Family background
In 1994, at the age of 73, Anna Halprin made an unexpected return to the public stage. Invited to perform at a Festival of Jewish Artists at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco, Halprin created a solo performance inspired by her Jewish heritage. This piece, which became known as The Grandfather Dance, was subsequently performed at the American Dance Festival in 1997 and at Halprinâs 80th Year Retrospective in 2000. Although Halprin had never stopped dancing and creating dances, for more than 20 years her attention had been turned away from theatrical performance and focused on the inter-relationships between artistic and personal process, dance and healing and the creation of contemporary community dance rituals. It is significant that The Grandfather Dance, which heralds the almost coincidental blossoming of a late and remarkable phase of Halprinâs artistic career, is autobiographical. The dance celebrates her relationship with her grandfather; it is dedicated to her grandchildren to help them appreciate their cultural roots. Halprinâs grandfather and his family had been forced to flee the Russian pogroms and, along with many other Jewish immigrants, had settled in Chicago establishing a tailoring business. Lacking a common language, the loving relationship Halprin had with her grandfather who spoke Yiddish was expressed primarily through body language and touch. The Grandfather Dance, performed in her fatherâs elegant pyjamas with a white silk shawl reminiscent of her grandfatherâs prayer shawl, tells of her weekly childhood visits to her grandfatherâs synagogue. The young Halprin, whose own life was relatively assimilated in mainstream American culture, was captivated by her grandfatherâs passionate and embodied prayer and his personal sense of relationship with God. Interpreting his prayer as a dance she concluded that âGod was a dancerâ and subsequently claimed that she has spent her life attempting to create dances which were as meaningful as her grandfatherâs (Halprin with Kaplan 1995: 2). Certainly a potent combination of expressive physicality, emotion and spirituality has characterized much of Halprinâs work.
Ann Schuman was born in 1920 and grew up in Winnetka, Illinois. Although named after her maternal grandmother Hannah, a fact that she only discovered many years later, Halprin was known at home (and professionally until 1972) as Ann. Ann was the youngest child and only daughter of a close and supportive family. An unconventional child, Ann danced from the age of three, her natural expressiveness finding an outlet in classes based on the approach of Isadora Duncan (1878â1927) after a less than promising start with a teacher of Russian Ballet (McMann Paludan 1995: 24). Halprinâs love of dance was nurtured by her mother who encouraged her to experience many different approaches to dance. Her physicality was also evident in sport at which she excelled and tree-climbing exploits with her two older brothers. Halprinâs upbringing appears to have given her the security and self-confidence to develop a clear sense of herself from an early age. Her Jewish background made her aware of her âdifferenceâ and a concomitant need to prove herself in the mainstream American culture which was her social milieu. At the same time Halprin claims this sense of difference proved liberating later in her career when her pioneering work flew in the face of the establishment. Halprinâs family was involved in social issues and she attributes her social conscience to a Jewish sense of responsibility. Several of her early dances reflect her concern with world issues on the brink of the Second World War. In 1939 she created a dance on the theme of war and refugees, and in 1940 another on liberty and freedom. An earlier dance in 1938 inspired by the beauty of nature highlighted the significance of her early relationship to the natural environment (Halprin c. 1938â40).
Early years
Halprinâs childhood passion for dance developed throughout her teens as she continued classes and created her own dances to be performed at school and in Chicago, including her first solo Saga of Youth. With her motherâs continued support Halprinâs dance education touched on a range of modern dance techniques based on the styles of eminent choreographers of the period, such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis (1879â1968). In 1936, whilst still studying at Winnetkaâs New Trier High School, she choreographed Pastorale, performed at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, in which she danced using music âwith contrasting themes of improvised circular and angular movementâ (McMann Paludan 1995: 25). These early performances which drew on an eclectic mix of dance influences allowed Halprin to experiment with her own style and content. So that, at the summer workshop in 1937 at Bennington College, she already had a basis from which to evaluate the experience of working with major modern dance techniques prominent in America at that time.
In 1934, âBennington College, a new womenâs school in Vermont, created the nationâs first center for modern dance. The summer program consisted of a school and a series of concerts given by the facultyâ (Mazo 2000: 136), which rapidly gained a reputation for providing expert teaching in a range of modern dance forms attracting the best known dancers to its staff. These included Martha Graham (1894â1991), Doris Humphrey (1895â1958), Charles Weidman (1901â75), Hanya Holm (1893â1992) (who had worked closely with German modern expressionist dancer Mary Wigman (1886â1973)) and Louis Horst (1884â1964) (musician, composer and dance composition teacher). While open to discovery of other dancersâ techniques and styles, even at such a young age Halprin did not feel driven by what she had experienced to settle into one form of training. At Bennington, Doris Humphrey spotted Halprinâs dance talent and asked her to join the HumphreyâWeidman Company in New York City. However, difficult as it was to reject such a prestigious offer, Halprin recollects of the period âI had promised my family I would graduate from college before I became a professional dancer, so I decided to postpone this opportunity until I had finished schoolâ (Ross 2000: xv). Of the two colleges in America that offered a dance major Halprin chose Bennington and was initially disappointed to be turned down and to have to take up a place instead at the University of Wisconsin. However, this turned out to be âthe luckiest mishap of my life. It was at the University of Wisconsin that I met the two people who would most influence my dance career: my future husband, Lawrence Halprin [1916â2009], and my mentor, Margaret HâDoubler [1889â1982]â (Ross 2000: xv).
Margaret HâDoubler and dance at Wisconsin
Halprin enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1938 and studied there for four and a half years, clearly exhilarated and inspired primarily by Margaret HâDoublerâs teaching. Although not a dancer herself, HâDoubler had become an enthusiastic advocate for the value of dance in education. Many of the principles she adhered to became foundational in Halprinâs development, an indebtedness that Halprin continues to acknowledge.
Recognized as a pioneer in the field of dance education, having set up the first undergraduate dance degree in the world in 1926 at Wisconsin, HâDoubler was initially a scientist with a degree in biology. She taught physical education at the University of Wisconsin and had an enthusiasm for basketball. The particular combination of values and skills she brought together in the creation of the dance degree was to influence directly and indirectly generations of dance teachers and to a lesser extent dance performers and choreographers. The formulation of the degree had its origins in a period of research at Columbia University and in New York City in 1916. Here HâDoubler came into contact with two teachers who used a scientific approach to dance and elements of improvisation, while a music teacher she met had students lie on the floor and begin to move from that position (Ross 2000: 118â19). âHâDoubler suddenly realized that lying on the floor, removed from the pull of gravity, it was at last possible to get the body to move with true freedomâŚâ (Ross 2000: 119â20).
In addition she became absorbed in the work of John Dewey (1859â1952), an education-alist and philosopher in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Columbia. His advocacy of the importance of experience in the learning process had obvious applications to the teaching of dance. This was combined with a theory of knowledge based on problem solving long used in the sciences, but according to Dewey, just as relevant in the teaching of the arts. In his view any inquiry or reflection would âhave the same pattern of stepsâ. âIt would begin with a problem and proceed through testing of possible solutions, to a resolutionâ (Ross 2000: 125).
Although Halprin studied with HâDoubler well after her initial establishment of the dance degree, the type of class she experienced was still based on the philosophical principles HâDoubler had encountered in her studies with John Dewey. HâDoubler was determined to take a holistic approach to the teaching of dance, like Dewey avoiding a mind/body split and recognizing the significance of the physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual components of dance. In her book Dance â A Creative Art Experience completed while Halprin was at Wisconsin, HâDoubler makes a strong case for the role of dance in education, stressing its value for developing the personality: âIt serves all the ends of individual growth; it helps to develop the body; it stimulates the imagination and challenges the intellect; it helps cultivate an appreciation for beauty; it deepens and refines the emotional natureâ (HâDoubler 1940: 64).
As Halprin would do later, she argued for the need for accessible dance and abhorred the thrust she had observed in New York for forms that were becoming tightly codified and refined, resulting in a reductive process that generated increasingly less involvement in dance. She wanted âto revive, through some kind of movement education, the impulse to move expressively, to dance, to develop adequate techniques for artistic expressionâ (HâDoubler 1940: 44).
Ross notes in her book on HâDoubler that the âshift to valuing the process over the product was one of Deweyâs ideas that under-lay HâDoublerâs whole philosophy of dance educationâ (Ross 2000: 129). Dance students at Wisconsin undertook a pre-medical course to increase their knowledge of anatomy and scientific principles. HâDoubler built on this and encouraged her students to learn experientially about the structural make-up of the body and its capacity for movement. Their control developed through increased kinaesthetic awareness aiding creative expression. Alongside explorations into the spatial, rhythmic and dynamic elements of dance, HâDoubler insisted on the value of the emotional and imaginative experience of movement. She encouraged her students to have a sense of connection with the natural world through dancing outside. In order for dancers to follow the innate âcraving for expression and the sharing of the enhanced emotional stateâ (HâDoubler 1940: 53) they must both âtrain the mind to use the body and to reflect its conditionsâŚand train the body to be responsive to the expressive mindâ (HâDoubler 1940: 70). As Halprin recalls, this style of teaching allowed students to explore âall the possibilities a movement could yield. This self-discovery evoked qualities, feelings, and images. Out of these personal responses we would then create our own dance experienceâ (Ross 2000: xvi).
Both HâDoubler and Halprin drew on the pioneering work of Mabel E. Todd (1856â1932) who, in 1937, published her seminal work The Thinking Body, a book that continues to inform and inspire dancers and teachers of dance. It is based on the principle that: âThe individual is a totality and cannot be segregated as to intellect, motor and social factors. They are all interrelatedâ (Todd 1968: 3). Todd proceeded to analyse the relationship between these factors in great detail. Drawing on the work from a variety of fields such as science, engineering, medicine, anthropology and psychology, she explored the impact that thinking and feeling have on the basic structure of the body and way that we move. Of particular value in her work for Halprin was the emphasis on visualization, imagination and tasks to explore her âpsychophysicalâ theories. For instance she examined the specific difficulties a person has to overcome in walking, by virtue of the fact that they stand upright on two legs in a field of gravity. She considered anatomical facts in relation to mechanical forces while simultaneously extolling the importance of visual images and psychological attitude in encouraging ease and efficiency in movement.
While at Wisconsin, Halprin recalls in interview that her âreconnection with Judaism and Rabbi Kadushin was a reaction to the Hitler eraâ (McMann Paludan 1995: 35). She became politically active in the Jewish student organization, the Hillel Foundation led by Rabbi Kadu-shin, and found support here and through HâDoubler for performance work and her senior dance project on the history of Jewish dance.
Lawrence Halprin and the Bauhaus connection
In 1939 Ann Schuman met Lawrence Halprin, a graduate from Cornell University who had come to Wisconsin to study botany but realized while there that he wanted to focus on landscape architecture. They married in 1940 and while Anna Halprin completed her dance studies, Lawrence having finished his Ph.D. went to study at the Harvard School of Architecture in Cambridge. On joining her husband, Anna Halprinâs interest was sparked by the work of Walter Gropius (1883â1968) who was then teaching at Harvard. Gropius had led the German Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and established a teaching institution for the arts at Weimer (director 1919â28) consisting of a collection of workshops and a self-contained community of teachers and students who âembraced the whole range of visual arts: architecture, planning, painting, sculpture, industrial design and stage workâ (Gropius 1961: 1). Given Anna Halprinâs recent experience of study with HâDoubler and Mabel Todd it is hardly surprising that she felt drawn to sit in on lectures given by Gropius who stated:
One of the fundamental maxims of the Bauhaus was the demand that the teacherâs own approach was never to be imposed on the student; that, on the contrary, any attempt at imitation by the student was to be ruthlessly suppressed. The stimulation received from the teacher was only to help him find his bearings.
(Gropius 1961: 1)
Alongside the dance teaching Halprin had organized at the Windsor prep school and volunteer work in two settlement homes, she sat in on design cou...