Anna Halprin dancing. 1951. Photo by Lawrence Halprin.
[ID: Anna Halprin dancing for a photo shoot in Caygill Garden, CA, designed by Lawrence Halprin. 1951. Lawrence Halprin Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Photo by Lawrence Halprin. Courtesy OUP.]
The Choreography of Environments tells the story of specific elements of a mid-century modern home commissioned in 1951 in Kentfield, California, by Anna and Lawrence Halprin. Janice Ross investigates how these specific elements—stairs, the well-known backyard dance deck, chairs, and windows—in their spectacular everydayness, came to shape not only the bodily routines of the Halprins, but also how those bodily routines went on to shape each of their professional contributions. Ross situates each Halprin as a choreographer in their respective field: Anna in dance and Larry in landscape architecture and urban design. What their work shares across disciplines is an orchestration of movement and the encouragement of embodied, sensorial participation; their Marin home made this kinesthetically salient in both life and art. Ross details what she terms “domestic choreography,” showing, for example, how the rhythmic everyday movements of traversing floating stairs inside the house and redwood stairs in the backyard get incorporated into Larry’s work with waterfalls in Portland Open Space Sequence and Anna’s work with procession in Parades and Changes (both from 1965). Ross draws out resonances, backed by her own experiences of visiting the house, conversations with the Halprin family, rich archival materials (she has also written Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance), and a bit of embodied imagination. In doing so, she follows the Halprins in modeling a receptivity to environment that invites readers to not only cognitively understand but also feel into the spaces she describes.
The Choreography of Environments also tells the story of a decades-long interdisciplinary collaboration between Anna and Larry. In doing so, the book focuses on the couple’s continual negotiation between private and public, interior and exterior, over the course of nearly 70 years of domestic and professional life on the foothills of Mount Tamalpais. The Halprins built the dance deck, in part, for a pragmatic reason: Anna could work on her art while still taking care of their two children, Daria and Rana. The resultant everyday rituals of dressing, eating, bathing, and play all made their way into her task-based workshops and performances. Ross delves into the strains and surprises that arose: one photo shows the Halprins and two colleagues holding a planning meeting in the family home, completely nude, the spillover of their co-led Experiments in Environment 1968 summer workshop. Ross weaves together such personal histories with key moments in dance and design history. She shows, for example, how the dance deck influenced other historic dance spaces, including New York’s Judson Dance Theater and the Berkshires’ Jacob’s Pillow’s outdoor stage. We learn, too, of JB Blunk’s sculptural wooden chairs for the Halprin home as a domestic parallel to his mentor Isamu Noguchi’s set pieces for Martha Graham’s Greek myth dances in the 1940s and ’50s. Throughout this wider history, the Halprins’ creative processes involve trial and error and continual re-engagement with objects. Take Blunk’s uncomfortable, uninviting chairs, intended to inspire bodily action rather than repose when they first entered the home in the 1950s. They initially spur Anna’s decision to force audience participation by removing seating for a Ten Myths piece (1967-1968). Decades later, however, she yields towards accessibility and creates Seniors Rocking (2005), a markedly different participatory work danced in rocking chairs by local retirees.
Finally, The Choreography of Environments tells a history of the Bay Area, one filled with tensions between postwar suburban life, 1960s countercultural aspirations, and liberal blind spots. As a contemporary reader, the Kentfield house is astonishing—both in its remarkable design and in the sense that it was once attainable for some (in this case, white, Jewish) middle-class families in the Bay Area. While the book does not state how much the Marin property sold for in 2022, Ross notes that the family’s second home at The Sea Ranch (a vacation development Larry helped design) sold for $12 million in 2021—$4 million above asking. In moments like these, limitations to public access and participatory art come to the fore: who gets to participate, under what conditions, and at what cost? Ross’s mention of racial covenants and “policed exclusion” in Marin is a necessary and overdue acknowledgment of the privileged seclusion, in life and art, that the Halprins were able to attain and maintain. The book’s attention to environments, themselves tied to land and its politics and peoples, also opens questions. Ross notes what was absent from a 1968 workshop at The Sea Ranch: talk of civil rights and Vietnam War protests, engagement with the broader history of native Pomo communities. What, too, of Coast Miwok communities in Marin? What of Palestinian communities around Jerusalem, where each Halprin made a work? What additional or alternative modes of land stewardship and embodied collective practice could have emerged, might emerge, or are already emerging?
Anna Halprin may be the most well-known West Coast contributor to the rise of postmodern dance, whose workshops and approaches shaped local and visiting New York dancers (including Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown) alike. Ross makes the case that these decidedly Northern Californian contributions are inseparable from the environment of the Marin home, its designed elements, and their attendant routine choreographies. In contrast to the traditional dance studio, with its disciplining of boundaries and bodies, the dance deck, absent of mirrors and roof, immersed dancers in a natural (although still built) sensory space, one that encouraged them to not only notice their environment, but to partner with it. Beyond noting this material and embodied legacy, the book demonstrates the conscious preoccupations, unwitting processes, and deep collaborations that go into making work. Ross’s critical framework reminds us that we can be dancing daily in our homes, our traversals of cities, and our interactions with loved ones and strangers. It feels like this is, in fact, Anna Halprin’s greatest contribution: the perceptual shifts and sensitive presence her secluded Mount Tamalpais home afforded might have been most palpable for dancers and movers in that exceptional environment, but the practices can be applied, the choreographies experienced, across environments, too.
Janice Ross’s The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design was published on January 22, 2025, by Oxford University Press.
Book Passage in Corte Madera will hold an author event in celebration of Janice Ross and her new book The Choreography of Environments. Janice will be joined in-conversation with Daria Halprin. Sun, Mar 30, 1pm
This article appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of In Dance.
Marlena Gittleman (she/they) is a dancer, writer, and translator who recently completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
