commonalities.
It’s important to remember that scores can (and should) evolve. That’s where valuaction plays a critical role. Valuaction allows people to share their experiences. It is a way of analyzing the score and its enactment to help a group make decisions and selections regarding the material and the creation of a final performance. Making this creative process visible and encouraging the input of the participants fosters mutual involvement, support, and enthusiasm. Valuactions tell us what works and what doesn’t according to the core intention of the dance. This process facilitates redesigning and recycling aspects of the score to more clearly meet its intentions. Through valuactions, an ongoing process of growth and change can occur.
In the kind of community ritual described in chapter 3, the final performance is a presentation of the group’s experience as it happens before invited witnesses (our audience). Unlike in ballet or other strictly choreographed dance forms, we are not performing a “known” experience or set of steps. In contrast to open improvisation, which is often done without concern for its effect, we dance with the specific intention to create change. The kind of performance described in this book is about bringing as much of our real lives onto the stage as possible and being witnessed in that act. There is something magical about performing, and being witnessed by other people has a focalizing effect. This magical boost offers each of us the chance to stretch beyond our ordinary limits. This performance is predicated on the belief that the expression of our experience connects us with others and that this connection helps to create a community with the collective power to enact change.
One of the greatest benefits of using the RSVP Cycles is the completely positive, nonjudgmental attitude inherent in its process. We give feedback (or valuactions) along the lines of the score; we have either completed the objectives of the score or we haven’t. There is no blame. If we find we haven’t met the score’s objectives, we can ask questions about what happened and why. The process provides for recycling the best ideas and composting the ones that have no place in the dance. There is no hidden or higher authority dictating the way. All participants are involved in the creation of the culminating performance.
2
A History of Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance
Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance have two histories: a long one and a short one. The long story begins in the 1950s. At that time I was researching ways for individuals and groups to tap into their personal and group mythologies through dance and movement. Later, in the sixties and seventies, I created group events that enabled people to invent their own stories rather than sitting back and watching mine. It was important for me to use dance as a way to help people connect with their own experiences and their own sense of power. I focused on inventing ways for each individual to access his or her personal mythology. Out of these experiments and explorations, a series of road maps, a technology of methods, evolved.6
Until then, I had used some of that technology with specific groups, but never really had the opportunity to amplify this personal process to a community level. My 1969 dance Ceremony of Us, which focused on racism, was confrontational, raw, and challenging, both for us as individuals and for our audience. Throughout the process, I felt the potential for causing harm when addressing hot topics like racism without a strong road map. An objective process for working with groups of people was needed if we were actually going to deal with issues that mattered. I started practicing ways to apply what I knew about dance to people’s real-life experiences and to do this for larger and more diverse communities.
It is against the backdrop of these previous explorations with people’s direct experiences, and their individual experience in relation to the collective, that the story of Circle the Earth begins. My husband, Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect and urban designer, had been working with groups of people around issues of community development in relation to the environment using the RSVP Cycles. I found that this process could be transferred to movement experiences, enabling participants to infuse a dance with emotions and images connected directly to their own stories. My husband and I were curious to know if these processes, which we had been using in our respective fields, could be applied to entire communities to help them identify meaningful stories or “myths” related to their lives. In 1980 we envisioned a series of workshops called “A Search for Living Myths and Rituals through Dance and the Environment” and invited people to join us in an exploration of relationships to each other, our surroundings, and ourselves. We wanted people of different backgrounds and ages to have a chance to interact and become familiar with one another through movement, dance, and the environment. The series was set up as a search for a myth with a community vision. We offered free workshops in the gymnasium of the local college in our town. “A Search for Living Myths and Rituals” was planned as a series of dance and environmental workshops over nine months, culminating in a performance.
We believed that movement, art, and nature could provide focal points for a community’s activities and wanted to experiment with how these elements could serve in the creation of a collective story. Everything developed intrinsically from the medium of the art experience and our experience of the natural world. We didn’t start out trying to solve problems. That came later, once we had evolved a common language and a way of working together. We did this by gathering and defining the physical and imagistic symbols from our dances, our drawings, our environmental-awareness walks and studies, and our dialogues with one another.
At the time of the workshop, four women had been murdered on the trails of Mount Tamalpais, a beautiful mountain in the center of our community, and the bodies of three more women and a man had been found in nearby Point Reyes. The “Trailside Killer” was still at large, and Mount Tamalpais was no longer considered a safe place; its trails and campgrounds had been closed because of the killings. As the workshop progressed, the image of the mountain kept reappearing in people’s drawings, and by the end of the series we realized that the story of the Trailside Killer and the mountain was the present-time myth of our community. We uncovered our need to reclaim the mountain and cleanse it of the destructive force that was holding it—a need to reinhabit this place that was part of our experience of home.
Larry and I provided a container for the emergence of a group myth, but in the beginning we had no idea what that myth would be. And this is how it should be—a community myth is seldom determined by only two members, and never by two members who risk taking on a leadership role. It must evolve from interactions among the collective, from their own inner lives and connections with one another, the creative process, and the natural world that supports us.
The participants in the workshop joined with dancers from the Tamalpa Institute7 to present a culminating series of ceremonies, events, and performances, titled In and On the Mountain (1981), which took place over a period of two days.
