Halprin, Anna

Anna Halprin (b. 1920) is a pioneering dancer and choreographer of the post-modern dance movement. She enrolled in the University of Wisconsin in the late 1930s where she studied with Margaret D'Houbler and developed a strong interest in collaboration and improvisation in response to more formalized modern dance techniques. Over her long career, Halprin has stretched the perceived boundaries of dance to include theater, visual art, myth, ritual, and individual and collective healing. She founded the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop in 1955 as a center for movement training, artistic experimentation, and public participatory events open to the local community. Large-scale public pieces such as Circle the Earth and Myths demonstrated the development of Halprin's unique expressive and transformative arts technique. Halprin's own battle with cancer has deepened her interest in dance as a tool for transforming the suffering of age, illness, and death. In 1978 she co-founded the Tamalpa Institue with her daughter Daria as a research and educational non-profit in the field of movement-based healing arts. Halprin has created 150 full-length dance theater works and is the recipient of numerous awards including the 1997 Samuel H. Scripps Award for Lifetime Achievement in Modern Dance from the American Dance Festival. She is the co-creator of the RSVP Cycle, a creative methodology that can be applied to many disciplines beyond dance. Her students include Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Ruth Emmerson, Sally Gross, and many others.

From the guide to the Anna Halprin Papers, 1957-1995, (American Dance Festival Archives)

Anna Halprin is an American postmodern dancer known for her innovative and experimental technique. Born Anna Schuman in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1920, Halprin began studying dance at the age of five. At the University of Wisconsin, Halprin studied formally under instructor Margaret H'Doublier. Before graduating from college in 1942, Halprin married landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, with whom she had two daughters: Daria and Rana.

In the early 1970s, Halprin began to engage in dance therapy as a means for healing and restoration. She authored several books on the subject, including: Dance as a Self-Healing Art (1977) and Movement Ritual: An Organization of Structural Movement to Encourage Creative Exploration (1979). In 1978, Halprin and her daughter, Daria, founded the Tamalpa Institute, a non-profit organization for dance and expressive arts therapy based in San Rafael, California.

Halprin also founded the San Francisco Dancers' Workshop (1955) and instructed an array of notable dancers such as Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Meredith Monk, and Yvonne Rainer.

From the guide to the Anna Halprin papers, 1940-2008, (The New York Public Library. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.)