Anna Halprin

Architecture/dance: choreographing and inhabiting spaces with Anna and Lawrence Halprin

“…For both Halprins, the conceptual, geographic, and aesthetic dimensions of space -whether space in nature, living or domestic space, theatrical space, or architectural space -would be lifelong concerns. 103 As Janice Ross points out in her academic biography of Anna Halprin, throughout their lives both Anna and Lawrence have been actively concerned with exploring the affective dimensions of spaces. In their concerns with the performance-events of architecture and dance, they were both interested in how spaces of performance and the performativities of space were enacted through the choreographic interplay of moving bodies and environments.…”

“…Anna was in the second year of the undergraduate dance programme at the University of Wisconsin, studying with the pioneering dance educator Margaret H'Doubler, whose ideas on dance as a practice for developing the self and discovering one's body were heavily influenced by the writings of the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. 34 Lawrence was a graduate researcher undertaking a Master's in the Department of Horticulture, but one year in, in 1940, he discovered the discipline of landscape architecture after a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin community, and his subsequent reading of Christopher Tunnard's influential 1938 book Gardens in a Modern Landscape. 35 Anna and Lawrence married in 1940, and upon completing his MS in Horticulture in 1941 Lawrence moved to Massachusetts to start a course on landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.…”

“…41 By the mid-1940s Moholy-Nagy was less optimistic about the ability of contemporary designers to overcome the Renaissance theatre 'box', and he asserted that 'neither theater nor movie settings yet show the slightest inclination toward a really new space conception'. 42 Nevertheless, the ideas of Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhaus thinkers, coupled with conversations with Lawrence, prompted Anna to think about the nature of 'choreographic space', 43 and she would later go on to become one of the pioneers of (post-)modern dance and performance art in the USA, reenvisioning the spatialities of performance, and taking dance and performance out of the theatre and into a range of public spaces.…”