Finally, The Choreography of Environments tells a history of the Bay Area, one filled with tensions between post-war suburban life, 1960’s countercultural aspirations, and liberal blind spots.
photo shows the Halprins and two colleagues holding a planning meeting in the family home, completely nude, the spillover of their co-led Experiments in Environment 1968 summer workshop. Ross weaves together such per- sonal histories with key moments in dance and design history. She shows, for example, how the dance deck influenced other historic dance spaces, including New York’s Judson Dance Theater and the Berkshires’ Jacob’s Pillow’s outdoor stage. We learn, too, of JB Blunk’s sculp- tural wooden chairs for the Halprin home as a domestic parallel to his mentor Isamu Noguchi’s set pieces for Martha Graham’s Greek myth dances in the 1940s and ’50s. Throughout this wider history, the Halprins’ creative processes involve trial and error and continual re-engagement with objects. Take Blunk’s uncomfortable, uninviting chairs, intended to inspire bodily action rather than repose when they first entered the home in the 1950s. They initially spur Anna’s decision to force audience participation by removing seating for a Ten Myths piece (1967-1968). Decades later, however, she yields towards accessibility and creates Seniors Rocking (2005), a markedly different participatory work danced in rocking chairs by local retirees. Finally, The Choreography of Environments tells a his- tory of the Bay Area, one filled with tensions between postwar suburban life, 1960s countercultural aspira- tions, and liberal blind spots. As a contemporary reader, the Kentfield house is astonishing—both in its remark- able design and in the sense that it was once attainable for some (in this case, white, Jewish) middle-class families in the Bay Area. While the book does not state how much the Marin property sold for in 2022, Ross notes that the family’s second home at The Sea Ranch (a vacation development Larry helped design) sold for $12 million in 2021—$4 million above asking. In moments like these, limitations to public access and participatory art come to the fore: who gets to participate, under what conditions, and at what cost? Ross’s mention of racial covenants and “policed exclusion” in Marin is a necessary and overdue acknowledgment of the privileged seclusion, in life and art, that the Halprins were able to attain and maintain. The book’s attention to environments, themselves tied to land and its politics and peoples, also opens questions. Ross notes what was absent from a 1968 workshop at The Sea Ranch: talk of civil rights and Vietnam War pro- tests, engagement with the broader history of native Pomo communities. What, too, of Coast Miwok communities in Marin? What of Palestinian communities around Jerusa- lem, where each Halprin made a work? What additional or alternative modes of land stewardship and embodied collective practice could have emerged, might emerge, or are already emerging? Anna Halprin may be the most well-known West Coast contributor to the rise of postmodern dance, whose
workshops and approaches shaped local and visiting New York dancers (including Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown) alike. Ross makes the case that these decidedly Northern Californian contributions are insep- arable from the environment of the Marin home, its designed elements, and their attendant routine choreog- raphies. In contrast to the traditional dance studio, with its disciplining of boundaries and bodies, the dance deck, absent of mirrors and roof, immersed dancers in a natu- ral (although still built) sensory space, one that encour- aged them to not only notice their environment, but to partner with it. Beyond noting this material and embod- ied legacy, the book demonstrates the conscious preoc- cupations, unwitting processes, and deep collaborations that go into making work. Ross’s critical framework reminds us that we can be dancing daily in our homes, our traversals of cities, and our interactions with loved ones and strangers. It feels like this is, in fact, Anna Hal- prin’s greatest contribution: the perceptual shifts and sensitive presence her secluded Mount Tamalpais home afforded might have been most palpable for dancers and movers in that exceptional environment, but the prac- tices can be applied, the choreographies experienced, across environments, too. MARLENA GITTLEMAN (she/they) is a dancer, writer, and translator who recently completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Janice Ross’s The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design was published on January 22, 2025, by Oxford University Press. Book Passage in Corte Madera will hold an author event in celebration of Ross and her new book, where she will be joined in-conversation with Daria Halprin. Sun, Mar 30, 1pm
40
in dance WINTER 2025 40
WINTER 2025 in dance 41
In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
unify strengthen amplify unify strengthen amplify
44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker