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Article published in Publico newspaper (Ípsilon supplement) a January 23 2009.

Maybe it is hard to imagine nowadays that naked bodies can cause any outrage, but in 1965, in the United States of America, immersed in an endless war in Vietnam, and despite free love and flower power, dance was not yet called, rightfully, contemporary and bodies were not really that free. That was in spite of the fact that in America  ruptures that would profoundly change dance as we know today were being experimented.

America tended to regard with discontent scenic experiences that challenged the norm and used traditional patterns to question the way theatrical mechanisms work. And, that is why, on the occasion of the premiere of Parades and Changes, Anna Halprin was issued an arrest order, the choreographer who dared present bodies emptied of eroticism in a play that “disregarded gender stereotypes by dressing the performers androgynously and flew in the face of the conventions of contemporary dance by creating a work based on an every day task”, sum up biographers Libby Worth and Helen Poynor in Anna Halprin: Life and Work (Routledge, 2004).

“The movement was not eroticized, the instruction to the performer was to be aware of their responses and their breathing as carried out the tasks”, they explain. “For Halprin dance was not about sexuality, but rather an initiation which reflected an approach to dance, the body and the self. She also felt that dance had historical significance because it had challenged both the social and artistic of the era”. Although Halprin considered the mistakes of her time prevented a “true understanding of the piece”, the “dressing and undressing” sequence became famous and is one of the strongest images of this ritual-piece. Two years afterwards, in Sweden, the nudity of that group of performers did not cause any outrage or surprise. For Europe, still far from embracing many of the most daring gestures of contemporary dance, nudity seemed natural and consonant with the spirit of research and sharing intended to be established between performers and the audience.

Not only dancers belonged to the group, but also musicians, architects, visual, light and sound artists and landscape architectures, creating a reactive and contrasting community that knew how to take advantage of their differences. Many of the performers were family members and not all of them were professionals. They called themselves “Bay Area cultural experimentalists”, but Halprin was seeking to build a community, both inside and outside the stage, an idea that got her a lot of criticism by the artistic community of the West coast of the United States.

A century of dance

Born on July 13, 1920, her history is mixed up with that of dance in the 20th Century and only apparently is the choreographer a second rate figure in the history of contemporary dance. This “choreographic refugee”, as essayist Janice Ross calls her in the notes in Culturgest’s programme, wished to propose another way of thinking and executing movement, by that point dependent and mimed by performers according to their teacher’s school. Something that has always been present in Halprin’s vision, which played an important role in the transition from modern dance to contemporary, bringing along lessons shared by the avant-guard artists of Bauhaus, exiled in Los Angeles and their mentors, as well as her husband, architect Laurence Halprin, and the experimentalism and philosophy of Doris Humphrey or Mary Wigman, who were her teachers, as well as a close relationship with experimental music. At a time when it hard to conceive an artistic action without profound political connotation, dance could not be merely the creation of ephemeral forms in space. I was necessary to do what Ross qualifies as “a discreet act of civil disobedience”.

“We were beginning to explore systems that brought attention to cause and effect relations”, cites researcher Laurence Louppe (Poétique de la danse contemporaine, Contredanse, 1997). “Anna Halprin begins by isolating parts of the body that she moves without joining in a continuity that determined a previously established path”, an idea that prolonged the notions of unpredictability and indetermination proposed by John Cage and Merce Cunnigham. Those tasks “interdicted the whole direct subjective initiatives, but also made the choreographic organization a non-premeditaded path, in which the structures depended entirely on the fulfillment of the task”, underlines Louppe. An idea that will later be precursor to the rupture movements of Judson Dance Church, where names like Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainner emerged.

A certain (re)discovered time

Over forty years afterwards, Parades and Change is back to stages, a feat of Anne Collod, French choreographer who was present in the origins of Quator Albrecht Kunst, a collective that dedicated itself to re-stage, between 1993 and 200, pieces from the beginning of the 20th century. The term Replay was added to the title, since at the time of the premiere and the following presentations not all the records of the many tasks created had reached us, as they constantly revised and adapted, either because of the performers or venues, in spite of the fact that “pragmatically it was not difficult to recreate as the choreographic vocabulary was easily accessible” (quoting again the biographers). Anne Collod chose twelve tasks, among them “dressing and undressing”, presenting many more task in one night than Halprin could have ever imagined and she did not invite a heterogeneous group of transdisciplinary creators, but rather performers with an established career, with aesthetics and schools that that could form a constrast but that suggested, above all, a broader map of the patterns of representation of the contemporary body. And she also defined a music score, instead of exploring the characteristic flexibility of the original piece. The ones we see in this re-creation are probably the ones that best identify with this piece and their names provide a perfect sense of the lack of metaphors, for its evidence and simplicity. Among them is the “Paper Dance”, in which the performers tear long strips of kraft paper without allowing a different interpretation than that of an installation of an ambiance that questions the functionality of gesture.

Vera Mantero, one of the performers, alongside Nuno Bizarro, Alain Buffard from France, Collod herself, Boaz Barkan from Israel and DD Dorvillier from the USA, who were joined by musician and composer Sébastien Roux, explains that the original was a lot more fragmented and the recreation work “tried to be as faithful as possible to the available material”. Parades and Changes, by Anna Halprin is due to profound work, that took long months to be completed and was constantly being re-evaluated, which allowed each of the performers, not only different in age but also with very different experience on stage, to find a space where they could activate what Halprin liked to call “the complicity of sharing”. In Parades and Changes, Replay, by Anne Collod and guests, this process had to be sped-up, the activations had to be more pragmatic and, despite the fidelity claimed by the current performers, the piece is dislocated to a less affirmative dimension from a political point of view and more focused on the performing aspect. Something that greatly interested Halprin.

“The whole piece is about questioning and deconstructing the theatrical scene. It finds again the space of the scene by using mechanisms, objects or costumes that exist on the space of the performance and speaking directly to the audience”, says Vera Mantero. There were some, in Sweden, who called it “ceremonial of trust”, an expression reinforced by Cristina Grande, programmer of Auditório de Serralves. “I can participate as observer in this discourse and be together in the same space observing performers who are completely exposed looking for solutions for problems” says the programmer. Anne Collod explains in the interview included in the program that “the processes used to create Parades and Changes exist in a dialectic game between privation and freedom and the piece works in the opening of emblematic possibilities of the time [in which it was created]: how to make a process visible? How to get out of illusion and give access to the materiality of the place and actions?”

One of the main strengths of Parades and Changes, Replay resides in how it brings to the present day a series of schemes that are still essential to choreographic construction, conscious of being inscribed in a precise historical time and space. Back to the example of the “Dressing and undressing” task, Halprin states in Buffard’s documentary film that “when you are undressing and looking you pay attention to everything that involves you”. Gil Mendo, dance programmer in Culturgest, adds that Halprin insists in the idea that “the performer must always assume responsibility in creation”, a philosophy that, as Vera Mantero explains, “allows the performer to find his/her own movement without imitating the choreographer”, an idea that is always present in the work of the Portuguese choreographer and that expands Halprin’s intentions by creating scores that hover above the determinist logic of creation.

There is an intense need to open space beyond its physical and verisimilar possibilities, and in each of the tasks to make not only the body relate to the place, but also to the many presences on the stage and the audience. The ceremonial of complicity so dear to Halprin is born again in this moving and profoundly contemporary re-action. And hoping the outrage is now another one: revealing how dance does not need more or less fictitious artifices to develop and to be received.