical work as well as a participant—allowing the observers to imagine
themselves in the bodies of the dancers through challenging the viewers’ personal
narratives, memories, and racial prejudices. Illustrating this provocative experiment,
Right On! invites the viewer to self-identify by putting the spectator in the position of the
dancer’s experience.
Through the reassuring narration of her voice, the viewer feels as if they are
participating in Halprin’s workshop. “Life is being now, not yesterday,” Halprin
narrates, “now is something you don’t know, you have to be here to discover it.”
Speaking to her students, and consequently to the viewer, Halprin invites them to
dismantle their personal narrative of yesterday’s racial taboos, and instead to focus on the
present journey into embodied self-awareness within the safety of the designated space.
The camera shifts from various angles throughout the room, moving with the dancers as
if the viewer is also within the space. Halprin invites all participants to “discover” the
opportunities emerging from the collaboration about to take place.
The typical viewer who tuned into the broadcast in 1969 may have been holding
memories of a decade of anti-Vietnam protests across the country, violent assassinations
of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, and the growing women’s liberation groups
with the founding of the National Organization of Women in 1965. In the public realm,
bodies were coming together to physically embody the protest against inequalities, the
challenge to patriarchal misogynist domination, and the revolt to an unjustified war.

43
Opening quote by Liam O’Gallagher in documentary Right On!, photographed and edited by Seth Hill,
16mm film, broadcasted on May, 14, 1969. http://www.liamogallagherartist.com/performance_art.html

21

At the time of the broadcast, the bodies of the dancers in Right On! seem to
mimic the bodies in the streets—physical presence and embodiment in the concrete world
creating communities, rallies, marches, sit-ins, demonstrations, and riots. As dance
historian Janice Ross noted, there was “an expansive and a theatrical quality to many of
the protest events of the time—as if social conflict were suddenly being played out on a
scale designed to capture the attention of the media and the hearts and sentiments of the
nation.”
44
Similarly, the bodies in Right On! attempt to physicalize or embody a catalyst
for social change, but in a more confined workshop of games, improvisation, and
movement exercises. As Ross observes, “the use of bodies in the film is paradoxically
chaste yet intensely physical in a way that invites the spectators to begin to construct her
or his own narrative of memory.”
45

Again, for the majority of the United States, but particularly for the participants
in the Studio Watts Workshop, the Watts Riots were an inescapable memory, taking
place in their backyards (with one of the participant’s mother actually at the initial scene
between Marquette Fry and the LAPD officers). As mentioned earlier, Halprin was
interested in unlocking these memories and using them as resources for the collective art-
making process. By providing scores, Halprin generated creative response within the
group by tapping into each individual body’s holding memories and re-structuring them
as working material for movement.
As a way to ease the anxiety of the initial meeting of the two groups, Halprin
relied on the creative freedom and unlimited accessibility of improvisation. In one of the
opening scenes, the Watts group lead themselves into the studio room swaying in a

44
Ross, Experience as Dance, 264.
45
Ibid.

22

snake-like line formation to the beat of the music, holding on to each other’s waists,
while stomping forcefully into the ground producing a large “ha” sound—an effective
and attention-grabbing, immediate entrance into the workshop. The San Francisco group
responded by creating a similar (but separate) line, while moving along the outside
periphery of the space. Eventually, the two groups began to steal spots in each other’s
lines, grabbing, pulling, and crawling under one another until they became one large
circle in the center of the room.
After the two separate circles have successfully been dismantled and destroyed,
the bodies began to merge with one another, exploring each other’s territory, and
engaging in the heightened moment of finally being able to touch each other. The men
begin to lift up the women and swing them around—for some of the African American
male dancers, this was the first time they had ever touched, held, or moved with a white,
female dancer. Others began to dramatically drag each other across the floor surface
echoing images of sit-ins where police officers dragged bodies out of restaurants, off of
buses, and through streets. Yet in this safe designated studio space, bodies dragging other
bodies through space became a response, a call to action, and a new chance to unravel
and disempower. This constructed freedom allotted by Halprin through the use of
explorations opened this workshop with the potential to use the body as the primary
source for communication and to seek out emerging relationships, styles, encounters, and
of course, confrontations.
Later in the film, Halprin provides a score to both sets of dancers in order for
them to explore the sources of racial prejudice—what the dancer actually sees versus
what he or she imagines. Halprin intended for this score to help in distinguishing between

23

“real and a fantasy projection.”
46
In order to include the viewer in the experiment, the
partners hold up mirrors to one another in order to see the body language and reactions to
seeing and being seen. The dancers exchange quite intimate physical descriptions, “I see
a very long neck with a little red mark at the base of your neck” and “I see a mustache
…and a gold tooth on your left side.” “She’s still shaking, and batting her eyelashes,”
says one woman to another. Exemplifying a kind of seduction, one African American
man says to a white dancer, “the eyelashes are long…a black leotard and I can see a
leopard colored piece of cloth underneath them.” “I see a great big man…curly black hair
on his chest, legs, stomach, and around his shoulder,’ says Wanda Coleman to a San
Francisco dancer.

Figure 3. Ceremony of Us, 1969.

While these rather detailed descriptions might be interpreted by some as reifying
stereotypes, this kind of witnessing played an important role in Halprin’s workshop, as it
becomes a tool in distinguishing between seeing and imagining. She hoped this exercise

46

Anna
Halprin
interview
with
Janice
Ross,
“Ceremony
of
Memory”
in
Experience
as
Dance,
276.

24

would rid the participant’s misinterpretations and stereotypes allowing for an exchange in
empathetic responses and acknowledgement of shared subjectivities.
Mary Starks Whitehouse, founder of Authentic Movement and fellow pioneer of
dance therapy working at the same time as Halprin, writes on the value of witnessing as a
key to self-empowerment. Authors Tina Stromsted and Neala Haze expand on this
notion in an essay titled, “Elements of the Study and Practice of Authentic Movement”
where they explain that a certain type of non-judgmental seeing is required of the
witness, which is especially important in the building of the “transitional space for
collaborative exchange” or a “free and sheltered space.”
47
This type of seeing is not just
looking at the mover, but rather it is seeing the mover through the witness’ own
“experiences of judgment, interpretation, and projection.”
48
Rather than projecting ideas
onto the performer, the witness must internalize the actions—only sharing what she had
felt in response to the performer.
One must ask, can witnesses ever be completely neutral? Were the participants
indeed freeing themselves from judgment by confronting one another through physical
descriptions? Halprin also used the notion of witnessing to describe the relationship
between the performer and the audience (in this context, the witnesses could also be the
viewers watching the broadcast of the film from their own homes). Towards the end of
the witnessing exercise, one participant exemplifies this type of internalized action
described by Stromsted and Haze, “I see me saying words to people I never will say…I
imagine me in other people’s eyes.”
49
Although these early attempts may seem utopic in

47

Tina Stromsted and Neala Haze, “The Road In Elements of the Study and Practice of Authentic
Movement” in Authentic Movement (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2007), p. 57.
48
Tina Stromsted and Neala Haze, Authentic Movement, p. 59.
49
Text spoken in Right On! from the participants writing score “when I look at you, I see…”

25

their intentions, Halprin was guiding the participants down an unpaved road—a place
where they were encouraged to look intensely, giving them support to see themselves
from an altered perspective. Another participant concludes, “I see eyes closed, tears,
smiles, laughter, and I know that there is love. I see the Ceremony of Us changing my
environment. I see interrelating on a more wholesome basis. Thank god!”
50

Another inescapable element of this film is the seemingly erotic tensions that
weave in and out of the exercises shown in various scenes. In a later interview, Halprin
actually noted this tension as the first unifying theme from the initial meeting and added
that either the attraction or repulsion would make or break the group. Initially, “the white
women were so liberated by the black men that I’ve never seen such dancing in my life”
while the black women felt abandoned, and the white men were not “free enough to relate
to the black woman.” One scene depicts the male and female undulating bodies, rising
and falling backwards, exploring the fluidity in their spines, while holding onto one
another hands for support. The scene then turns into the score (later given the title
Levitation and used in the performance) where a black male and white female are laying
on the ground as the participants circle the body and begin to slowly lift them off the
ground into the air. The two are then brought back to their feet, where they stand facing
one another, leading to laughter and hugging.

50
Ibid.

26

Figure 4. Levitation, Ceremony of Us, 1969.

Although a scene may read as erotic to the contemporary viewer, Coleman felt
this was not the original intention. “It was about expressing the self in different ways and
for each individual, it was different.”
51
For participant Wanda Coleman, the experience of
working with men helped her to develop and utilize her strength in an efficient way. “I
was very strong and that was frowned upon in my society. And I didn’t know what to do
with my strength…that was probably one of the most important things I got from Anna. I
could just let myself be. I could lift the guys.”
52
In one instance, Halprin had partnered
Coleman with one of the largest white male dancers for the lifting exercise. Recalling
this moment of lifting him by his ankle and wrist and spinning him around, Dennis (the
male participant who had not been carried since a child) began to cry. “For him, it was
freedom,” Coleman said, “he was able to let himself go with me where he felt he would
hurt the other girls.”
53
These collaborations that were initiated by Halprin were real life
situations brought into a studio setting. She used movement as a way to open these

51

Interview
with
author,
September
26,
2013.

52

Ibid.

53

Ibid.

27

stereotype scenarios that would then take a life of their own. “Anna might sense
something and send us in a direction, but it would happen spontaneously based on who
we were.”
54

Figure 5. Ceremony of Us, 1969.

These scores along with other exercises such as blindfolding, carrying and being
carried, and washing one another are examples of Halprin’s ongoing interest and
development with Gestalt Therapy founder, Fritz Perls. Halprin viewed the Ceremony of
Us workshop as a chance to bring live situations into a designated safe space mimicing
the role-play exercises conducted in Perls therapy sessions and counter groups.
By being blindfolded or shutting out one of the senses, the participants could
focus on the kinesthetic, tactile embodiment where sight would not overwhelm or
interrupt the movement process. Perls became interested in the psychology of movement
and dance after meeting Palucca, a pupil of renowned improvisational dancer, Mary
Wigman. Similar to Halprin, Perls was drawn to movement as a method for unstructured
expressiveness and creativity. They were also both cultivating an interest in the

54

Ibid.

28

immediate present—being rather than interpreting or portraying. “The modern dancers
were not really dealing with real issues. They were always on the outside, portraying, not
being,” says Halprin. This attention to flesh is comparable to Halprin’s influence of
Gestalt Therapy in her workshop. The German word gestalt means a “whole or a
complete pattern, form or configuration” and “includes the whole thing or person being
considered, its context and the relationship between two.”
55
Similar to the notions of the
RSVP Cycles, Halprin was also interested in the whole— weaving the individualities and
memories of the participants into the movement. Like the participants of Ceremony of
Us, Perls would invite his clients to move or mime through a particular reaction, thought,
or sense mobilizing this holistic understanding of the inseparable connection between
psyche and body/soma.
56

Transformative Rituals

For in this performance at the Mark Taper on February 27
th
there will be an equal
number of black and white people. What kind of partnership can evolve out of
these conditions between audience–performer, performer to performer, audience
members to each other. Within the defining of this question would come the
answer. Not in any pre-conceived form but rather through a process that would
permit all of us to discover in a heightened manner our own feelings.
57

The workshop concluded with the culminating performance at the Mark Taper
Forum in downtown Los Angeles in February 1969. James Woods deliberately chose
this venue in order to mix members of the Watts community with the primarily white,
affluent theatre attendees. Halprin writes, “That theatre itself, a status symbol of ‘let me

55

Ibid.

56
“Gaines, J. Fritz Perls Here and Now. California: Celestial Arts, 1979. “Holistic understanding is based
upon the inseparable unity of bodily, emotional and mental experience, upon the integrity of language,
thought, and behavior. He believed that the body, mind, and soul all naturally function as one whole
process. All parts of the human being are coordinated and arranged to function with complete collaboration
in support of each other and the whole organism.”
57
Los Angeles Festival of the Performing Arts, Anna Halprin Archives, San Francisco: Performing Arts
Library and Museum, February, 1969.

29

in’, was to be, as he said, ‘a tool for social change.’”
58
Both Woods and Halprin imagined
a participating audience to play a significant role in shaping the final performance for
Ceremony of Us. The audience could become witness to the coming together and
ceremony of collaborative movement against racial divide.

Figure 6. Ceremony of Us, Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, 1969.

Although there is no film footage, James T. Burns captures the energy of the night
in a poetic essay titled “Microcosm in Movement.” Burns describes the dancers standing
in the lobby of the theatre holding up actual mirrors to audience members commenting,
“when I look at you, I see…” re-introducing the developed score exploring notions of
real and imagined by directly inviting the audience members to take part in witnessing.
“’When I look at you I see…pink skin, brown skin, black hair, groovy earrings, a soul
sisters, yellow mustache, love, trust, uneasiness, a smile.’ Tapes play words and sounds
made earlier by the group itself.”
59
Reinforcing the active role, the attendees were given

58
“Interview with Erika Munk” in 5 Decades, 156.
59
James T. Burns, “Microcosm in Movement” in Moving Towards Life 5 Decades of Transformational
Dance (Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 166.

30

the choice to enter the theatre either through the door populated by the Watts dancers or
the other inhabited by the SFDW.
Participants from Studio Watts, Wanda Coleman and Pepe Hill, were in charge of
selecting the scores to be used in the final performance. Similar to the notion of a ritual
that is built on repetition, these scores had developed over the last ten days spent
together. Composer Charles Amirkhanian recorded the dancer’s collective singing,
shouting, laughing, and crying from the previous ten days, and used it as a soundtrack for
the performance. “They shout, call each other’s names, move toward each other, kiss,
touch, embrace. Louder cries, laughter, drums. Two group lines form, black and white.
Breathing noise… Jumping behind screens, in front, blacks penetrate white line, separate,
lie down, dance over, lie on, hump and dance over, clap, stretch legs, run, jump.”
60
Burns
describes the layering of scores as the dancers move throughout the space incorporating
audience members. In the written performance score, the sub-scores include titles such
as “tug of war”, “levitation”, “pyramid” and “carry.”
61

Towards the end of the performance, the dancers entered into the space of the
seated audience and began to wash the hands of obliging viewers using washcloths and
bowls. Like a rebirth, the dancers were enacting a purging of racial divide allowing for
the audience to leave cleansed. Following this, the attendees were asked to join in
movement as they proceeded down the aisles of the auditorium and into the outside plaza
where the dancing continued. Keeping with Woods’ vision, Halprin attempted to
physically enact a coming together, a celebration, and a mutual creation between the
communities and the involved participants.

60
Ibid.
61
Anna Halprin, “Instructions to Performers: Ceremony of Us” in Moving Towards Life, 161.

31

During this period, Halprin was looking to experimental theatre artists like Jerzy
Grotowsky and Antoin Artaud who were attempting to break the proscenium arch to
create performances that directly engage with the spectator, blurring the line between the
performer and non-performer. Yet, for this performance, some critics felt this was
unsuccessful. How could these moments of first interaction, crossing boundaries,
exploring prejudices be re-created authentically as a show for a group of audience? How
would the audience be able to successfully take part in the lived experiment when so
much of the work was done by the duration and proximity of spending ten full days
together? These questions would be explored in the final and necessary component of
The RSVP Cycles—Valuaction, which as mentioned earlier, allows for participants to
openly evaluate and communicate the challenges from the creative process.

32

Chapter Three:
Evaluating and Recycling the Pedagogy

If this piece failed as art, that mattered less than whether it succeeded as an
experience.
62
-Anna Halprin

Lawrence Halprin described the Valuaction step as analyzing “the results of
action and possible selectivity and decisions.”
63
The Valuaction helps to refine the scores
so that they can be recycled for future work. Because the pedagogy is not goal driven, the
challenges that arose from the participants affected the collective more so than the
negative reviews from outside critics.
The ending for some of the participants involved in the Ceremony of Us was bitter
and abrupt. In line with the Valuaction component of The RSVP Cycles, the group met
the following day after the performance to reflect on the overall experience. For some of
the participants, the subsequent meeting was an unforeseen and startling end to the
collective transformation they had experienced in the last six months. “I felt like I was
working with my siblings. I felt sisterhood and brotherhood. That was my strongest
feeling…but when humans interact it doesn’t always stay that way,”
64
remembers Wanda
Coleman. What happens after a collective is dismantled or abruptly ended after the
intensity of a durational workshop? How can the utopic performative moments continue
to linger outside the safe, designated space?

62
Ross, Experience as Dance, 285.
63
Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, p. 2
64
Interview with author, September 26, 2013.

33

John Rockwell, music critic for the Oakland Tribune, foreshadowed similar
thoughts in an article published a month prior to the performance. He expressed his
concern for the translation of the individual’s growth within the group onto a stage.
The danger of every improvisatory art, based around more or less tightly planned
general forms, is of ‘waste’ the inevitable moments when the participants are not
inspired to communicate. A Halprin rehearsal is meant to sensitive the
performers, to minimize such waste. The Watts sessions, both in each separate
group and especially when the two are combined, have been absolutely
extraordinary in their intensity. Not only are the personal changes
(reconsideration of each individuals relation to his group, growth and loss of
confidence, etc…) marked, but their expression in artistic terms is transparently
clear. If this intensity can be maintained in a performance situation, and if Ann
Halprin can work out the greater-than-ever problems in this situation of
successfully involving the audience, then the Los Angeles performance should
be amazing indeed.
65

Despite his hopes, critic Rockwell called the performance a “disappointing affair”
because the relationship between “spontaneity and structure was unsuccessfully worked
out” and no “effective way was hit upon to involve the audience.”
66
He felt the energy
and enthusiasm of the performers was undoubtedly infectious, yet some scores were
perhaps played out too long, crippled by a “self-indulgent pretension.”
67

A performance must contain some level self-involvement especially in an event
that is meant to sum up an entire six-month intensive work process. The participants were
looking to share the experience with the audience, but more importantly they were
focused inward on the changes they each had received from one another. In Towards a
Poor Theatre, Grotowski explains art as an act of confronting oneself in front of others in
order to better understand oneself. “Theatre provides an opportunity for what could be
called integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality

65
John Rockwell, “Disappointing Experimental Dance,” Oakland Tribute, Sat. March 1, 1969, 4.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.

34

of physical and mental reactions.”
68
Like Halprin, he also saw the therapeutic function
for the participant, but also for the spectator, “the actors act is an invitation to the
spectator…this act could be compared to an act of the most deeply rooted, genuine love
between two human beings.”
69

Although Rockwell may argue that this was not translated, the significance cannot
be taken away from the participant’s own memory of the experience. The crucial
moments of embodiment and collectivism occurred within the workshop—the
recognition of being brought together. “To be accepted, that was the greatest reward.
None of us had had that… not to that extent,”
70
Wanda remembers.
During the time, Halprin famously stated, “I am interested in a theatre where
everything is experienced as if for the first time, a theatre of risk, spontaneity, exposure,
and intensity.” Even if the scored had been selected ahead of time, the participants were
still open to spontaneous explorations based on the encouragement from and interaction
with the audience. In an interview with participant Wanda Coleman, she felt the
performance was undeniably necessary in order to show the community their six-month
engagement with the work. Coleman remembers a particular moment in the performance
that Jill Dolan, author of Utopia in Performance, might call “communitas” (a term
derived from anthropologist Victor Turner). As Coleman began to sing, “I felt the whole
audience as an organic whole…one mind. I could feel the entire audience together.
Here’s this other consciousness. They wanted me to keep singing. I’m amazed it isn’t
discussed more.”
71

68
Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 87.
69
Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, 212.
70
Interview with author, September 26, 2013.

71
Ibid.

35

Similar to the feeling Coleman describes, communitas is the particular moment in
theatre or rituals in which “audiences or participants feel themselves become part of the
whole in an organic, nearly spiritual way” and when a “spectator’s individuality becomes
finely attuned to those around them, and a cohesive if fleeting feeling of belonging to the
group bathes the audience.”
72
These utopian performatives are the moments when a shift
can occur, bringing the participant and audience member “an affective vision of how the
world might be better, were the goals of social justice achieved.”
73
For Halprin, the
theatre was a space where this could occur— transforming participant and audience
member through witnessing, embodiment, and collective movement.
Martin Bernheimer, a critic for The Los Angeles Times, felt the performance
lacked the deep mystical significance that is usually seen in Halprin’s work and
suggested a “difference between the process of making the dance, exploring the racial
struggle that underlay its concept, and the presentation of the dance: a series of ‘games’
played by the dancers, and at times with the audience.”
74
Yet, Bernheimer failed to see
how provocative this work was for Halprin or any artist working in the realm of incipient
social practice that addressed issues of race. Rather than looking at the final performance
as a staged completion of the workshop, one must see Halprin’s inspiration from Jerzy
Grotowski who viewed the theatre as a laboratory or a “working model in which the
current research into the actor’s art can be put into practice.”
75
The experiments
conducted in the laboratory (theatre) are equally valid and crucial because the necessary

72
Jill Dolan, “Utopia in Performance” in Theatre Research International, vol. 31, no. 2, (United Kingdom:
International Federation for Theatre Research) p.166.
73
Ibid.
74
Martin Bernheimer, “Ann Halprin Presents Dance Happening at Taper Forum,” Los Angeles Times,
March 1, 1969, 8.

75
Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, 9.

36

conditions are witnessed. As Janice Ross observes, Halprin was “practicing an aesthetic
of erasure, a partial peeling back so that the messiness of making the dance was as much
in view as the finished work.”
76
Halprin was not interested in creating an aesthetic dance
performance, but an interaction where the theatrical focus shifted from traditional
narrative to creating solidarity among the participants and the viewers. Bernheimer did
appreciate the “handsome young people enjoying their freedom from inhibition”
77
and as
Coleman reiterated the importance of this in her statement, “We felt the Ceremony of Us
was more significant then Hair.”
78

Halprin’s intention was to engage with the Watts community, create a
collaborative work for the festival, and return to San Francisco. Experimenting in this
type of durational involvement, she had not anticipated the relations nor planned for the
expectations between the groups. In the final meeting following the performance, the
group met to reflect on the experience and discuss the possibilities of continuing the
collective. Although Halprin did end up inviting the Watts dancers to join the SFDW, it
was nearly impossible for all of them to afford the move. Three of the male dancers did
end up traveling north where they taught dance classes at the studio for many years. For
Coleman, “I felt a tremendous pull. Anna wanted me to stay with the San Francisco
Dance Workshop and I knew it. That meant letting go of Studio Watts … I had the
difficulty of approaching this divorce, I had two children. How was I going to support
them? What skills did I have? I had no college, what was I going to do?”
79
This conflict
was similar for many of the participants—the struggle to remain in the collective with

76
Ross, Experience as Dance, 148.
77
Bernheimer, “Ann Halprin Presents Dance Happening at Taper Forum,” Los Angeles Times.
78
Interview with author, September 26, 2013.
79
Ibid.

37

Halprin, but also feeling a sense of loyalty to James Woods and their Watts arts
community. For Wanda Coleman, however, the choice to stay in Los Angeles led to a
prolific career as a poet, winning an Emmy, traveling across the country, and sharing her
work.
As mentioned previously, Ceremony of Us is a contradiction between an honest,
well-intended collaboration and a failed attempt between two divergent groups of people.
Many people today might look back at this project and read it as an appropriated,
fetishized portrayal of racial division, especially in light of recent post-colonial theories.
Halprin may be seen as a privileged “colonizer” from San Francisco borrowing
indigenous cultural practices of Watts, yet even if this may be perceived, this was not her
intent. As a female working in the 1960s, Halprin was also somewhat marginalized prior
to the burgeoning women’s liberation movement coming to fruition in the following
decade. Additionally, she was creating work at a moment when racial division was
heightened in a context still recovering from the Watts uprisings and continuing socio-
political inequality. Finally, the failures and stereotypes that are so apparent to us now
have ultimately benefitted from these early attempts at socially activist collaborative
projects aiming to take on such large issues as race, class and gender. When looking
back at historic utopic attempts of the 1960s such as Halprin’s Ceremony of Us, in spite
of their shortcomings, we can see how contemporary artists and performers have
benefitted from gaining a better comprehension of and sensitivity to the need for ethical
practices in community-based and socially engaged practices.

38

Conclusion:
Halprin’s Pedagogy Today

In spite of the failures within the structures of Ceremony of Us, the lessons, more
importantly, became a model for Halprin’s future socially engaged work throughout her
career. The education continued into her later work as she began to merge movement and
critical social issues into her own practice. The following summer, she held the first of
dozens of multiracial workshops where she was able to take some of the valuable
pedagogical misunderstandings from Ceremony of Us and recycle them into valuable
methods with new participants. Halprin described these workshops as laboratories and as
models for community solutions through the use of movement— a “natural theatre of
life” and “humanistic art as social action.”
80
Making point to clarify that these were
laboratories, Halprin emphasized trail and error, experimentation, and working through
individual and collective social issues.
Rather than expecting members of the collective to uproot him or herself, Halprin
realized that spreading her pedagogy and instilling dance leadership within a community
would be the most beneficial and achievable resolution. A few years later, she began
Reach Out, a multiracial dance collective funded by the National Endowment for the
Arts’ Expansion Arts Program, until the mid-1980s. The director of this program had
followed Halprin’s work after attending the original Ceremony of Us performance.
81

80

Anna
Halprin,
letter
to
donors
for
1969
summer
session
scholarships, Anna Halprin Archives, San
Francisco: Performing Arts Library and Museum, August 1969.

81

Ross,
Experience
as
Dance,
285.

39

Taking the lessons she had learned after the collective had been abruptly dismantled,
Halprin created a dance training scholarship program specifically for minority dance
students who she hoped would “go into their own communities to teach and network with
community groups to spread dance back into their own neighborhoods.”
82
. In May of
1970, she received a $25,000 grant from the San Francisco Foundation to support what
she deemed as “working studies in racial harmony through dance.”
83

Her interest in an individual’s story (resources) as the material for art became a
tool for working with HIV positive communities in the 1980s and 90s. Over the last
decade, she has worked with retirement communities and has brought her pedagogy to
those struggling with old age impairments. Her career continues as she leads workshops
today at ninety-three years old, still with a tireless gumption and assertive nature.
Ten years after Ceremony of Us, Anna Halprin and daughter Daria Halprin
founded The Tamalpa Institute—an internationally recognized school for dance and
movement-based expressive arts education. The founding mission is a commitment to
“the exploration and application of movement/dance and art as a healing and education
force” where students “draw from the wisdom of the body and the creativity of the
imagination as a source for authentic expression, artful communication and new ways of
learning and living.”
84
The Halprin pedagogy is still inherent in this institute and
students are still learning to use their own resources to create scores. Halprin now calls
the pedagogy Life/Art Process and it is “an approach based on working with peoples'

82
Anna Halprin, Letter to donors, Anna Halprin Archives.
83
Heuwell Tircuit, “An Award for Multi-racial Dance Research,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1969, in Anna
Halprin Archives.
84
Tamalpa Institute, “The Tamalpa Life/Art Process” http://www.tamalpa.org/about/hlap.html Accessed
February 15, 2014.

40

own life experiences as the utmost source for artistic expression” with a continued
emphasis on collaboration.
85

The Halprin pedagogy was a desire to reach out and bring two communities
together, relying on methods of shared intimacies, witnessing, bodily storytelling, and
duration. Similarly, Los Angeles based Cornerstone Theatre Company has initiated
successful community programs in the last two decades with a comparable ethos to
Halprin’s community work. Founded in 1986, Cornerstone Theatre Company has staged
over a thousand performances with more than sixty rural and urban neighborhoods
ensuring all the plays deal with local concerns and relevant issues. Cornerstone believes
“theater can catalyze dialogue around crucial issues and bring together disparate
communities.”
86

Like Halprin’s emphasis on an individual’s resources, both recognize that an
emphasis must be placed on the individual’s own resources. Cornerstone expects “every
individual has the capacity for creativity and each has a story worth telling.”
87
From an
individual’s personal circumstances, a movement (or in this case a story) can begin to
develop. These stories are then shared through witnessing, often in the form of a
performance or workshop, within the community. In 1994, Cornerstone Theatre did a
residency in the Watts neighborhood where the emphasis was placed on creating more
positive relations between African American and Latino residents. Over a series of plays,
community members showcased several stories from the community’s history including
the construction of the Watts Towers and addressed community issues of recent violence
against women and the suppression of female voices.

85
Ibid.

86
Cornerstone Theatre, “About” http://cornerstonetheater.org/about/ Accessed February 15, 2014.
87
Ibid.

41

Like the Valuaction component of The RSVP Cycles, Cornerstone works to make
sure the collective sits down together after the production to evaluate the experience.
Managing Director Leslie Tamaribuchi expands, “This helps us assess not only how to do
the work better in the future, but also how to continue the relationship after the play is
over.”
88
This has usually taken the form through helping the community establish their
own theatre group by raising funds to provide equipment and professional advice.
Similar to Halprin’s intention to spread her pedagogy, Cornerstone Theatre offers
to teach their methodology by leading intensives throughout the year. Training over two
thousand students, the workshops offer instructions to educators, artists, and
organizations that are interested in building collaborative, socially-engaged projects in
their own communities.
89
Tamaribuchi expands, “By giving people the tools they need to
mount their own productions, we are helping to support a flourishing tradition of
performance in every community we touch.”
90

This acknowledgement and understanding of community engagement can be
understood through the lessons learned by Halprin in Ceremony of Us. After the
dismantling of the collective, Halprin quickly realized that the importance of the
pedagogy needed to come from within the community. She could not just enter a
community (even if it was a six-month period), lead workshops, and leave the individuals
with an abrupt ending. She had to figure out the necessary tools and equipment for the
individual to empower themselves, and ultimately his or her community from the inside.

88
The Wallace Foundation, “Leslie Tamaribuchi Interview” http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-
center/audience-development-for-the-arts/strategies-for-expanding-audiences/Pages/Corner-Stone-Theater-
Company-Leslie.aspx Last accessed February 24, 2014.
89
Ibid.
90
The Wallace Foundation, “From Bethlehem Steelworkers to LA’s Finest, Involving the Community
Takes a Dramatic Turn: Cornerstone Theatre Company” http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-
center/audience-development-for-the-arts/strategies-for-expanding-audiences/Pages/Corner-Stone-Theater-
Company.aspx Last accessed February 24, 2014.

42

By creating The RSVP Cycles and The Tamalpa Institute, Halprin could become
the self-proclaimed guide, rather than the choreographer. She only ever intended for her
students and peers to find their own movements, scores, or stories by opening them up to
their own individual motivations and desires. Her mission was sustenance for the
participant by developing a pedagogy that aimed for creative individual and collaborative
practices. As projects for social engagement will most likely always be flawed, it is
important to emphasize the artist’s intentions, the community objectives, and most
importantly, the lessons learned.
Although so much has changed and progressed since the initial workshop
meeting, the broadcasted film, and the provocative performance, there is always a need to
look to past working models that can assist and enrich communities in need. Today, we
can revisit Ceremony of Us as a model for collaborative communication by acquiring new
strategies for the learned lessons of stereotyping and essentialism. Ultimately, we can
look at the art of dance and theatre through the eyes of Anna Halprin—exploring
moments of collectivity, movement, and embodiment as potential working material for
social change.

43

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Since the early 1950s, experimental dancer Anna Halprin had rejected traditional modern dance in favor of a more humanistic approach to the art form by taking inspiration from architecture, performance art, Gestalt therapy, and theatre. Halprin’s emphasis on the physical landscape, audience participation and kinesthetic awareness placed her at the forefront of experimentation, contributing to her consideration as a pioneer of postmodern dance. In 1969, Halprin was invited to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts where she created one of the first bi‐racial projects to explore race through movement, Ceremony of Us, for the Los Angeles Festival of the Performing Arts. ❧ In Ceremony of Us, Halprin used the bodily memories and personal stories of the dancers involved as pedagogical tools for bringing the two communities together. The project is contradictory in that it was an honest, well‐intended collaboration, and also a failed utopic attempt to address racial tensions. Analyzing and deconstructing the project today, Ceremony of Us could potentially be read as an essentialist, stereotyped portrayal of blacks and whites. This is not taking into account the radical nature of the endeavor and its effects on its participants. Halprin was one of the first artists to create a type of durational community engagement in the provocative and racially divided context of Los Angeles after the Watts uprisings. The failures and the lessons learned in Halprin’s collaborative community performance can help provide us with useful ethical standards for today’s socially minded collaborative practices.

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Creator Courtney, Amanda (author)

Core Title Anna Halprin's Ceremony of us: pedagogy for collective movement and embodiment

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/29/2014

Defense Date 04/28/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s,Anna Halprin,collective,collective movement,Dance,embodiment,James Woods,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,pedagogy,postmodern dance,Race,San Francisco Dance Workshop,Score,Studio Watts Workshop,Theatre,Wanda Coleman,Watts,Watts Riots

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