target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#uc162ea2f-9389-5ce8-a98d-67802de7050d">COMMUNITY ART AS LIFE PROCESS: THE STORY OF THE SAN FRANCISCO DANCERS’ WORKSHOP (1973)APPENDIXES
PREFACE
As I leaf through these pages of Collected Writings, I’m sitting on a bench overlooking my dance deck and studio, surrounded by redwood trees and shadowed by the constant presence of Mount Tamalpais. I realize I have been here a very long time. Each tree, each flight of a bird, rustle of a deer, feel of the breeze, or sound of a foghorn holds a memory of a dance born in this place. My life and work are interwoven with the rhythms, changes, and subtle shifts of this land.
I left the Midwest of my childhood and my budding professional dance career in New York City to move to California in 1945. World War II was over, and I set off to San Francisco to join my husband who had just returned from the Pacific. I was twenty-five years old. Six years later, we had two daughters, Daria and Rana, and our young family had moved into a new home designed by Bill Woorster in collaboration with my husband, Lawrence. Both men are primary influences in the Bay Region style of architecture and landscape architecture, a movement that influenced me and my art on a daily basis. Their style allowed for a free-flowing connection between inside and outside, a major theme in my own work which would develop through explorations of dance both inside and outside the theater. At my new house, sliding glass walls opened onto tan-bark terraces and led into the surrounding redwood groves, and the views reached to the bay and the slopes of the majestic mountain. My new house in the country felt like an integral part of nature, and increasingly it was a contemplative environment, free of the distractions of the city. At this time I shared a dance studio with Welland Lathrop in San Francisco, but I felt a gradual and steady pull to spend more and more time at my home studio.
Lawrence and the modern-dance lighting designer Arch Lauterer designed a dance deck that meandered among the redwood trees below our house. The pull was getting stronger. I did not want to be away from my two daughters, and I was ready to make the final break. I left the city and began to dance in this invigorating outdoor environment. I cut my ties with modern dance and began to search for new directions. I offered experimental workshops for dancers and invited visual artists, musicians, actors, architects, poets, psychologists, and filmmakers to join. I called the group Dancers’ Workshop, an idea from the experimental Bauhaus school of pre-Nazi Germany. At Dancers’ Workshop we were looking for ways to rediscover the basic nature of our materials free of preconceived associations and concepts. We were interested in avoiding the predictability of cause and effect. As a result of our many experiments, we created theater pieces and gave performances on the dance deck and the surrounding wooded area for invited audiences. As people became interested in our work, we were invited to international art festivals, both here and abroad.
The three aspects of my work I wish to illuminate are, I believe, unique trajectories; they have been of the greatest importance to me over the years. The first is that the experiments Dancers’ Workshop and I did in the 1960s and ’70s with new forms of dance led to new uses of dance. Dancing outside the confines of the proscenium theater and in the environment—the street or the natural world—had unexpected results. As it came closer to the environments where people lived, dance became more connected to people’s lives and more responsive to people’s needs. The image-making and sleight of hand common to the theater dropped away and we were left with the raw material of our lives to make our art. The boundaries between art and life, and between performer and audience, shifted and expanded, and the uses and applications of dance followed suit. Some larger force, which I believe has to do with the ancient roots of dance and its primary importance to human beings, was set into motion.
A second aspect developed as we researched new uses of dance and movement, and our forms became accessible to more people and began to exist outside the theater and in the daily lives of ordinary people. As the forms expanded, the kinds of people who participated became more diverse, which brought about profound changes in dance. New methods of communication and a creative process encouraging
