I know what you’re saying. No, you can’t score a transformation. In the Watts/S.F. workshops, I had each group work separately on the same score. It was a simple follow-the-leader type of score. When we came together for the first time, the Watts group did the black dance for the whites and then the S.F. group of whites danced for the blacks. Then the next score was to do these two lines, the black and the white, at the same time so you both have to use the same space. But what happened is that they started interacting. Cutting through lines. They tried to take the people out of one line and seduce them to their group, and all hell broke loose. It became very competitive but in a charged and creative way. Issues of how far you would go with the movement came up. The degree of outrageousness was a big issue. All the issues came out that first day, and most of them were unresolved. So then we had to deal with setting up situations where we could explore issues of competition, leadership, sexuality, abandonment, issues of self-esteem. We had no notion beforehand what the outcome would be. It took its own form as we danced the issues that emerged.
NANCY: In what way does the RSVP Cycles allow people to participate in the creation of the event?
ANNA: You see, the RSVP Cycles wasn’t developed when I first was doing the black and white Ceremony of Us. We developed it because of that, because we didn’t have a common language for communicating. Our way of speaking, and our language and our images were so different we weren’t hearing each other. We didn’t know how. So we developed this RSVP Cycles so that we could listen to each other and find a way to respect our differences and find our commonality.
The RSVP Cycles is so simple. You take the creative process and you look at it in four different ways. One is collecting Resources, the other is Scoring, the other is Performing, and the fourth is Valuacting. Now, when you collect resources, you collect them objectively or subjectively. That includes what we are trying to achieve by it, what are the changes we want to create, what is the theme? What are our resources, our people resources, our movement resources that we might use in this, our space resources, our prop resources, whatever … it’s like an inventory. What is possible? Everybody chips in. This is my idea. My ideas are resources. And then we take those resources and we start to score them. We score them in relation to activity, over time, in space, with people. Now we know where that score came from. The score is graphic and absolutely visible. We put the score up and we try it. We perform it. And then after we perform it we valuact it. We say, it didn’t work, or it did work. Or I liked this, or I didn’t like that. What new resources do we need, how can we change the score? So we’re very involved in it.
NANCY: How are you making decisions together?
ANNA: There’s always a facilitator. Sometimes in scoring, it’s done totally co-operatively. Other times, I’ll come in with, “These are the resources I got from watching you. This is the score I think will work. Do you have anything to add to that?” And then we will valuact it. But they still feel invested in it because they’ve been able to take those themes and explore them and understand what it means to them on a personal level. They’ve been able to validate those scores in terms of their own personal experience. That’s how it works.
What happened in Watts was that through the workshop and by doing these movements together and by dancing together and drawing and making our images, we developed into a loyal group. We started out being scared to death of each other. And curious. It’s hard to believe this but in ’67 this was the first time that this particular group from Watts had ever been in any kind of an intimate relationship with a group of white people. And vice versa.
It was also an issue of economics. I would say that the black group was essentially poor. The white group may not have been individually affluent, but we had resources. It was a totally different economic situation between groups. That was an issue too. And in 10 days we became absolutely loyal as a group. Not separate. We kept saying, “If we can’t solve our differences and our problems, do you think the world out there can? We’ve got to do this and we’ve got to show the world that we can do this.” When we performed it at Mark Taper it was like—See, we can do this. We can live a different life. And we did do it. There was an interracial marriage, there were lifelong friendships.
That was our first big real political issue, social issue, that had a huge impact. Not only in Watts but up here [in the San Francisco Bay Area]. We started a multiracial company as a result of that, which was called the Reach Out Program and was funded by NEA’s Expansion Arts Program for 12 years. Then we toured all kinds of places, including the American Dance Festival, Soledad Prison, neighborhood theaters, schools and colleges, and began to take on Chicanos and Asians, American Indians. It became very apparent to me that dance had been dominated by an Anglo-Saxon culture. I was just astonished at the prejudices that I didn’t even know I had. I didn’t know a damn about this scope of movement on an ethnic level. The company began to develop classes in black dance. Not like Harlem ballet, but rather out of the origins of black dance.
Each member of the multiracial company went through a training program, and they developed their own form of dance which came right out of the street—the Asians developed their form of Asian dance, and American Indian dance, and it just was wonderful.
We had to develop a new criteria for movement, and we did this through a new theater piece called Animal Ritual. Because I found that if we used animal imagery, we could all use our own cultural background and it wouldn’t matter. We did this dance at the American Dance Festival.
So that went on for 12 years. The impact lasted for 12 years. Until Reagan came in and Expansion Arts guidelines changed completely and we lost our support.
NANCY: Really! Was that a natural cycle for it or do you think it was cut off?
ANNA: It was cut off. Prematurely. There was a lot more work we could have done. A lot of these people in the company were developing themselves as artists, they just needed another boost. However, many of them to this day are doing their own thing. Just today somebody called me from the company and said, “I’ve just been reading about the drug warfares that are going on in San Francisco and it’s getting so bad that black people are saying that the young people are killing each other off and I can’t stand this any longer. I’m going to see if I can set up some workshops in the Hunters Point area and start some activities there based on the RSVP Cycles, and see if I can be a force in turning this thing around.” So it seems like it’s recycling.
There was continuous development and research around our processes that we were constantly sharpening. Every time we’d do something there were always new challenges that we’d then try to incorporate in our training and in our work, try to understand a little better. So we always were having our workshops going on and trying to develop our systems.
And then I would always have these projects I personally was interested in. Somebody came to me and said, “Would you do something at our gerontology society?” and suddenly I became interested in the whole issue of the aging process and realized that that was a big issue. Economic and political. In preparing for the workshop, I thought, “What are the issues for them?” For me, the issue was that old people, again, are isolated. The same issues come up over and over again: isolation, separation, and fear. It comes down to that every single time. The issues with the blacks, the issues with Citydance, male and female—isolation, alienation, separation, and fear!
Then for quite awhile I didn’t do anything because I didn’t have anything that excited me, that seemed real, that was a real issue, till we had the murder on the mountain [Mt. Tamalpais]. Then that started this generic cycle which we now call Circle the Earth. It started in 1981 with a two-day and night dance called In and On the Mountain and the issue was the killer on the mountain.
There was a trailside killer who’d been on Mt. Tamalpais and killed
