at the College of Marin at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. The dance included ritual reenactments of the trailside murders, with friends and families of the slain women in the audience. A series of ceremonies and rituals lasting all night and into the next day’s sunrise followed that performance. On the second day, we went up the mountain. Eighty people, including some children, braved their fear of the Trailside Killer, riding in buses to the top of the mountain. There we took part in a series of offerings at each place where a woman had been murdered. People read poems and told stories; children danced spontaneously; somebody planted a tree. We were marking these tragedies and affirming our connection to the mountain. A week after our performance, an anonymous phone call helped police locate the killer. Three weeks later, the killer was caught.
Did this community dance help to catch the killer, or was it just a coincidence? Does the collective mind and spirit have the power to bring about a change of this magnitude? It doesn’t really matter who gets credit for catching the killer: the dance, the mountain, the police, or the spirit. In and On the Mountain was a prayer, a prayer said not with words alone, but by the whole body of the collective through dance. When you say a prayer and your prayers are answered, that’s not the time to start questioning whether or how prayer works. When your prayers are answered, that’s the time to give thanks. And pray again.
In that spirit of gratitude and awe, the next year we created another dance, an offering of thanks that the killings had stopped and that the mountain had been reclaimed. We called it simply Thanksgiving. We had built a sense of community and felt we had begun to uncover a myth with both an immediate, personal meaning and a larger, more universal one. On the immediate level we were reconnecting with our mountain; more broadly we were reconnecting with the environment, restoring our place in nature and our deep appreciation of the value of aligning with one another in community.
This might have been the end of the story were it not for a visit from a 107-year-old Huichol shaman, Don Jose Mitsuwa, who came to Tamalpa Institute during the following year to present a deer dance ceremony. When we told him about our previous performances on the mountain, he said, “The mountain is one of the most sacred places on earth. I believe in what your community did, but to be successful in purifying this mountain, you must return to it and dance for five years.” As with the Corn Dance that so moved me in Santo Domingo, New Mexico, I was confronted again with indigenous wisdom that directed us to focus our intent, ignite our enthusiasm, and repeat the motions of our dance. What had started out as an experiment had had such far-reaching results that we were committed to fulfilling Don Jose’s near-directive. His words made me see that our experiment had connected to something essential. The experience had a momentum of its own, and I wanted to see where it would go and how it could integrate into the ongoing myth of my community.
Score for In and On the Mountain, 1981. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.
By this time it was clear that one intrinsic theme of these dances was the struggle of life against death. In 1983 the dancers and participants in our workshops presented Return to the Mountain, in which we used images from the animal world in a dance and ceremony for peace between people and the natural environment. The next day, Don Jose joined us and members of the local community for a ceremony on the top of Mount Tamalpais. He planted a feather he had received on a Himalayan peak and then led us around the top of the mountain, so we could look out and see the four directions. This moment in Return to the Mountain signaled a broadening of our view from our specific community needs to their connection with the larger world around us.
For the following year, 1984, we decided to use running as our theme and called our dance Run to the Mountain. Our intention was to dance for peace among the peoples of the world. Peace rose up as an issue of importance to us during our preparatory workshops, and we chose to highlight running because it is a movement common to all people and it symbolized the urgency of our hope for peace. A month before the performance, we began running with banners through our neighborhoods and on the Golden Gate Bridge, both to get in physical condition and to arouse curiosity about our upcoming event. The hardiest of our group ran up the mountain from four different directions. An eighty-five-year-old participant, Jack Stack, led us on the first mountain run. For many subsequent years, running continued to be an integral part of our day on the mountain.
As Don Jose pointed out, Mount Tamalpais, where the dance originally took place, is historically the sacred ground of the local Miwok tribe. I wanted to honor their connection to this land as we honored our own connection to it. However, in no way was I attempting to imitate or replicate Native American rituals. I seek to honor the values of this culture, not appropriate them for my own uses.
In 1984 religious leaders from different faiths led participants around the peak, stopping in each of the four directions—north, east, south, and west—to offer inspirational words. As we made our procession, I looked out from the mountain toward the ocean and deeply felt how important it was to relate our dance not only to our mountain but to the larger world as well. At that time the greatest threat to peace on the planet was the tension between the Soviet and American superpowers and the proliferation of nuclear arms. I imagined our dance becoming a peace dance on a larger scale.
In envisioning a global scope for our dance, I realized that a local group of dancers would not be strong enough to match this vision. The power of the performance needed to match the power of the intention. I imagined one hundred people joining together to perform this dance. I thought that if enough of us danced together with a common intention it would have the potential to create change.
For our 1985 ritual, we decided to go beyond our immediate community and open the dance to anyone who wanted to perform. We sent out a call for participants: “One hundred performers to create a spirit voice strong enough so that our peaceful song is heard and our peaceful steps felt. The weapons of war have a critical mass. So, too, do the hopes of peace. We need 100 performers, 200 feet, to dance upon the planet for its life and its healing—to find a dance that inspires us to keep the earth alive.” Even though one person acting alone might not make much difference, we hoped that working with a large group of people would gather more and more energy around the intention of peace and increase the possibility of creating change.
Over one hundred people came together in a high school gym, which had been transformed with banners, flowers, fruits, and special objects. I offered a weeklong workshop to ready the participants for the performance of Circle the Mountain: A Dance in the Spirit of Peace. We began with a run to the mountain, to gain inspiration for the dance, and then engaged in a workshop experience, preparing a performance for friends and the community. This was our fifth year of dancing in our quest to purify the mountain. Curiously, it also took exactly five years for the killer to be convicted. One cycle had ended, and another cycle begun.
I renamed the dance Circle the Earth, and where it was once danced to reclaim a small measure of peace on our mountain, now it was danced to reclaim peace on the planet. This is how it was described: “Circle the Earth is a peace dance. Not a dance about peace, not a dance for peace, but a peace dance: a dance in the spirit of peace. It is a dance that embodies our fears of death and destruction, a dance that becomes a bridge and then crosses over into the dynamic state of being called peace. Circle the Earth is a dance of peacemakers. A dance that makes peace within itself, makes peace with the earth on which it moves. In a world where war has become a national science, peacemaking must become a community art in the deepest sense of the word: an exemplification of our ability to cooperate in creation, an expression of our best collective aspirations, and a powerful act of magic.”
As with Circle the Mountain, Circle the Earth evolved from an intensive workshop process, involving movement and sound exercises, along with drawn visualizations.
