February 15–April 21, 2013 @ BAM
During the 1950s, a group of Beat poets, painters, environmentalists, composers,
and psychologists gathered together with choreographer Anna Halprin on an
outdoor dance deck in Marin County built by her husband, landscape architect
Lawrence Halprin, and experimented with developing new artistic forms that could
reflect the basic needs of human expression. As she later told her biographer
Janice Ross, “What we were all after was to have our art be more reflective of real
life issues and to do this we all tried to break down the aesthetic barriers we had
inherited. And since movement was my medium, out of that came a new kind of
realism.”1 Rejecting the hierarchy of the traditional dance company, the Halprins
began to organize these gatherings as workshops, using a term borrowed from the
Bauhaus curriculum.
Anna and Lawrence Halprin were eager to bridge the disparate communication
styles of the various workshop participants and create a common language. They
sought to develop a formal notational system that could be applied to many creative
endeavors—to make visible the process of gathering and selecting resources,
acting on those resources, and evaluating the results. Parades and Changes, first
performed in 1965, was the culmination of hundreds of workshop experimentations.
More than a piece of choreography, it is a compositional method. Taking its name
from everyday parades that ritualize daily existence and the changes that throw
these rituals into question, Parades and Changes can never be performed the
same way twice…
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ASLA @ BERKELEY 