An excerpt from the feature documentary, Artists in Exile: A Story of Dance in San Francisco. This clip highlights Anna Halprin dancer and performance pioneer active in the Bay Area from the 1950’s through today.
related: In California, a Marriage of Dance and Design
In 1966, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and the dance pioneer Anna Halprin invited 40 young people to Northern California to participate in a roving summer workshop.
Moving from San Francisco north to Sea Ranch, the modernist coastal development master-planned by Mr. Halprin, the architects, artists and dancers investigated the common ground between the couple’s two professions: the environment.
They staged a happening in Union Square, took blindfolded walks, built a village of driftwood and dropped paper from trees. A new exhibition at the Graham Foundation in Chicago, “Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971,” explores the Halprins’ interdisciplinary creative process through photographs, films, drawings and the scores that gave the participants’ movement a shape and a purpose.
Mr. Halprin died in 2009, but Ms. Halprin, 94, spoke about the workshops and her continuing dance practice earlier this month. (Read at NYT)
