teaching in the training program, 1974.
Photographer Unknown.
As we began to perform some of our smaller pieces, we began to notice that the audience was getting very unglued. They either wanted to do it with us, at us, or somehow or other be involved. And so they started throwing things at us, yelling and shouting and really getting very [laughter] involved.
NANCY: What were you actually doing?
ANNA: We were doing things that were very unexpected. Breaking rules without letting them in on it. Going into their territory. I mean I buy a ticket and I sit in my seat, somehow or other I’m buying my space. And what are you doing in my space? What are the boundaries now? You’re getting me all stirred up; does this give me permission to react any way I want? So I began to realize that we were breaking tradition, that we were involving other people who weren’t in on the process. And so as a result of that, they’re telling us something, which led us to do scores for all the people to perform.
In a way, that kind of audience reaction had its own excitement and certainly on a social level was making a statement about “anti”; anti-this, anti-that, react, make your voice felt. What was instructive about that response was that it was part of the times. People rebelling and being very dramatic, saying, “I want to be heard!” But it stopped right there. We felt there was a lot of power there and it wasn’t being channelled in a creative way.
NANCY: Would you say that audience reaction was the issue, the driving force?
ANNA: Absolutely. It was a great driving force. Without that reaction I think we would have gotten stuck in our own indulgent way of just doing our own exploration, forgetting that the audience is who you are performing for.
NANCY: What were you actually exploring in that work?
ANNA: Well, we made everything absolutely visible. The stage was completely visible, stripped of curtains, flats. The light sources were completely visible, movements were everyday movements that everybody could identify with. They were task-oriented. Like “build a scaffold and when you’ve built it, go up to the top.” They were risky and they made people excited and created a kind of a tension. The music was live by people we collaborated with who sometimes became dancers, like sometimes we became sculptors. So that was very unfamiliar, people would get charged up. Emotionally insecure.
NANCY: It sounds like you started out with the kind of mood of the times, of challenging the assumptions that were in your field, and in the process you realized that you were cutting across more than artistic boundaries but also social taboos. Was there political content in any other way?
The automobile created a wonderful environment for movement. I was attracted to it as a prop with so many possibilities—visual, audible, kinesthetic, symbolical. From Automobile Event, A. A. Leath and Lucy Lewis, 1620 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, 1968.
Photo by Rudy Bender.
Automobile Event, Norma Leistiko facing camera, John Graham on car, 1968.
Photo by Rudy Bender.
We began to pay attention to the feedback process between movement and feeling. Circle the Earth, 1985.
Photo by Paul Fusco.
ANNA: In a sense, yes. There were very few grants in those days, and they were very small. One of the reasons we took to the streets, just went outside, was that this was a place to perform. A place where you could have ready-made audiences. You didn’t have to go through the expense and the machinery of putting out brochures, getting the press and renting halls. And audiences would be wherever they were. We wanted to perform. So we went to the streets, to beaches, to bus stops, to abandoned buildings, to anywhere.
Well, this became a political issue as we found ourselves getting arrested over and over again. It became a political issue regarding the right of using the street territory. When were we obstructing the peace? We were behaving in a way people were unfamiliar with and people would get irritated about it. So finally we did a march with blank placards, as a procession through the city. Well there was an ordinance that you have to have a permit if there were more than 25 people in the group. So we would have 24 people go at a time and then we’d leave a space of about a block between us, but we kept it going. We had a hundred people or so doing this.
What we were really trying to build up to was a dance throughout the whole city. You could get permission to perform in a park, but we wanted to be able to use the whole city as we wanted to. So in a way we were rebelling against the restrictions that were put on artists performing in the environment.
NANCY: So it wasn’t that the piece was a political satire, but the doing of it was challenging some political definition. Where did it go from there?
ANNA: Making scores for an audience to perform. We did a series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, open to the public, where we led 100 to 500 people in performing various scores. This led to the development of Citydance, which was performed from sunrise to sunset, in subways, neighborhoods, parks, plazas, hillsides and the ocean. We did Citydance for three years as a statement that the city was a place to be creatively enjoyed by all its inhabitants.
Then in ’64 and ’65 we began to go back to exploring on a personal level, and the workshop modality became very important for us. We wanted to withdraw and look at a more inner world within the person. Really study the social terrain of the person, the whole person. This was at the time of the human potential movement. This was the time also that we began our first serious training program.
NANCY: When you say “whole” person, what do you mean?
ANNA: The emotional life, which dancers rarely study. Dancers studied movement. But movement is related to feeling, and we had no system for looking at those feelings that were evoked through movement. Nor did we have any idea of how the mind was really functioning in relation to movement or feeling.
During that period in the ’60s, there were all these conferences on body-mind-spirit, as if they were separate. But in terms of what we were exploring, we said there is no separation. They’re in a single impulse. There is the mind working in terms of images which think faster than the linear verbal thinking process. But images are like dreams. They go instantaneously with the movement, with the impulse to move, and the feeling. And so we were working with that integrated power. And at the same time realizing that was also taking us to the connection between artistic growth and personal growth, and that the two went hand in hand. And this was, again, part of a larger issue going on: the Human Potential Movement, which has had an incredible impact, all over the world.
Now what that led us to was dealing with real-life issues. And it’s as if all the work up to this point was laying the groundwork to deal with real-life issues. All this was the foundation.
NANCY: You’ve
