Anna Halprin (1920) is now 100 years old. His hybrid dance has crossed our entire form of understanding and critical analysis over the years of contemporary art history, with a scope that has affected and determined the new directions of body knowledge and “choreographic sciences”, we can say in the world of western dance from the mid 20th century to the present day. The genesis of its creative force comes from dance and in it it is so expanded and stretched, to the point of promoting within this context and artistic language a movement that destabilizes its borders. Breaking with “the preponderant artistic conventions” of his (our) time and, by incorporating in his creative environment “new ideals of democracy and anti-elitism”, he promotes new dialogues and paths of approximation between life and art.

Halprin chose to build his story far from the cultural effervescence that swept New York in the 50s and 60s, when artists questioned the legitimacy of traditional supports. His work was aimed at creating and developing a methodology that could support the interpreter to discover and articulate their own language and their own movement. This happened through the kinesthetic consciousness that was directly linked to space, another primordial factor in Halprian thought. Which was built from his union with the architect “dedicated to organicity” Laurence Halprin. Both were strongly influenced in the 1940s by the Bauhaus movement and concepts, under the tutelage of Walter Gropius, displaced from Germany by Nazism to Harvard, where they met.

Although still little known outside the US, Anna Halprin is one of the main founders of the revolutionary movement called postmodern dance – forming the main creators and thinkers of contemporary dance, such as choreographers Merce Cunnighram, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti and Meredith Monk, just to name a few mainstream names among many others. His first structured improvisation laboratories were still in the 1950s, a procedure that is now assumed and developed in his pedagogy, as well as in his artistic creations, as a driving force that will lead all subsequent generations to rethink the contours and ways of doing things, reading and thinking about dance, bequeathed to postmodern dance more than principles and an innovative philosophy; an attitude towards their environment and the world.

By proposing new forms of behavior to the universe of dance exploration, Halprin ends up triggering a new paradigm with regard to the relationships established between the members of a choreographic game, for example. Depriving the place of the creator, the one who has the autonomy to improvise and create the path to be represented, Halprin now proposes to his dancers/interpreters the displacement of creation, proposing that they themselves seek to improvise and discover in their bodies an organicity capable of building “scores ” more unpredictable, less codified and closer to the daily life of contemporary man. By incorporating the other into his artistic/pedagogical work without restrictions, since his works ranged from professional dancers to people from other professional backgrounds, he promotes, through difference, unique and multicultural dialogues of the contemporary subject.

In her work, the artist supports the need for “ritual consciousness” (ritual consciousness) as a means of approaching and enriching individual and group experience, suggesting “Observing the potential ritual in your experience every day” (Halprin, 2000, p. 40). From a very early age Anna has been undertaking and debugging this idea that even began in the 60s when, from her collective improvisations aimed at choreographic creation, she developed the concept of “task performances” (tasks) where arbitrary everyday gestures became re -valued for the dramaturgical construction of theatrical dance, such as running, walking, dressing, undressing, etc. One of the pioneers in using the Nu on stage and in provoking important social debates such as the racial issue by placing in one of her works only black artists and in another more than 20 dancers, each of a different nationality.

Already in the 50s, in a visionary way, he took his groups of students and dancers to occupy squares and streets, performing performances that sought to establish a closer relationship with the other, the architecture of cities and their nature. Whenever possible, he incorporated those who wanted to participate in his artistic-ritual and theatrical performances, aware that his work was not just to be contemplated, as it was not just for entertainment. Anna Halprin’s dance follows a path that goes from the individual to the social, which makes dormant forces pulse, anesthetized by the violence of the urgent world and the sense of belonging. We can say that from the “unpredictable I” presented in his nudity and represented by his daily gestures, Halprin takes the subject back to his essential condition, restoring his sense of collectivity, making him position himself in the face of political, sustainable issues , physical and emotional. Naturally, your mandala in life will close in constant movements as in your exceptional Planetary Dance – Circle the Earth.

In the 70s Anna Halprin began to develop, through dance, an interesting research between the imaginary and movement called “visualizations”. Much explored in her workshops, she went through the experience of drawing a large “grey ball” in her pelvic region in one of these, but without being able to extract movement from this image. Her intuition led her to investigate what that action might be manifesting, and this investigation ended up discovering that she had a malignant tumor in her colon. This event made Halprin delve even more deeply into his research into images, imagery and dance, definitively compromising his personal position and his life in his profession.

Halprin decides to create a ritual performance entitled Dancer my cancer, performed once for a select group of friends and family, where he comes face to face with his illness in a physical, psychological and spiritual clash, not only renewing his belief in dance but dimension of rituality and spirituality but above all reinforcing it as an artistic power capable of restoring and restructuring the biological body and the subject. Affirming that, if she created the disease, she could also create a cure, and that she would not give herself solely and exclusively to scientific resources to achieve it. Anna Halprin’s next clinical examination after her purification-social-theatrical rite or “experience” as she likes to call it, came back negative and she was cured.

After this event, Halprin’s entire life turns to the deepening of body work where the physical, emotional and mental states join the healing dance and life. Their search for healing encouraged the community around them and, with their daughter Daria Halprin in 1978, they founded the Tamalpa Institute in California which offers training programs and workshops in the creative process of integrating psychology, body therapies and education with dance as a path to the healing and resolution of social conflicts. His “Process Halprin Life/Art” workshops focus on therapeutic and bodily needs, using the body’s expressive tools and integrating movement, voice, drawing, improvisation and performance, in order to provoke the other to explore themselves. even and using art as a way to heal in a profound process of personal, interpersonal and social transformation.

Over these years Anna, an almost unique dance artist, redefined and displaced places and genres characteristic of the representation of this art that already called itself contemporary, but little recognized in the “inherited” tradition and in the fragile babble of its new canons. Anna continues today at 100 years of age working with scientific and therapeutic institutions to support terminal patients or those in recovery with Cancer, Aids, Alzheimer’s and mental disabilities, using her artistic resources through dance and body awareness in order to restore their energetic potency and creative that had been taken from them with the illness.

The contemporary dance that Anna Halprin makes, rises for 70 years, destabilizing the conceptual bases established in models and codes of conduct and production that insist on defining how and where art should follow. Because by dictating models, it dictates fashions and behaviors, even and above all with the seal of being ‘avant-garde’, which only contributes once more to certain creators and interpreters to close themselves within select “nuclei” of art, which despite the good speech elaborated and with a democratic model, its practices remain reductionist and segregated. Halprin’s work destabilizes these conventions of false discourse. Its positioning is “unpredictable” as and in the measure of an improvised, original and newly elaborated movement. Built from ancestral memories, rites of transition, healing, passage, return and re-aggregation, as in the “social dramas” revitalized by experience, and which is only completed through a way of extracting oneself, performing.