Making Dances That Matter. Anna Halprin

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      A History of Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance

      Circle the Earth and the Planetary Dance have two histories: a long one and a short one. The long story begins in the 1950s. At that time I was researching ways for individuals and groups to tap into their personal and group mythologies through dance and movement. Later, in the sixties and seventies, I created group events that enabled people to invent their own stories rather than sitting back and watching mine. It was important for me to use dance as a way to help people connect with their own experiences and their own sense of power. I focused on inventing ways for each individual to access his or her personal mythology. Out of these experiments and explorations, a series of road maps, a technology of methods, evolved.⁶

      Until then, I had used some of that technology with specific groups, but never really had the opportunity to amplify this personal process to a community level. My 1969 dance Ceremony of Us, which focused on racism, was confrontational, raw, and challenging, both for us as individuals and for our audience. Throughout the process, I felt the potential for causing harm when addressing hot topics like racism without a strong road map. An objective process for working with groups of people was needed if we were actually going to deal with issues that mattered. I started practicing ways to apply what I knew about dance to people’s real-life experiences and to do this for larger and more diverse communities.

      It is against the backdrop of these previous explorations with people’s direct experiences, and their individual experience in relation to the collective, that the story of Circle the Earth begins. My husband, Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect and urban designer, had been working with groups of people around issues of community development in relation to the environment using the RSVP Cycles. I found that this process could be transferred to movement experiences, enabling participants to infuse a dance with emotions and images connected directly to their own stories. My husband and I were curious to know if these processes, which we had been using in our respective fields, could be applied to entire communities to help them identify meaningful stories or “myths” related to their lives. In 1980 we envisioned a series of workshops called “A Search for Living Myths and Rituals through Dance and the Environment” and invited people to join us in an exploration of relationships to each other, our surroundings, and ourselves. We wanted people of different backgrounds and ages to have a chance to interact and become familiar with one another through movement, dance, and the environment. The series was set up as a search for a myth with a community vision. We offered free workshops in the gymnasium of the local college in our town. “A Search for Living Myths and Rituals” was planned as a series of dance and environmental workshops over nine months, culminating in a performance.

      We believed that movement, art, and nature could provide focal points for a community’s activities and wanted to experiment with how these elements could serve in the creation of a collective story. Everything developed intrinsically from the medium of the art experience and our experience of the natural world. We didn’t start out trying to solve problems. That came later, once we had evolved a common language and a way of working together. We did this by gathering and defining the physical and imagistic symbols from our dances, our drawings, our environmental-awareness walks and studies, and our dialogues with one another.

      At the time of the workshop, four women had been murdered on the trails of Mount Tamalpais, a beautiful mountain in the center of our community, and the bodies of three more women and a man had been found in nearby Point Reyes. The “Trailside Killer” was still at large, and Mount Tamalpais was no longer considered a safe place; its trails and campgrounds had been closed because of the killings. As the workshop progressed, the image of the mountain kept reappearing in people’s drawings, and by the end of the series we realized that the story of the Trailside Killer and the mountain was the present-time myth of our community. We uncovered our need to reclaim the mountain and cleanse it of the destructive force that was holding it—a need to reinhabit this place that was part of our experience of home.

      Larry and I provided a container for the emergence of a group myth, but in the beginning we had no idea what that myth would be. And this is how it should be—a community myth is seldom determined by only two members, and never by two members who risk taking on a leadership role. It must evolve from interactions among the collective, from their own inner lives and connections with one another, the creative process, and the natural world that supports us.

      The participants in the workshop joined with dancers from the Tamalpa Institute⁷ to present a culminating series of ceremonies, events, and performances, titled In and On the Mountain (1981), which took place over a period of two days. The first day featured a performance at the College of Marin at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. The dance included ritual reenactments of the trailside murders, with friends and families of the slain women in the audience. A series of ceremonies and rituals lasting all night and into the next day’s sunrise followed that performance. On the second day, we went up the mountain. Eighty people, including some children, braved their fear of the Trailside Killer, riding in buses to the top of the mountain. There we took part in a series of offerings at each place where a woman had been murdered. People read poems and told stories; children danced spontaneously; somebody planted a tree. We were marking these tragedies and affirming our connection to the mountain. A week after our performance, an anonymous phone call helped police locate the killer. Three weeks later, the killer was caught.

      Did this community dance help to catch the killer, or was it just a coincidence? Does the collective mind and spirit have the power to bring about a change of this magnitude? It doesn’t really matter who gets credit for catching the killer: the dance, the mountain, the police, or the spirit. In and On the Mountain was a prayer, a prayer said not with words alone, but by the whole body of the collective through dance. When you say a prayer and your prayers are answered, that’s not the time to start questioning whether or how prayer works. When your prayers are answered, that’s the time to give thanks. And pray again.

      In that spirit of gratitude and awe, the next year we created another dance, an offering of thanks that the killings had stopped and that the mountain had been reclaimed. We called it simply Thanksgiving. We had built a sense of community and felt we had begun to uncover a myth with both an immediate, personal meaning and a larger, more universal one. On the immediate level we were reconnecting with our mountain; more broadly we were reconnecting with the environment, restoring our place in nature and our deep appreciation of the value of aligning with one another in community.

      This might have been the end of the story were it not for a visit from a 107-year-old Huichol shaman, Don Jose Mitsuwa, who came to Tamalpa Institute during the following year to present a deer dance ceremony. When we told him about our previous performances on the mountain, he said, “The mountain is one of the most sacred places on earth. I believe in what your community did, but to be successful in purifying this mountain, you must return to it and dance for five years.” As with the Corn Dance that so moved me in Santo Domingo, New Mexico, I was confronted again with indigenous wisdom that directed us to focus our intent, ignite our enthusiasm, and repeat the motions of our dance. What had started out as an experiment had had such far-reaching results that we were committed to fulfilling Don Jose’s near-directive. His words made me see that our experiment had connected to something essential. The experience had a momentum of its own, and I wanted to see where it would go and how it could integrate into the ongoing myth of my community.