Throughout her career, dance scholar Janice Ross has published several monographs with a semi-biographical approach, using the lives of dance artists and teachers like Margaret H’Doubler, Leonid Yakobson, and Anna Halprin to open into broader analyses of their historical times, places, and circumstances (Ross, Reference Ross2000, Reference Ross2015, Reference Ross2007). Ross’s latest book, The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design, continues in this vein by resuming her examination of Anna Halprin, who died in 2021 at the age of 100. This time, Anna’s art and ideas are considered alongside those of her husband, the landscape architect and urban designer Lawrence “Larry” Halprin, and the home that they built and shared in Kentfield, California, just north of San Francisco. The result is a fascinating and important study offering new insight into both Halprins and the midcentury American culture in which they lived and created, while also presenting an innovative methodological model for examining the buildings, objects, and environments that shape dancers’ daily lives.
The Choreography of Environments features five chapters, each focused on a distinct architectural element of the Halprins’ domestic environment. The first four examine features of the Halprins’ primary residence: the floating staircase, signature “dance deck,” large wooden chairs and benches, and immense glass-paned windows. The final chapter focuses on the Halprins’ second home, the Sea Ranch, a design of Larry’s nestled on the rural coastline of Northern California. Each follows a roughly similar structure, beginning with the design of the object (often conceived by the Halprins themselves, and constructed with the help of collaborators spanning architectural, theatrical, and urban design), then examining the creative usage of the object by both Anna and Larry, and finally considering the colloquial or domestic usage by the Halprin family and their visitors. The analysis is complemented by rich images and illustrations – in both black-and-white and color, averaging over a dozen per chapter – that allow the reader to conceptualize the Halprins’ homes, artistic inspirations, and creative designs.
Certainly, the primary appeal of The Choreography of Environments for most dance scholars will be its deepened insight into Anna Halprin as a choreographer, performer, teacher, and theorist of movement. In each chapter, Ross cites evidence from the embodied routines of Anna’s domestic life to explain recurring creative elements in her dances. For instance, she locates the “miniature fall and recovery of walking downstairs” (32) in the movement refrains of pieces like Parades and Changes (1965-1967). In The Four-Legged Stool (1961), Ross notes the “charged symbolism” (155) of props such as empty bottles, chairs, and other domestic objects, many of which Anna interacted with daily in her kitchen and throughout her home.
But Ross seems much more interested in using this book to situate Anna’s dance practice within several larger contexts: that of her marriage to and creative partnership with Larry; that of her life as a mother of two daughters and wife working primarily in her home; that of midcentury American ideas about domesticity, femininity, and Jewishness; and finally, that of postwar suburbanization and the transformation of the American built environment. Ross’s arguments about these broader contexts make a compelling case for Anna and Larry Halprin’s significance beyond the fields of performance and aesthetics. The location of the Halprins’ home, “secluded, remote, and secret” at the end of a dead-end lane” (22), becomes emblematic of the postwar housing boom in the United States, and the economic and social comfort attainable to many white, middle-class families during the 1950s. Anna’s ability to “code-switch” (97) between housewife and working artist demonstrates prevailing notions of motherhood, body image, and domestic labor at midcentury. Larry’s designs like Ghirardelli Square (1962) serve to “urbaniz[e] the experience of nature” (160), prompting people to meander reflectively through public space just as the construction of highways and suburbs created an infrastructure of isolation and alienation for many Americans. These insights support the central argument of the book: that dance has long engaged in reciprocal “dialogue with spatial, environmental, and urban agendas” (1), and that the contextualized lives of Anna and Lawrence Halprin represent the pinnacle of this collaboration.
The first chapter, “The Floating Staircase,” and the third chapter, “Disappearing Chairs,” are the most convincing in their synthesis of the Halprins’ domestic and creative lives. Chapter 1 regards the prominent, precarious staircase as a “dry waterfall” (32) within the home, with the ascent and descent daily reminding each Halprin of their artistic mission to curate humans’ kinesthetic engagement with the natural world. Chapter 3 draws a line from the intentional discomfort of seating in the Halprin home, exemplified by a biomorphic wooden chair and bench designed by JB Blunk, to the couples’ tendency to make audiences uncomfortable as a means of prompting meaningful reflection during performance or within public space.
Chapter Two, “Choreographing Nature,” is rightfully the longest in the book, as it explores the best-known and heralded object in the Halprin home: the dance deck. Ross presents the deck as a feat of both architectural and choreographic innovation, an object that could only exist in this specific location, amid these specific trees, for the specific purpose of experimenting with movement while surrounded by nature. Yet, Ross also examines the deck as a space that helps us understand larger domestic, social, and ethnic tensions in the Halprins’ lives during the 1950s and 1960s. A particularly fascinating portion of this analysis considers the deck as a parenting space, bolstered by testimony from the Halprins’ daughters. Inside the home, the Halprin girls donned girlish “mommy and me” outfits that matched with their mother; on the deck, they tossed rolling stretches of fabric in a moment of “play for the girls and research for Anna” (99). As teenagers, the girls performed, workshopped, and witnessed nude dances on the deck; but back in the home, being sexually intimate with a boyfriend was forbidden (125). Such moments of dissonance sharpen Ross’s argument about the boldness of the Halprins’ innovation, as they underscore the formidable traditionalism that saturated their lives beyond the deck.
The fourth chapter, “Windows in the Halprin House,” is the most metaphorical in its analysis and thus the most tenuously connected to the book’s overarching claims. After a brief discussion of architect William Wurster’s design philosophy, Ross shifts focus to examine the Halprin home’s windows as symbolic “tutorials in how to direct attention and notice the overlooked, as well as the importance of bringing sustained focus to the world” (177). The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to reframing and reflecting on the “racial resonances” of both Halprins’ designs, and the “implicit racial privilege” (183) of the home’s seclusion in an upscale, white suburban neighborhood. The ensuing discussion of Anna’s Ceremony of Us (1968), a piece which filtered both dancers and spectators according to race, is interesting and important, as it reveals a limitation of Anna’s radical approach to audience engagement. Still, the chapter lacks the tangible, sustained interplay of physical object and embodied practice that undergirded the previous chapters. Chapter Five, “Expanding Home,” doubles as an epilogue by taking the reader away from the Halprins’ primary residence and into the sandy seascape of the couples’ “working laboratory” and second home, taking the narrative through and beyond the end of the Halprins’ natural lives.
The Choreography of Environments also provides dance scholars with a model for interweaving experiential, embodied modes of inquiry with meticulous archival and text-based research. Throughout the book, Ross makes the case that dance scholars must look to ordinary objects and domestic spaces like the Halprin home as “lenses into viewing dance innovation” (1). In other words, to fully understand the significance of dance history, Ross reasons that we must look beyond the ephemeral moments of rehearsal and performance and consider the holistic lives of dance practitioners, searching for archival traces beyond their physical bodies. The result is convincing, as Ross has presented a deeply contextualized study of the Halprins that not only prompts dance scholars to view them anew, but makes their art and ideas accessible to scholars of urban design, midcentury American culture, and other topics beyond dance studies.
Finally, it is worth noting how, from the opening lines of the acknowledgements through the final pages on the Sea Ranch, Ross effectively guides the reader on a walk through the Halprins’ homes, dances, and urban designs. Although I have never visited Northern California, and certainly have not stood in the Halprin home, it was easy to imagine myself in that space, feeling the warmth as natural light cascaded through the redwood-framed windows, shifting my posture to seek comfort on the wooden chair, testing my balance as I descended the precarious staircase to the dance deck. The reader’s ability to engage in multisensory imagination is certainly enhanced by the generous number of photographs featured throughout the book. But Ross’s elegant, descriptive prose is also a major contributor to this kinesthetic effect. “The repeating sets of stairs of the Halprin property are rehearsals,” Ross writes in a particularly evocative section of the first chapter, “… riverbeds for the flow of human bodies down, up, and deeper into the spaces of the home and gardens. They are the tributaries that deliver bodies from one environment to another, from the domestic to the artistic” (47). Such passages serve as a reminder that the most moving dance writing does more than describe and document; it also evokes energy, imagery, and flow. In this way, Ross’s language takes on some tenets of the Halprins’ creative philosophy, as it serves to “increase[e] spectators’ [or readers’] awareness, active engagement, and participatory commerce with their surroundings” (132-33).
For its methodological innovation and capacious analysis linking creative concerns with domestic context, Janice Ross’s The Choreography of Environments marks a vital contribution not only to the literature on American postmodern dance, but to the broader field of dance studies. It reminds us that dance knowledge leaves a tangible impact on our homes, our cities, our parks, and public spaces, and inspires us to look for these traces in our professional and personal lives.
