Making Dances That Matter. Anna Halprin
method is to use a workshop setting to provide opportunities for participants to discover their own resources, thereby ensuring that the performance that evolves will be both a personal and a collective one. The RSVP Cycles are a highly responsive structure encouraging creative participation at all levels. Exploring resources can help performers discover greater personal meaning in the activities they do in performance. If our concern is how to connect movement to emotion, we might try a contractive movement and explore how it makes us feel emotionally. We might try that movement with a lot of intensity and see what arises. Fear? Anxiety? When we then move with less intensity, we have a different experience. Using our sensations, we can expand our resources in movement. As a workshop leader, if you want your participants to be able to express a range of emotions through movement, you need to help them develop a vocabulary they can draw from by experimenting with different values, intensity, and duration in movement.
One of my “tests” for a good score is: Does it generate creativity in the performers? A simple score might be: “Everyone go to the other side of the space now.” It tells who (everybody), what (go), where (other side), and when (now). But in this score, “how” is completely undefined. The movement options open to performers are endless—walk, run, crawl, spin, go quickly or slowly. Other choices include going across directly, on a diagonal, and so on. If I wanted to make a score extremely open, I might say: “Do whatever you want whenever and however you want.” This kind of score encourages improvisational spontaneity, but too much freedom can be as paralyzing to creativity as too little. A very closed score might be the choreography for a ballet, where there are precise models for the performance of each step. My scores generally fall in between these two extremes.
The scores for the community rituals detailed in this book are open enough to allow different individuals and groups to embody them in unique ways, so the culminating performance will never be exactly the same. The diversity of the performers, the dynamics of the group, and any cultural differences that exist will all affect how a score is performed. Although the score provides an overall framework, it does not exclude new input and change. Instead, it promotes creativity and growth. A score is like a living thing, constantly shaped by our experience. The image of a tree comes to mind: it remains a tree in essence even as it responds to such forces as wind, rain, and sun.
People sometimes ask how closely participants need to follow the score, how committed to it they need to be. What happens if they “break” the score, if they take an element of the score that’s closed and open it? If you feel that an important aspect of the score is being lost, you may want to step in and gently remind participants of the score by modeling the activity it calls for, as I sometimes do when participants stray from a unifying drumbeat. At times people break a score because they don’t understand it or aren’t clear about its purpose. Some people may break a score because they’re feeling rebellious or bored. Still others may believe that, because the score doesn’t match their emotions, they can’t do it. Part of one’s role in presenting a score is to understand the score well enough to communicate it to others, to help them embody it.
The score for the Planetary Dance (see chapter 4) calls on participants to declare what they are dancing for in relation to peace among peoples and with the earth. Someone once said to me that she needed to dance for her own needs. This might be a fine intent for a different score, but the Planetary Dance score instructs people to dance for the needs of others. One challenge for Planetary Dance leaders is how to help people hone their focus within the score. Often people say they intend to dance for “love.” My response to this is always to ask for more specificity. What do you love? Take the mirror away from yourself and show it to the world around you.
In workshops like the one detailed in chapter 3, we don’t do scores because they match our emotions. We do scores to see what emotions they will evoke. If you come to one of my workshops, I would ask you to commit to the scores of the workshop, to give yourself to the scores without preconceptions of how they will make you feel. At one point we may be doing a score of celebration, and you may feel angry, sad, tired, or depressed. You may not want to have anything to do with anyone. The challenge, then, is to find a way to follow the score and see what emotions it brings up. What is it like to stay within a score when your mood is in a completely different place from everyone else’s? That’s the challenge—to stay within the score, not to break it. Really committing to a score is one way to get the most out of it.
Another thing that can interfere with getting the most out of a score is closing a previously open element. Especially in the beginning of a workshop, I use scores in which the intention is to explore, research, find out different possibilities, so closing parts of the score that are open will close down innovation and avenues of discovery. A simple score might ask you to investigate rising and falling movements. If you start out with a strong idea of what rising and falling are about, you will limit yourself. There could be more than a hundred different ways of rising and falling, so if you restrict yourself to one idea in the beginning, you’re closing a part of the score that’s open and you won’t get the most value from it. So when a score is open, be mindful about making choices that close it down.
Open scores give us a chance to express our differences, while closed scores help us express our commonalities. Most scores have both open and closed elements. When you have a sequence of scores over the course of a workshop or a dance, it’s important to have a balance, with some scores more open and some more closed. In our culture we place a high value on individualism, so we often need to express our differences first, to know that we are honored and recognized for who we are. As modern people tempered in the forge of individuality, we seem to need to find our own personal content before we can make a commitment to our commonalities.
It’s important to remember that scores can (and should) evolve. That’s where valuaction plays a critical role. Valuaction allows people to share their experiences. It is a way of analyzing the score and its enactment to help a group make decisions and selections regarding the material and the creation of a final performance. Making this creative process visible and encouraging the input of the participants fosters mutual involvement, support, and enthusiasm. Valuactions tell us what works and what doesn’t according to the core intention of the dance. This process facilitates redesigning and recycling aspects of the score to more clearly meet its intentions. Through valuactions, an ongoing process of growth and change can occur.
In the kind of community ritual described in chapter 3, the final performance is a presentation of the group’s experience as it happens before invited witnesses (our audience). Unlike in ballet or other strictly choreographed dance forms, we are not performing a “known” experience or set of steps. In contrast to open improvisation, which is often done without concern for its effect, we dance with the specific intention to create change. The kind of performance described in this book is about bringing as much of our real lives onto the stage as possible and being witnessed in that act. There is something magical about performing, and being witnessed by other people has a focalizing effect. This magical boost offers each of us the chance to stretch beyond our ordinary limits. This performance is predicated on the belief that the expression of our experience connects us with others and that this connection helps to create a community with the collective power to enact change.
One of the greatest benefits of using the RSVP Cycles is the completely positive, nonjudgmental attitude inherent in its process. We give feedback (or valuactions) along the lines of the score; we have either completed the objectives of the score or we haven’t. There is no blame. If we find we haven’t met the score’s objectives, we can ask questions about what happened and why. The process provides for recycling the best ideas and composting the ones that have no place in the dance. There is no hidden or higher authority dictating the way. All participants are involved in the creation of the culminating performance.