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Article Excerpt
"For a long time during the 1960s," the composer Steve Reich wrote, summarizing the relationship between music and dance in a 1973 essay, "one would go to the dance concert where no one danced, followed by the party where everyone danced." He concluded, "This was not a healthy situation." (1)
In this essay I would like to press further on Reich's observation and delineate something about this "dance where no one danced" and the nature of what in fact proved to be a robust, if clandestine, relationship among the music, dance, and performance experimentalists of the early 1960s. In particular, I will focus on the 1960 and 1961 summer workshops taught by the California dancer and teacher Ann Halprin at her home in Marin County. The artists who were significantly influenced by Halprin in these workshops include Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, the workshop's musicians--La Monte Young and Terry Riley--and, to a lesser degree, the visual artist Robert Morris. As they developed their insights from these initial summer studies over the next few years, these artists would make work that would effectively launch Minimalism in their respective domains of dance, music, and visual art.
Halprin had moved to Marin County from the East in 1945 to join her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, after the naval ship on which he was stationed during World War II was torpedoed and he was sent to San Francisco on survivor's leave. Ann Halprin had arrived in the West with a dual status; she was a working woman in a two-artist family, which she had supported while he finished graduate school, and she was a choreographic refugee critical of the prevailing model in East Coast modern dance, in which students were trained in movement techniques built on their teachers' bodily predilections. While in high school in her hometown of Chicago, Halprin had discovered the early fall-and-release modern-dance style of Doris Humphrey. In the late 1930s, while in college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Halprin became the protegee of the pioneering dance educator Margaret H'Doubler. A former gym teacher, H'Doubler favored discovery over drill, teaching dance as a series of movement explorations based on anatomical logic and each student's improvised responses to verbal prompts from the teacher. This training shaped dance teachers as much as artists, and in California Halprin became both. As the wife of a student at Harvard, Halprin had taught introductory dance classes for the architecture students studying with the Bauhaus emigre Walter Gropius, and she enjoyed the widely diverse ways artists working in different disciplines approached the basic movement problems she posed. Once in California, isolated from the mainstream modern-dance tradition in which she had been trained and, for a time in New York, had performed, Halprin evolved a workshop structure in the Bay Area premised on individual investigation and focused on turning students into physical explorers. By not making formal dance training a prerequisite to movement invention, Halprin expanded the definition of the dancer.
When she arrived in the West there were few professional contemporary dancers in the Bay Area, so Halprin built her performing group from necessity. She collaborated with a few of her own students and eventually her two young daughters, as well as artists in disciplines outside dance, many of them members of the loosely affiliated group of Bay Area cultural experimentalists known as the Beats. In 1955 Halprin formalized her small group of dance students and fellow teachers as the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, and she moved the locus of her teaching and performing from a rented studio in San Francisco to the "dance deck," an expansive redwood deck perched on the side of a steep slope behind her home in Marin. Custom-built for Halprin by her husband and the scenic designer Arch Lauterer, the deck had stunning views of San Francisco Bay and openings where madrone trees poked through, turning the deck into a performance surface celebrating randomness. As she worked in the pastoral seclusion of the deck, Halprin kept steadily scraping back from what she saw as the cluttered, emotion-saturated, and personality-based dance of Martha Graham and other early modern choreographers, to her own spare focus on the basic anatomical ways in which the body moved when executing tasks. Halprin was moving toward a form of movement theater that uncoupled cause from effect, separating storytelling from physical action, emotional narrative from gesture, and sound from choreographic plot. It was this last impulse that helped bridge her influence into musical Minimalism and allowed the summer dance workshops to retrospectively exert the influence they did on Minimalist performance across genres. Forti, who danced with Halprin from 1955 until she left for New York in 1959, returning in 1960 for the summer workshop with her husband, the visual artist Morris, remembered the workshops for the quality of deep immersion in just being present that they prompted, as participants were taught to observe nature and the functional actions of the human body as a response to their observations. (2) The "dance where no one danced" was in fact richer and more influential than it seemed.
As the fallout from the summer workshops of 1960 and 1961 would prove, what Halprin helped pioneer was not so much live-art Minimalism as the conditions for its discovery and implementation by other artists. The reductive and repetitive elements in Halprin's work were developed in distinctive ways by the artists who studied or worked with her those summers. Like Halprin, they were on a path of discovery, uncovering the essential conditions of their art forms and a primary sense of the body as a medium. When Forti, Brown, and Rainer headed for New York at the end of the 1960 workshop, the works they would soon make at Judson Church would effectively launch postmodern dance--a movement that would come to be regarded as synonymous with Minimalist dance. (3) Morris would begin creating unitary form sculptures and performance...
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