Anna Halprin

This extraordinary film documents the first days of rehearsal for the performance Ceremony of Us, created in response to the Watts riots and staged at the Mark Taper Theatre in Los Angeles in 1969. No final performance film exists, but this film goes far in capturing its spirit. After working separately for months with all-white dancers in San Francisco and all-black dancers in Watts, Anna Halprin brought the two groups together in the politically groundbreaking performance. This film captures how Anna guided the two groups of dancers into experiences that both elicited and challenged racial stereotypes, creating a space where political and personal anger and despair could be expressed, and where reconciliation could be envisioned.

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Auguste Rodin's sculptures and Anna Halprin's creative process come together in this poetic film of dances in nature.

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A chronicle of the iconoclastic life of gay poet, filmmaker, and spiritual visionary James Broughton, one of the defining voices of the sexual revolution, whose groundbreaking artistic celebrations of sexuality and the body influenced generations of the 1960s and '70s to profoundly embrace life and ‘follow your own weird’.

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SENIORS ROCKING explores the artistic process of Anna Halprin, a pioneer of American dance, through the prism of a single performance piece. The film retraces not only the development of a unique performance with residents of two nursing homes in California, but also the growth of a sense of community when fifty people from various walks of life, age 65 to 100, join forces to perform together. Underpinned by Halprin’s conviction that dance and movement embolden people to express themselves and, in so doing, change their lives, the film shows how the participants give physical shape to their personal messages for posterity through a dance performance.

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BREATH MADE VISIBLE is the first feature length film about the life and career of Anna Halprin, the American dance pioneer who has helped redefine our notion of modern art with her belief in dance's power to teach, heal, and transform at all ages of life. This cinematic portrait blends recent interviews with counterparts such as the late Merce Cunningham, archival footage, including her establishment of the first multiracial dance company in the U.S., and excerpts of current performances such as "Parades and Changes" at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, to weave a stunning, inspiring account of one of the most important cultural icons in modern dance.

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Minotaur was the center of in a solo exhibition at the New Museum, New York. Octogenarian choreographer Anna Halprin, pioneer of postmodern dance, recently created an erotic performance based on Auguste Rodin's rendering of the Greek legend. Minotaur traces labyrinthine transformations, in which photographs, sculpture and dance succeed and replace one another, and in which bodies and objects appear part of a continuous tissue. Fluctuations between disparate media are accompanied by shifts in gender dynamics; in Rodin's original the half-man / half-bull grips an ambivalent nymph, while in Halprin's iteration the female 'victim' turns the story on its head, wresting a melancholic triumph over her captor. A score by Matmos, which includes the sounds of Rodin sculptures being struck like instruments, echoes the sculpture's muscularity.

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