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

Abstract

In this paper I build upon geographical writings on non-representational theory and dance by exploring how the pioneering avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin attempted to choreograph a range of bodies and environments in 1950s and 1960s California. In contrast to geographic writings which have focussed on the regulatory and oppressive politics which are frequently embroiled in the choreographing of specific traditions of dance, I highlight the complex and contested nature of choreography, before focusing on the Left-leaning, libertarian, democratic, counter-cultural choreographic experiments of Anna and Lawrence Halprin. I examine the evolution of Anna and Lawrence’s philosophical approaches to creativity and the arts, highlighting the importance of Bauhaus principles of interdisciplinary working and charting their early attempts to rethink landscape architecture and dance through an understanding of the spaces of choreography and performance, and the performativities and choreographies of spaces. I then focus on Anna and Lawrence’s interdisciplinary ‘Experiments in Environment’ workshops of 1966 and 1968, which marked a turning point in their respective approaches to choreography, participation, and collective exploration and creativity. I examine their pioneering attempts to include diverse communities and audiences in their performance and design projects, and I build upon recent work on the politics of non-representational theory and affect by showing how Anna and Lawrence sought to engineer affects and emotions with explicitly positive, inclusive, egalitarian, democratic, and communitarian aims.

Geographies of Experiment/Experimental Geographies: A Rough Guide

“…Aesthetic experiments have their own geographies, requiring ‘care, tinkering and labour’ (Ingram , 129) as well as specific ‘generative constraints’ (McCormack , 207) that hold the diverse bodies and materials of the experiment together while also allowing them to interact in surprising ways—for instance, dancers may utilise different conceptions of choreography, from ‘open’ to ‘closed’ scores, in order to modulate relations between performers, spaces and audiences (Merriman , 440). Another example of such experimentation is the exhibition space, which can be seen as

a site for the generation rather than reproduction of knowledge and experience.

…”

“…Such interventions include ‘algorithmic walking’ tours (Pinder , 396‐397) that use diverse ‘navigational devices’, such as specific patterns and rules, to generate alternative ways of engaging with urban space, while also ‘provoking debate about how [cities] might be different, better ’ (Pinder , 399; original emphasis; see Hawkins ). Community art projects can be understood similarly as ‘aesthetic interventions in the affective realm’ of daily life, rearranging ‘people's embodied movements through and attachments with spaces’ as well as widening participation by involving collectives and publics in the improvement and redesign of their environments (Merriman , 440). The content and form of these experimental set‐ups may differ from scientific practices, but they are equally important arenas for crafting new geographies, new modes of collectiveness and new ethical sensibilities.…”

Human geography without time‐space1

“…Firstly, I want to consider dance, a term used to describe a very broad set of embodied expressive practices. Geographers have developed an interest in how dance is not simply a non‐representational, embodied, spatial practice that eludes representation, but is clearly choreographed, codified, notated and practised in relation to a broad array of techniques and technologies, from discourses surrounding ideal movements to notational techniques such as Labanotation (Cresswell 2006; McCormack 2005 2008; Merriman 2010; Thrift 2000b). In many cases, these technologies and practices for diagramming, notating and representing dance movements come to frame how people actually think about and practice these movements, but there are traditions of experimental dance practice that appear to be about feeling, engineering and apprehending something we might call ‘movement‐space’.…”

“…In the 1960s and early 1970s, the experimental dance form known as Contact Improvisation functioned in similar ways, becoming an experimental dancer‐centred art form where the focus was ‘on the physical sensations of touching, leaning, supporting, counterbalancing, and falling with other people’ (Novack 1990, 8). Contact Improvisation was and is an embodied movement practice that focuses on the kinaesthetic sensibilities, experiences and spatialities of the performance, giving rise to experiences and sensations emergent from the moving‐spacing of the dance practice, as there appears to be ‘a literal “going with the flow” of events’ (Novack 1990, 11; see also Merriman 2010).…”

More-than-representational geographies of the past and the affectivity of sound: revisiting the Lynmouth flood event of 1952

“…Re-inscribed through varying forms of representational apparatus, such as guidebooks and step charts, Cresswell draws attention to the racialised morality of movement. Counter to rigid corporeal regimes, Merriman (2010Merriman ( , 2011 Rycroft's (2007) study of the Californian countercultural movement of the 1960s draws a parallel with 1960s experimentalism and current conceptions of non-representational theory. Moving with and beyond the realms of practice and performance, my aim here is to revisit the Lynmouth flood event of 1952 by exploring archival sources, the landscape of the East Lyn valley, and the material remains of the event.…”