had already developed an overall series of scores for the culminating performance, the workshop allowed the performers to find their own responses to these scores and bring their personal experiences to bear on the final creation. The nine performance scores had evolved out of my own healing process with cancer as well as years of observing participants in very open scores and noting which results were repeated over and over. Essentially, the dance progresses from starting alone to joining another person in relationship and eventually forming a group. Once we get a feeling for our own strength and the strength of the community, we are able to look at our dark side and take on the most challenging issues of our lives. Out of that effort, which inevitably entails an expression of fear and anger, comes a release, tears, and, with comforting help from others, peace. Then, we are ready to connect with the world and send this message out.
Requests began coming in to do the dance in places other than my local community. The dance and its living myth started to travel, first to other sites in California, and then across North America to the United Nations Plaza in New York City. Using the structure developed for Mount Tamalpais, different people performed the dance in their own communities. In 1986 Circle the Earth crossed the Atlantic to Europe and the Pacific to Australia. By 1987 queries were arriving from interested parties worldwide. Although it wasn’t possible for me to travel to all of these places to create Circle the Earth, it did occur to me and to one of my Swiss students that the Earth Run, a section of the dance that we do each year on Mount Tamalpais, was a simple score that many people could adapt to their own community, no matter where they lived. If each community were to frame that dance with their own symbols and add to it out of their own community needs, the Earth Run would be a dance we could all do together, no matter where we lived. As a social species, I believe we need to come together and celebrate our unity and alignment, and to connect with the larger body of our culture and our planet. We need stories that tell of our oneness and our connection with the earth. And we need hopeful stories about living in an age threatened by pollution, nuclear devastation, overpopulation, hunger, ethnic war, and disease.
Confronting the dark side in Monster Dance from 1985 Circle the Earth. Photo © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos.
The Earth Run, which is designed for people of all ages and abilities, calls on participants to run (or walk) for others and to see their actions as influencing the larger whole. The point of the run is that people dedicate themselves to the health and healing of the planetary body. Embracing the overall intention of peace, each participant announces a personal intention for the run—declaring, for example, “I run for Alice and all children suffering from violence in our cities,” or “I run to bring Israelis and Palestinians together.” Moving to the musicians’ steady beat, participants run or walk in concentric circles, creating a moving mandala. Each step becomes a call for peace. When a large number of people move together in a common pulse with a clearly defined purpose, an incredible force takes over. It is a power that can renew, inspire, and heal. The dance provides a way to symbolize our commitment to peace, mobilizing people to take action in the world.
Circle the Earth in Zurich, Switzerland, 1986. Photo © Lisa Schaublin. Anna Halprin Papers; courtesy of Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco.
The Earth Run transports us from a place of individuation to an experience of collective oneness. The constant repetition of one beat after another, one circle after another, helps us to see our separate lives in a community context. This repetition and connection is the essential metaphor of Circle the Earth, a dance we perform to create peace and healing through community action. The evolution of the Earth Run recapitulates this truth. In excerpting the Earth Run from the whole of Circle the Earth, I intended for each community to add its own beginning and ending, thereby personalizing the dance to suit its own needs. At this time I renamed it the Planetary Dance and sent a letter asking former students, dancers, and participants in Circle the Earth to join us on April 19, 1987, wherever they lived, in this dance of peace and healing. Instructions for the Earth Run were sent to interested people in communities around the world—in Switzerland, Australia, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Israel, England, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, and many places within the United States. That year, two thousand people in thirty-seven communities performed the Planetary Dance, and it continues to be performed each year around the world.8
Letter describing Planetary Dance in Japan, 1987.
Planetary Dance in Melbourne, Australia, 1987. Photographer unknown.
In 1988 we performed Circle the Earth: Dancing Our Peaceful Nature in an outdoor setting in the Marin Headlands. Influenced by local and world concerns, many of us began to become increasingly aware of what was happening to the environment. My attention shifted from the threat of nuclear arms to a fear for the earth herself. This was around the time of the Chernobyl devastation, when many of us were becoming more conscious of the human threat to the natural world. We decided to dance outside in an environment of sand, ocean, meadow, forest, and cliffs. The workshop participants camped in a redwood grove near the ocean. Near our campsite were military barracks from World War II, a reminder of war and the military spirit. Witnesses walked for twenty-five minutes to get to our performance site. Along the way, they could see open hillsides and the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Golden Gate Bridge and the city of San Francisco on the other. The performance took place in a redwood grove with a giant tree at its center. The central quest of that dance was to come into a balance with the abundance of earth and the awesome technology of society.
Planetary Dance score. Graphic design by Stephen Grossberg (continued on pp. 44–45).
During the late 1980s, I was asked to apply my work in the healing arts to people with cancer and HIV infection. From this experience, I saw the fear surrounding AIDS, a disease that seemed to have no boundaries and no cure. Rampant mostly in the gay community at that time, AIDS brought up the need for work that would confront social and internalized homophobia. There was a lot of ignorance about how the disease was transmitted. Many people feared being in contact with those who had been infected. The disease held a frightening taboo, and my extended dance community was in real crisis. My collaborators and I decided to dedicate the 1989 dance to people living with HIV and AIDS.
We sent out an invitation to participants from previous Circle the Earth dances, students, dance colleagues, Positive Motion (a special AIDS-related group with which I was already working), and a group of people with cancer who also were working with me. We asked them to join us in a different kind of healing dance. We stated that the intention was to heal the fear, isolation, and prejudice surrounding the AIDS crisis. Over one hundred people from all walks of life came. Despite this diversity, we had one common goal: to see if, through movement and art, we could heal our community and ourselves. Could we dance to break through the prejudices and fears that separated us? Could we learn to trust the wisdom of our bodies as much
