Right On: A Ceremony of Us
Author
Nina Zurier
Decade
1960s 1970s
Tags
Activism Community Dance Performance Poetry Ritual
Jane Levy Reed and her husband, Larry Reed, were students at SFAI in 1969, and he was one of the dancers in this performance. The woman standing with her back to the camera at the center of the photo is Wanda Coleman, a poet and central figure in Los Angeles literary life. Anna Halprin taught dance at SFAI in 1968. In 2003, Anna Halprin and her husband, Lawrence Halprin, were awarded honorary doctorates at SFAI.
Right On: A Ceremony of Us records the San Francisco rehearsal for a commissioned performance at the opening of the Mark Taper Forum by Anna Halprin’s San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop and the Studio Watts Workshop from Los Angeles (all-white and all-Black dance companies, respectively). In the piece, created in response to the Watts riots, Halprin guides the dancers through a series of movements and extensive partner work. The performance sought to explore racial politics while providing opportunities for catharsis and healing. According to Larry Reed, the two dance troupes rehearsed separately for almost six months. Halprin traveled back and forth between rehearsals in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and would describe one group to the other. Eventually the two groups came together in San Francisco at the Divisadero Street studio in rehearsals that were powerful sessions of trust-building. They would work on movement and engagement at Halprin’s direction, then make drawings to explore their feelings, then go back to movement. This later became the basis for Halprin’s Integrative Dance workshops, which continue today as the Tamalpa Institute. On September 29, 1970, Halprin and the Dancers’ Workshop performed a similar work at the opening of the new University Art Museum, Berkeley (now BAMPFA).
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Video
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