Anna Halprin, the leading Jewish American dancer and choreographer and educator for generations of experimentalists in dance and theater, died May 24 at her home in Kentfield, California She was 100. Her daughter, Daria Halprin Khalighi, cited old age as the cause of death.
Across the 80 years she taught and performed internationally and led workshops on her outdoor dance deck at her home in Marin County, Halprin was a pacesetter for her early disowning of the modern dance world – both its technical approach and its production system, and her abandonment of the proscenium stage. She challenged major dance orthodoxies and her radical dance theater events helped prefigure happenings, performance art and experimental theater works. Located at the boundaries between art and life, healing, ritual and performance, Halprin created participatory site-specific dances, situating art events in the midst of urban life.
Influential choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin has died at age 100. Her art spanned high modernist works and collaborations with artists like John Cage
Her work, which stressed improvisation, attracted students, disciples and enthusiasts fascinated by the creative issues she explored and the way she explored them.
Anna Halprin. Photo: Shawncalhoun/Wikipedia Commons. May 26, 2021 at 3:24pm
Pioneering choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin died at home in Kentfield, California, on May 24 at the age of one hundred. The news was announced by her daughter Daria Halprin on Facebook. Known for innovating what is now called postmodern dance in the early portion of her wide-ranging career, and for her participatory choreography involving the audience, Halprin devoted her life to “expanding dance so that it’s part of life,” using it to explore social conditions and the importance of communion as well as healing, teaching the form to senior citizens and AIDS and cancer patients. In 1966
Her work, which stressed improvisation, attracted students, disciples and enthusiasts fascinated by the creative issues she explored and the way she explored them.