ANNA: And we’ve got the tools. We developed a system of movement, a system of working with emotions. We studied eight years with Fritz Perls, who worked with Gestalt Therapy, which is “the whole is greater than the parts.” He worked specifically with our company. So we had this system for working with emotional material that came up and also with imagery. This is called the PsychoKinetic-Visualization process, which we use now with people challenging AIDS and cancer. But we developed that then.
NANCY: When you say you developed “a system of movement,” what do you mean?
ANNA: Simply that if you do not teach people a traditional or idiosyncratic style and instead you set up a situation to move in, you systematically give people the opportunity to develop a full range of original movement. You set up movement situations that evoke emotional responses, situations in which the movements may be extremely assertive or very passive, or with partners in intimate contact. This will tend to bring up a lot of emotional material, which we then process. We do a lot of drawings of images and dance them. That’s called the PsychoKinetic-Visualization process.
In dealing with real-life issues, we had to find a way of moving, feeling, and making images. These three images show the development of the self-portrait work done by Nicolette Uta, 1987.
Photos by Anna Halprin.
In dealing with real-life issues, to be totally authentic, we had to find a way of moving, feeling and thinking that would become new tools. Like when I got cancer, and I wanted to deal with that issue on a level of healing. I had to have an open-ended vocabulary. How did I know what I was going to do until I worked with it? If I had a stylization of movement, it would have been predictable. I could not have gotten past what I already know.
One of the things about working with real-life issues is that it can be transformative. You work with an issue because it is unresolved, and through the dance, we hope to discover new possibilities. It’s not about the dancers and it’s not an interpretation of a theme, it is real. And by doing it you get to a different place with that issue, and in your life. The dance changes the dancer.
The purpose is to create change. That’s when we started using the word “ritual.” To distinguish that from dance as entertainment, dance as spectacle. Not that it couldn’t be a spectacle or it couldn’t be entertaining, but that is not the purpose. So that became a very important shift for me. And so we developed the RSVP Cycles in which people were able to learn how to score in a very direct and simple way. And this made it possible for us now to deal with groups of people. Because an individual can kind of feel things out, be intuitive, but if you’re dealing with groups of people, you can’t just feel things out and be intuitive.
Through the RSVP Cycles people can validate what they are doing in terms of their own experience. I wanted to create something for a group of people to do in which they’re given the opportunity to explore the theme and find out what’s real for them, find out what our differences are and what our commonalities are. It’s a particular way of being a choreographer. It allows for social impact in process as well as in the final product.
We did ten myths for small audiences. It was really a research process because I wanted to find out what were the natural forms that groups did. If you got a group of 50 people together and you gave them a very open score, what would they do? Because finding order is biologically how we’re made. We can’t exist in a totally random form.
NANCY: What are you hoping to change as people are finding their own creativiy and moving through these various forms that arise?
ANNA: In those exploratory myths, the purpose was to empower people to create together and to impart the experience of the power that comes from cooperating through movement as a collective body and find out what are the collective forms and perhaps even the archetypes.
This led to another issue that was coming up. I was invited to the American Humanist Psychology Conference on androgyny. And this was about the time, about 1967 I think, when the feminist movement was just getting hot. And the whole question of male and female differences or alikeness, the concept of androgyny, was on everybody’s lips. I felt that what was going on at that time was creating a tremendous cultural upheaval. Families were being drastically affected by the feminist movement, the workplace was being affected, people at that time felt that the feminist movement was the biggest cultural and economic and political issue that would hit us in this century.
principles of a creative process.
So I had an opportunity to deal with that issue at this conference. I just had the men dance alone. And had the women just watch. Then I had the women dance alone and I had the men just watch. And after this whole conference in which everybody was intellectualizing about the male and female issues and that we’re alike and that the only reason that we’re different is because of conditioning processes and so forth, we did this dance. They had exactly the same score. And it was just astonishing. I mean, it was funny, we all laughed at ourselves. We cried, we got so excited, because it was such a relief for the men to be together, to do their work and to work as a team, and to do their kind of movement. And the women were so delighted to be together as women and they had a totally different tone about what they did. Then when the men and women came together, they came together with mutual respect. That was truly a transformative experience.
The issues we had been dealing with at the conference were not the real issue. The issue was—we are different and it doesn’t matter that we’re different. What matters is that we’re able to respect our differences and bring those differences together and find our commonality.
NANCY: Where did you go from there?
ANNA: About this same time I got a call from James Woods in Watts asking if I would do a performance at the Mark Taper [Theater] with my company. This was at the time they were having the riots in Watts in 1967. His idea was that the Studio Watts, the black community, would bring us down to the Mark Taper, which is like the Opera House. It’s the big theater in the middle of Los Angeles. And Watts is in the ghetto. And I said, “No, no. Instead of bringing me in as a symbol, we’re going to take on this issue of the separation that you feel in a ghetto from not being part of the mainstream and the cultural life. I will come down and work with an all-black group in Studio Watts for a year.” Which I did, every Saturday. And I said I’d work simultaneously in San Francisco and start a new company, all-white. We’ll start exactly at the same time and it’ll just be two new groups doing the same scores.
At the end of the year I brought the black group up to San Francisco and the two groups essentially spent 24 hours a day together for 10 days. We developed a dance based on our encounter, our prejudice. We performed it at the Mark Taper Theater in Los Angeles. It was called Ceremony of Us.
The dance showed the whole process of how these two groups came together. We started separate and then we showed the conflict and confrontation and so forth. And then at the end, the performers came out and did a procession and gathered the audience. And when we went outside to the Mark Taper Plaza we were all dancing together. So the transformation was not just in the performers. But our purpose was to bring it out into the audience.
NANCY: Do you wait for an actual transformation in the workshop process to show you what forms to use, or do you just lay out a symbolic structural transformation and let it happen in
