I could not find it. What I did find was that none of these questions could be answered in a rational, logical, or systematic manner. It just didn’t work that way for me. What seemed to work was the process: when people danced their images and moved back and forth between dancing and drawing, the messages would be made clear through their movements and drawings. The visual images couldn’t be codified in rigid terms because each person had a unique story and expressed it in a personal way.
At the same time, certain symbols and principles seemed to repeat themselves. For example, in a whole classroom of self-portraits, which often took weeks to create, I might notice that almost every drawing had a snake or a tree or a water image. Or that the drawings indicated polarities and opposites—a dark side and a light side. In conjunction with the intense individuality of each drawing, certain common themes seemed to appear again and again. I learned that until these images were personally experienced through dance and movement, their messages remained mysterious. It became apparent how some of the repeating images and polarities had to do with the ways we are all connected to our common environment—the natural world—and the elements that make our lives similar to one another’s. This is what Jung refers to as the “collective unconscious,” a collection of images that we, as human beings, share. It could be that these images are lodged in the cells of our bodies and that they connect us to one another across time and across culture.
Let me describe how I learned something about my life story, the mystery of my own personal imagery, and my connection to the natural world by dancing a self-portrait created at the time of the recurrence of my illness. When I first drew myself, I made myself look “perfect.” I was young and brightly colored. My hair was blowing in the wind. I was the picture of health and vitality. When I looked at the image after drawing it, I knew I couldn’t even begin to dance it; it just didn’t feel like me. I turned the paper over and furiously began to draw another image of myself. It was black and angular and angry and violent. I knew that this back-side image of me was the dance I had to do. When I did it, I was overwhelmed by the release of rage and anger. I kept stabbing at myself and howling like a wounded animal. Witnesses said it sounded like I spoke in tongues. I had to have witnesses because I knew that unless I did, I would never be able to go through this ordeal. My witnesses were my family, my colleagues, and my students, and they kept me honest, urging me to go deeper, reinforcing my sounds, calling out parts of the picture I was to dance. I danced until I was spent, until I collapsed and began to sob with great relief. Now I was ready to turn the picture over and dance the healing image of myself.
As I danced this image, I imagined my breath was water and that my movements flowed through my body just as water would flow. I imagined that the water was cleansing me. I had an image of water cascading over the mountains near my home, of water flowing through me and out to the endless vastness of the sea, taking with it my illness. I believe I was experiencing the forces of nature as they are imprinted onto my body, which gave me a deep sense of the real connection between my body and the world around me. The movements of this dance started soft and small, and as I continued to dance, I added sound. My witnesses again reinforced these sounds as the movements grew and grew, until my whole body was engaged in the image of cascading water. When I finished, I invited the witnesses to join me in a circle; I felt ready to return to my friends and family.
Something happened in this dance that I can’t explain. I felt I had been on a mysterious journey to an ancient world. Time and place were suspended; I was in a timeless blue void. The experience left me shaken and cleansed. Later, as I gained distance from the experience of my dance, I began to notice a pattern in it that seemed relevant to other healing processes. Much later, while developing theory and methods to apply to my teaching, I saw how this experience was the source of a healing process. This experience gave me a new way of looking at healing, which I have used ever since as a guide to working with others and in developing my dances, including Circle the Earth. I have mapped out the touchstones of that journey and have found that they apply not only to my own healing, but also to the healing journey in general. These touchstones—the “Five Stages of Healing”—underlie my work with other people with life-threatening conditions in Circle the Earth. Admittedly, the Five Stages of Healing, like all systems, draw lines of black in places that are really gray. Healing, although it has different aspects and stages, is both more seamless and circuitous than any system can articulate fully. But I believe the Five Stages of Healing can offer guiding choreographic structures for a dance workshop and performance like Circle the Earth: Dancing with Life on the Line (detailed in chapter 3).
Anna dancing the light side of her 1974 cancer self-portrait. Photo by Lawrence Halprin; courtesy of Anna Halprin.
1. Identification. The first stage is simply to look and see and identify the issue, noticing the polarity between the light side and the dark side. In my personal journey, this stage was my discovery that I had cancer and realizing that the issue was whether I would live or die.
2. Confrontation. This stage entails the enactment of emotions and images responsive to the life-or-death issue. In my cancer experience, it involved dancing my fears, my rage, and my anguish. I had to confront the dark side of my being.
3. Release. After I danced my rage and fear about my illness, my body softened and relaxed, and I wept.
4. Change. After the release, the next step is to find a way to integrate the new changes. This stage takes place when an individual or group is ready to move to another level of awareness. It was the stage when I did the water dance in my own healing process, transforming my repressed rage into positive strength and power.
5. Assimilation. The final step is an assimilation of the experience into one’s ongoing life. For me, this entailed a coming back to my community and my family and my life with new purpose and understanding. The learning I gained in my healing dance made it possible for me to teach and score with others using this same process. I assimilated my experience into my work and use it now to serve others.
Taken together, these Five Stages of Healing constitute a rite of passage, a series of activities marking moments of significance in a person or a community’s life. Traditionally, rites of passage acknowledge the passage of time—birth, entrance into adulthood, marriage, and death are all marked by rites of passage. In the Jewish culture, for example, a bar or bat mitzvah marks a child’s entrance into the adult world; sitting shiva with family and friends to mark the death of a loved one is another rite of passage. There is a strong human urge to mark these moments, both as individuals and within the context of community. My self-portrait and my dance served as a personal rite of passage; Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance offer rites of passage for an entire community.
I become so excited by the discoveries of the visualization process and the road map for a healing journey that I often forget to tell people that, after doing my healing dance with my family and friends, my cancer went into remission. I don’t say that I was cured. A cure is an event, neither predictable nor always available. The process of healing interests me more, because healing is available to all of us, all the time. I am not discounting the importance of doctors’ interventions, but I believe healing also involves our attitudes toward our bodies and our illnesses, our willingness to challenge our values and lifestyles and points of view.
Changing our relationship to illness has to do with changing our relationship to our experience of living and dying. When we approach healing as an ongoing dialogue with our body and our mortality, surrender to what is beyond our control, and grasp an understanding of the power we have in our own living and dying, I believe our relationship to healing, and death, will change. The creation of Circle the Earth is grounded in the belief that the process of the dance is as relevant as its outcome, just as the process of illness is as relevant as its outcome.
