Anna Halprin's Ceremony of us: pedagogy for collective movement and embodiment

Since the early 1950s, experimental dancer Anna Halprin had rejected traditional modern dance in favor of a more humanistic approach to the art form by taking inspiration from architecture, performance art, Gestalt therapy, and theatre. Halprin’s emphasis on the physical landscape, audience participation and kinesthetic awareness placed her at the forefront of experimentation, contributing to her consideration as a pioneer of postmodern dance. In 1969, Halprin was invited to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts where she created one of the first bi‐racial projects to explore race through movement, Ceremony of Us, for the Los Angeles Festival of the Performing Arts. ❧ In Ceremony of Us, Halprin used the bodily memories and personal stories of the dancers involved as pedagogical tools for bringing the two communities together. The project is contradictory in that it was an honest, well‐intended collaboration, and also a failed utopic attempt to address racial tensions. Analyzing and deconstructing the project today, Ceremony of Us could potentially be read as an essentialist, stereotyped portrayal of blacks and whites. This is not taking into account the radical nature of the endeavor and its effects on its participants. Halprin was one of the first artists to create a type of durational community engagement in the provocative and racially divided context of Los Angeles after the Watts uprisings. The failures and the lessons learned in Halprin’s collaborative community performance can help provide us with useful ethical standards for today’s socially minded collaborative practices.