The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin
As part of the Time Based Art festival in Portland, I saw the City Dance performance in 2008 which featured dancers in and around the Ira Keller, Lovejoy and Source fountains, as well as Pettygrove Park, all designed by Lawrence Halprin, with live music by members of the Third Angle New Music Ensemble. The piece was divided into four stages, each taking place in a different park with the audience traveling to each location guided by performers. Each location featured a different composer and choreographer with music starting before and trailing after the audience entered the space. This performance was beautiful and is significant in how each stage perfectly suited the public space that it was in, the spaces were enhanced through the choreography of the people’s movements.
In the first sequence, choreographer Tere Mathern’s fully used the Keller Fountain, with dancers climbing a rope ladder up its 20-feet-high walls, while cascades of water flew over them.
Third Angle New Music Ensemble/
The City Dance of Lawrence & Anna Halprin
09.14.08
2008 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom
All Rights Reserved, PICA
Lawrence Halprin, landscape architect, on designing the Open Space Sequence (3 parks, Keller Fountain, Pettygrove Park & Lovejoy Plaza) in Portland:
The Portland progression, a choreographed sequence of open spaces. The space is choreographed for movement with nodes for quiet and contemplation, action and inaction, ahrd and soft, yin and yang… These places were for the first time designed to be used, to be participatory, NOT just to look at — the say COME IN - not stay off…
http://www.tamalpa.org/about/philosophy.html
In the early 1960’s Anna began collaborating with other artists and leaders in a groundbreaking movement that was to bridge the fields of dance/movement, art, performance, somatics, psychology and education. These collaborations included exchanges between Anna’s dancers group and Fritz Perls (founder of Gestalt therapy), Moshe Feldenkrais (Awareness Through Movement), Carl Rogers (Person-Centered Therapy), and Thomas Gordon (confluent education). The dancers group also collaborated with Anna’s husband, environmental designer Lawrence Halprin, the Fluxus group of New York, and others in the avante garde movement. The questions being explored were, What can the arts tell us “here and now” about the experience of being human? What do we know experientially, and what can we learn about the body/mind/spirit connection in our lives today?
Influenced by these collaborations and by her work with the dancers and artists who gathered around her, emerged what Anna Halprin called a “life-art process” — an approach based on working with peoples’ own life experiences as the utmost source for artistic expression. From its beginnings, the work was grounded in group learning, group creativity, and the actual life experiences of those she was working with. The work took place in spaces that extended from the dance studio and performance stage, to urban city streets and natural outdoor environments.
The foundation of our approach is based on a view of the body and movement. The body holds our entire life experience. We understand movement as the body’s primary language. For us movement is synomymous with life. Movement is personality and soul made visible; and dance is body, feelings and imagination in motion. We believe that movement/dance is for all people a way to live a more embodied and creative life. Movement/Dance is a way to connect deeply and authentically; to express the full range of human emotion. The philosophy of our work is based on the following principles:
![RSVP Cycles
Through his philosophy of design, his books and lectures, Halprin moved far outside of the confines traditionally imposed by his field. By his experiments in dance and choreography with his wife, Anna Halprin, he discovered a methodology for involving community in the design process. These early experiments were described in his book “RSVP Cycles” (Brazilier, 1969) and they remain a primer for all those interested in sources of design and creativity.
RESOURCES – These are the human and material resources available to inform and enrich the creative process; the resource base includes a physical inventory and a project program, objectives and expectations
SCORE – As in a musical score or the choreography of dance; the score orchestrates design, participation, events and activities that visibly delineate, generate and sustain a project
VALUACTION – As an integral part of the process, people’s feelings and belief systems, as well as community needs and desires must be integrated with a decision-making process that respects, acknowledges and incorporates these values
PERFORMANCE – Includes the product and its evolution over time; this component of the Cycles anticipates an organic, non-static solution; an environment or result that is defined by those who use it, experience it, and appreciate it.
REFERENCE – The Rsvp Cycles : Creative Processes in the Human Environment – Lawrence Halprin [1969] [REF]
ISBN – 0807605573](http://11.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ktx6g7KohS1qaob9ko1_500.gif)
RSVP Cycles
Through his philosophy of design, his books and lectures, Halprin moved far outside of the confines traditionally imposed by his field. By his experiments in dance and choreography with his wife, Anna Halprin, he discovered a methodology for involving community in the design process. These early experiments were described in his book “RSVP Cycles” (Brazilier, 1969) and they remain a primer for all those interested in sources of design and creativity.
RESOURCES – These are the human and material resources available to inform and enrich the creative process; the resource base includes a physical inventory and a project program, objectives and expectations
SCORE – As in a musical score or the choreography of dance; the score orchestrates design, participation, events and activities that visibly delineate, generate and sustain a project
VALUACTION – As an integral part of the process, people’s feelings and belief systems, as well as community needs and desires must be integrated with a decision-making process that respects, acknowledges and incorporates these values
PERFORMANCE – Includes the product and its evolution over time; this component of the Cycles anticipates an organic, non-static solution; an environment or result that is defined by those who use it, experience it, and appreciate it.
REFERENCE – The Rsvp Cycles : Creative Processes in the Human Environment – Lawrence Halprin [1969] [REF]
ISBN – 0807605573
Halprin’s legacy may reside as much in how he re-structured the process of design as in what he built. Recognizing that landscape design requires, in Moholy Nagy’s terms “vision in motion”, Halprin translated notational systems for dance and music scores into a new landscape drawing convention. Called “motation,” this diagram documented and imagined movement through space over time in the landscape.
http://www.tclf.org/pioneer/lawrence-halprin/biography-lawrence-halprin
Rachel Whiteread, the Water Tower project lead to Ghost on the plinth in Trafalgar Square
artist Rachel Whiteread makes casts of negative space, this image is of Water Tower where she made a translucent resin cast of the inside of a water tower and was installed on a rooftop in nyc.
NYTE:: new york talk exchange
visualizing the volumes of internet data flowing between nyc and cities around the world.
1 looking from the light into the darkness
2 looking out from the darkness to the light
images I took of Miroslaw Balka’s box of darkness, an installation in the turbine gallery of the Tate.
