Anna Halprin's Pioneering Dance Legacy and Post-Modern Influence Explored in Interview

Anna Halprin, interviewed by John Held, Jr., details her revolutionary approach to dance that shifted focus from expressive works to task-oriented actions in the 1950s. Her work with experimental musician LaMonte Young led to the first Fluxus project, An Anthology, edited by Young and designed by George Maciunas. Halprin's dance deck in Kentfield, California, designed by her husband Lawrence Halprin, became a hub for avant-garde artists including Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Robert Morris, Simone Forti, and Merce Cunningham. These workshops directly influenced the formation of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Halprin's 1965 work Parades and Changes resulted in her arrest for nudity in New York in 1967 and a 15-year blacklist, though it later received a Bessie Award. After a 1972 cancer diagnosis, she began incorporating audience participation more deeply, notably in Ceremony of Us following the Watts Riots, where audiences chose between black and white entrances at Los Angeles's Mark Taper Theater. Halprin, who studied under Margaret H'Doubler at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was influenced by Bauhaus principles through Lawrence, who studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard. She contrasts her organic, nature-oriented art with the conceptual direction of Black Mountain College artists like John Cage. In her 90s, she continues creating work, including a trilogy dedicated to Lawrence, using his World War II erotic drawings as inspiration.