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AHN NEWS: March & April 2006
This issue of AHN News is dedicated to Dance & Elders in honor of 2006 AHN Awardee Anna Halprin, and her outstanding work with dance and healing. This issue's featured article is an excerpt from Anna Halprin's speech given at UC Davis in 2000. This is followed by information about Anna's recent project called Seniors Rocking -- an outdoor dance performance by elders. In addition, I review the book, Reach for It! A Handbook of Health, Exercise, and Dance Activities for Older Adults, and offer links to Kairos Dance Theatre's Dancing Heart Program and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's new online toolbox.
Also the Arts and Healing Network is pleased to announce that a new member has joined our team. Tristy Taylor has just stepped into the role of Web Site Coordinator. You can contact her at ahn@artheals.org.
As always, I would love to hear from you. Please send your feedback about this issue and suggestions for future news topics to marydaniel@artheals.org.
Regardless of your age, I hope this issue will encourage you
to move in new and inspired ways.
--Mary Daniel Hobson, Director, Arts and Healing Network
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CONGRATULATIONS to Anna Halprin!
Recipient of the 2006 AHN Award!
The Arts and Healing Network is delighted to announce that the 2006 AHN Award has been given to Anna Halprin, dancer, choreographer, teacher, author, creator of the Life/Art Process, and founder of the Tamalpa Institute. We applaud Anna for her outstanding and pioneering work moving dance beyond its traditional parameters, and opening it up to all people as a tool for healing. Upon receiving the award, Anna responded with this statement:
"I envision a future where more of us will call ourselves artists and work together to make an art concerned with the primary issues of life. I envision a future where art is once again honored for its power to inspire, teach, transform and heal. I envision a future where all people dance together, where the circle is open enough for both children and grandparents. I imagine a dance in collaboration with the forces of the earth rather than a dance of her continued domination. I envision a future when we will ask to join the animals, the birds, the insects, the ocean, the mountains, the sun, the moon, the deserts, and the rainforests. I feel an urgent desire to create the forms of art that will give birth to this dance at all levels of our culture. Our culture is in the throes of crisis: I have a vision of dance working in the service of healing. I invite you to join me in this quest, toward a future which includes all of this."
- Anna Halprin at the age of 85
To learn more about Anna and the AHN Award, please click here to visit the AHN Award page. Or visit Anna's web site at www.annahalprin.org.
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AHN Featured Article:
Dance and Healing -- An excerpt from a speech given at UC Davis in 2000
By Anna Halprin
"I have been dancing for a very long time – nearly sixty years professionally, and for all the eighty years of my life. There is a secret to longevity in dance: I found a process, which enabled me to access my creativity through dance. Later on, when I knew more about it, I called this the Life/Art Process. But in the beginning, in my years of experimentation, and during the time when I was trying to find my own place in dance, I stripped away many of the assumptions I had learned about dance, and re-invented it for myself. I freed myself from the constrictions of vocabulary and choreographic syntax. I experimented with where dance could take place, and who could be a dancer. I danced on the streets and the beaches, and I danced with people who had never taken a dance class in their lives. I worked with large groups of people who were united in their desire to make connections with each other and their environment. I simultaneously simplified and expanded the reasons for dancing. I started questioning what dance could be about and I started making dances that had to do with my life and the lives of the people who dance them. I have been playing for these many years in the open field of dance, where life experience is the fuel for my dancing, and dance is the fuel for my life experience.
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In the beginning of my career, my experiments where philosophical and technical in nature. I wanted dance to be available to more people. I wanted to dance outdoors. But as time went on and I had satisfied many of my formal questions, my explorations became more content-driven. I began to create my dances about things that were happening to me, or in the world outside my home. I made dances with groups of people from Watts, after the LA riots.
Returning to Health with Dance,
Movement and Imagery is one of
several books by Anna Halprin on the
art of dance. Please click here to order through Amazon.com.
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I created large-scale street performances that took place all over the city of San Francisco. I created a series of myths, which took place in my San Francisco studio. All of this experimental work was culturally specific -- it took place during the 1960's and early 1970's, at a time when the world was in a cultural upheaval and many boundaries and borders were being questioned. I see that aspect of my work as part of, and contributive to, this era of American history.
My work changed again when I was in my early fifties. At this time, I was diagnosed with cancer. My reliance on Western medicine for my healing was traditional, but the way I discovered I had cancer was not traditional at all. One day, while teaching a class, I had people make a drawing of their own bodies, and then I asked them to dance that drawing. I drew myself with a black mass in the center of my pelvis, and for some reason, I was unable to dance this drawing. The next day I called my doctor and asked him to examine me; he found a tumor in the exact place of the black mass in my drawing. After three years, I did have a recurrence, and I realized at the time, that I had to do something differently if I wanted to live at all.
I had diligently studied the connection between movement and imagery since my initial diagnosis, but I had been unable to find an absolute connection between imagery and movement. What I had seen was that the process of drawing and then dancing the drawing always had a transformational quality. After my recurrence, I drew a picture of myself, which was surprisingly light-hearted and free. It didn't seem correct, or complete, so I turned the paper over and drew another figure. This one was angular and dark and filled with rage. I called my family and friends together, and with their help and support, I danced my dark side. This was an intense and cathartic experience, which transformed my image of myself, and also, my body. After this, my cancer went into remission and has not returned. |
After I got cancer, my work changed dramatically. Now, instead of being concerned with the formal or even content-driven questions, I began to think about dance and movement as a tool for healing. Dance played a remarkable role in my own recovery from cancer, so I began to wonder how dance could be useful to people confronting life-threatening illness. While this aspect of my work evolved, our culture was confronted with the AIDS epidemic.
Anna Halprin in her performance
Returning Home.
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My work began to reshape itself around concerns of myth, ritual and the power of dance to heal. And again, what constitutes a dance and who is a dancer were central questions. It became clear to me that no one is exempt from the healing possibilities of dance, and no one is exempt from the healing experience of dance and ritual. I began to shape my work towards these ends.
I think the experience of having cancer and facing my own mortality as enlightenment at gunpoint. It forced me to re-evaluate and imagine my life, my death, quite differently than I had in the past. I used dance as a tool for my own healing. I began to imagine using it as a tool for helping people (and communities) in crisis, and as a means of creating the new culture I envision.
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I want you to imagine that you have one dance left to do. I want you to imagine what this dance would be. Money is no object. Production values are irrelevant. What is the dance you want to do -- this last dance of your life?
A still from the performance of
Seniors Rocking.
Photo by John Kokoska
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It is different to imagine dance as an urgent messenger, the vehicle of your important feelings and thoughts. I long for dances which express the immediate and central essence of our life's concerns. I want to encourage you today to invest your work with this kind of urgency and care. When we invest our dances with the concerns of our communities, our families and our lives, I think we will find dance again in the center of our culture, in its rightful place as the keeper of rites of passage and life changes.
Can you imagine how dance can help people who are ill; how it can address issues of homelessness and poverty; how it can be brought into the school systems so that all children have dance as a basic part of their education? Can you imagine dance as a tool for facing issues of death and dying? Marriage and union? The birth of children? Can we use dance to address abuse, violence, racial tensions, and our deep desire for community? Can dance contribute to and reflect the needs of our culture? I believe that it can. This is the kind of dance I envision as part of the re-creation of our culture."
For more information about Anna Halprin, please visit www.annahalprin.org.
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FEATURED PROJECT
Seniors Rocking
By Anna Halprin in collaboration with Lynn Moody, the Sunshine Club, the Marin City Grandmothers Club and the Redwoods Retirement Center
A still from the performance of
Seniors Rocking.
Photo by John Kokoska
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In October 2005, Anna Halprin "conducted" seniors in a performance called Seniors Rocking at Lagoon Island at the Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, CA. The 69 elders -- all from local retirement homes -- were each given a unique rocking chair from which to move, stretch, and dance outside in nature, moving together through movements led by Anna.
As Anna describes, "At 85, I am certainly a senior and my interest in aging drew me to work with other elders. Seniors Rocking emerged out of a series of workshops held at the Redwoods Retirement Community Center in Mill Valley, CA. The intention of the project is to empower seniors by using dance as a medium for emotional, physical and spiritual expression and to create a sense of community in which to share stories, hopes, and legacies. I am not a choreographer of this work in a traditional sense, rather, I see myself as a conductor, weaving together material generated by the individual participants during the workshops."
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These dance workshops for elders are continuing under the leadership of Lynn Moody. For more information or to join in the group, please call her at 415-454-4490.
John Kokoska photographed the event, capturing the emotion, camaraderie and beauty of this wonderful project. A few of his pictures are included here. To view additional pictures please visit John Kokoska's web site. For more information about Anna Halprin, please visit www.annahalprin.org.
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FEATURED BOOK:
Reach For It! A Handbook of Health, Exercise and Dance Activities for Older Adults
By David E. Corbin and Josie Metal-Corbin
 This book is a great resource for encouraging elders to keep active and express themselves through movement. It includes several sections on dance, such as "Dance in Chairs," "Line, Circle, and Group Dances," and "Expressive Movement and Improvisational Activities." It also offers information about other forms of exercise such as "Warm Up Exercises," "Water Exercises," "Walking," and more. The book begins by discussing the demographics of an aging society, and explaining how exercise and dance directly improve the health of older adults. The target audience for this book is older adults and those who lead older adults in health, exercise and dance programs.
This 423-page softcover book, was published by Eddie Bowers Publishing in 1997. Please click here for information on ordering through Amazon.com.
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FEATURED LINK:
Kairos Dance Theatre's Dancing Heart Program for Elders
www.kairosdance.org/adults.html
Established in 2001, Kairos Dance Theatre's Dancing Heart Program contributes to elders' physical, emotional, cognitive and social well-being by providing in-depth opportunities for individual artistic development, higher-level physical activity, and community connection through a unique program design that includes chair dancing and sharing stories. Their site includes details about their program as well as research on creative aging and dance.
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FEATURED LINK:
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Toolbox
www.danceexchange.org/toolbox/
 A valuable resource on dance and community has just been launched called the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange Toolbox. Available online free of charge, this resource offers step-by-step techniques, guiding principles, valuable links, essays and more. These materials impart a body of knowledge that reflects the Dance Exchange's 28 years as a leader in contemporary dance and a pioneer in the realm of art-and-community collaboration. They would be a valuable resource for anyone interested in working with dance and elders.
Founding Artistic Director Liz Lerman explains the origins of the Toolbox: "In working with artists and community groups we constantly draw from our fund of experience and the big stock of artmaking tools we've amassed over the years. We often have to think on our feet, so handing people a lesson-plan or syllabus as a memorandum of the experience always seemed limiting, because the reality always turned out different from the plan. We created the Toolbox as a way of sharing our knowledge as a series of separate, accessible, actionable units."
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READERS RESPOND
Please send us your thoughts and feedback on this issue of AHN News.
Was this issue of AHN News helpful and how?
Do you have other resources about dance and elders you'd like to share?
Are there other topics you would like to see addressed in AHN News?
Please send your comments, ideas, and feedback to marydaniel@artheals.org.
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