Anna Halprin and the Dancers’ Workshop: A Marin Story

The story of the Anna Halprin Dancers’ Workshop starts on a wooden deck in the redwoods of Marin County. From that hillside in Kentfield, Halprin sent dancers onto a Stockholm stage, into a New York scandal, down San Francisco’s Market Street and finally up Mount Tamalpais. Here is her Marin story in order, with the dates her sources give.

From Winnetka to the redwoods (1920-1952)

“Born Anna Schuman in Winnetka, Ill., in 1920, Halprin began studying dance as a little girl,” NPR’s obituary begins. She went on to the University of Wisconsin, where her mentor was Margaret H’Doubler and where she met the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. NPR adds that “they were married for 70 years before his death in 2009.”

After the war the couple moved west. Her archive dates “her arrival in San Francisco in 1945,” and from 1946 to 1955 she ran the Halprin-Lathrop Studio with the dancer and choreographer Welland Lathrop. The Tamalpa Institute’s full biography of Anna Halprin covers these early years in more detail.

The Anna Halprin dance deck in Kentfield

“In 1952, Larry Halprin built the dance deck and studio where Anna developed her new dance movement,” says the Tamalpa Institute. Flash Art gives “between 1951 and 1954,” so the safe answer is the early 1950s. The house stood on “a steep, redwood-shaded slope in Kent Woodlands with a view of Mount Tam,” on the mountain at the centre of Mill Valley’s arts history.

Anna, quoted by NPR from a 2014 interview, explained why it mattered: “The dance deck was an eye-opener to taking theater to where people are rather than expecting people to come to you.”

The San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop

Even the founding date is contested: NPR gives 1955, her own archive 1959, and BAMPFA simply “the 1950s.” We follow BAMPFA.

NPR lists her students as “Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Meredith Monk,” and Monk later built Meredith Monk’s site-specific works in New York. The touring company included A.A. Leath, John Graham and her daughters Daria and Rana, and it “toured nationally and internationally for the next twenty years.”

“In 1964 she opened the Dancers Workshop Studio in San Francisco,” at 321 Divisadero, in a building shared with the Tape Music Center and its sound collages. Her method rested on choreographic scores, which Lawrence formalised in 1968 as the RSVP Cycles: Resources, Score, Valuaction, Performance.

Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes, Stockholm to Hunter

Parades and Changes premiered in Stockholm on September 5, 1965, commissioned, in Halprin’s words, “by a music festival in Sweden.” It was built from six units, including “a slow ritual of undressing and dressing.” A Swedish critic called the undressing scene “a ceremony of trust.”

New York did not. NPR reports that “When the piece premiered in 1967 at New York’s Hunter College, it was promptly banned,” with warrants for every performer, including the composer Morton Subotnick. Halprin remembered it differently: “they issued a warrant for my arrest at the hotel the next day for indecent exposure. But I wasn’t there.”

The company stopped touring. Her verdict: “It was a disaster that turned into a blessing.” For the work’s place among the period’s open-ended events, see Parades and Changes and the Bay Area happenings. Its final staging was at BAMPFA in February 2013.

Rituals for a city: Myths, Ceremony of Us, Citydance

Myths (1967-68) was “a series of 10 performances” at the Dancers’ Workshop Studio, with music by Casey Sonnabend. Ceremony of Us, made with the Studio Watts School for the Arts, brought Black and white dancers together and premiered on February 27, 1969, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

In the mid-1970s Citydance channelled dancing participants along Market Street in a day-long event; Halprin called it “a gift to the people of San Francisco.” In 1978 she co-founded the Tamalpa Institute with Daria Halprin.

The Planetary Dance and Mount Tamalpais

Between 1979 and 1981 a series of murders on the mountain’s trails closed them, and, as the Planetary Dance site puts it, “the community lived in helplessness and rage.” The Halprins’ community workshop chose to dance the reclaiming of the mountain.

The ritual, In and On the Mountain, premiered on April 10, 1981, starting at the College of Marin and moving onto Mount Tamalpais. It “included a walk along the very trails where the killings occurred.” A Huichol shaman told her: “you must return to it and dance for five years.” The Planetary Dance’s own account of the 1981 ritual tells the full story.

In 1985 the dance became Circle the Earth, and it was later simplified into the Planetary Dance around the Earth Run. It is “a participatory dance rather than a theatrical performance,” in which people “run, walk, or simply stand in a series of concentric circles, creating a moving mandala.” Halprin died at her Kentfield home on May 24, 2021, aged 100.

Year	Event	Place
Early 1950s	Lawrence Halprin builds the dance deck (1952 per Tamalpa)	Kentfield
1950s	Dancers’ Workshop founded (1955 or 1959)	San Francisco
1965	Parades and Changes premieres	Stockholm
1967	Hunter College performance; warrants issued	New York
1969	Ceremony of Us, with Studio Watts	Los Angeles
Mid-1970s	Citydance along Market Street	San Francisco
1978	Tamalpa Institute founded	Marin
1981	In and On the Mountain	Mount Tamalpais
1985 on	Circle the Earth, then the Planetary Dance	Mount Tamalpais, then worldwide

A Marin parallel: Snake and Antenna Theater

Halprin and Antenna never worked together, as far as the sources show, but they shared a county and a conviction: that performance could leave the proscenium for a hillside, a beach or a street. Snake Theater, Antenna’s predecessor, played Somewhere in the Pacific on the beach at Fort Cronkhite in 1978 and Auto “at an abandoned Mohawk gas station in Sausalito” in 1979. The Antenna chronology, year by year lists the rest.

By coincidence of dates, Antenna’s Vacuum (1981) “premiered over the weekend in Sausalito,” the Chronicle reported on April 21, ten days after the mountain ritual began. Peter Magnant in the Mill Valley Record saw “highly stylized dance-like, performance pieces, with masked actors and taped voice-overs,” stripped down until “we are left with something approximating a mantra.”

The routes differed. Halprin made participants into dancers; Antenna kept a script and a soundtrack and put its audience inside the play. Both belong to the wider family described in what site-responsive theatre means.

Aspect	Anna Halprin	Snake and Antenna Theater
Home ground	A deck in the redwoods at Kentfield	Warehouses on the Sausalito waterfront
Outdoor sites	Mount Tamalpais, Market Street, Sea Ranch	Fort Cronkhite beach, Sausalito City Hall, a gas station
Audience	Participants who become dancers	Audience members guided by tape who “become part of the show”
Spring 1981	In and On the Mountain, April 10	Vacuum, April
Mark Taper Forum	Ceremony of Us, 1969	Adjusting the Idle, co-commissioned

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