Making Dances That Matter: Resources for Community Creativity - Softcover

Halprin, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819575658 ISBN 13: 9780819575654

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Anna Halprin, vanguard postmodern dancer turned community artist and healer, has created ground-breaking dances with communities all over the world. Here, she presents her philosophy and experience, as well as step-by-step processes for bringing people together to create dances that foster individual and group well-being. At the heart of this book are accounts of two dances: the Planetary Dance, which continues to be performed throughout the world, and Circle the Earth. The Circle the Earth workshop for people living with AIDS has generated dozens of "scores" for others to adapt. In addition, the book provides a concrete guide to Halprin's celebrated Planetary Dance. Now more than 35 years old, Planetary Dance promotes peace among people and peace with the Earth. Open to everyone, it has been performed in more than 50 countries. In 1995 more than 400 participants joined her in a Planetary Dance in Berlin commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Potsdam Agreements, at the end of World War II. More recently, she took the Planetary Dance to Israel, bringing together Israelis and Palestinians as well as other nationalities. Throughout this book Halprin shows how dance can be a powerful tool for healing, learning and mobilizing change, and she offers insight and advice on facilitating groups. If we are to survive, Halprin argues, we must learn, experientially, how our individual stories weave together and strengthen the fabric of our collective body. Generously illustrated with photographs, charts and scores, this book will be a boon to dance therapists, educators and community artists of all types.

About this title

About the Author:

ANNA HALPRIN founded the groundbreaking San Francisco Dancers Workshop in 1955 and the Tamalpa Institute in 1978 with her daughter Daria Halprin. She is the author of several books including Moving toward Life, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1995. RACHEL KAPLAN is a psychotherapist specializing in somatic healing.

Review:

"Anna Halprin is a pioneer of postmodern dance, a warrior for connecting arts to social issues, and a healer of individuals and communities. Here, in crystal clear prose, her wisdom of the-body-in-the-world tumbles out. Borrowing concepts from various cultural traditions, Halprin lays out the scores she has created over a long lifetime of exploring and transgressing. Her ability to integrate body, mind, and spirit is both soothing and exhilarating.―Wendy Perron, author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer
Anna Halprin radicalized contemporary performance with her democratic vision of dance as ethics instantiated in motion. Her eco-feminist choreographies constructed in alternative, site-specific spaces―San Francisco's busy streets. California's central coast, the outdoor dance deck of her Marin County home―offered every person the roots with which to become an artist. In this beautifully essayed volume, Halprin shares her own diasporic history as the root to her communitarian dance-making ethos."―Ninotchka Bennahum, author of Carmen, A Gypsy Geography

About this edition

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0819575658
• ISBN 13: 9780819575654
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232