Anna Halprin’s Urban Rituals
I must admit, I floated through Janice Ross’s text "Anna Halprin's Urban Rituals." I felt the pull of anchoring statements here and there that resonated with my own experience and cognition but was for the most part lost in the idea of ritual that she returns to throughout the text. I can’t say I shared a common definition of ritual with her until I reached her concluding thoughts. I pursued an external definition of ritual—a (solemn) ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order—but that seemed overly limiting…it failed to capture the essence of what Ross was referring to. I had hoped to find embedded in some definition an ideology or pedagogy—some spiritual remnant tied to the functionalist definitions. But the idea of ritual remained an unfamiliar one.
I came to a tentative familiarity by following closely the evolution of Halprin’s use of ritual from her first encounters with the pedagogy of John Dewey. Dewey advocated an integrative model of art making as “a living union of thought and the instrument of expression.” Halprin integrated Dewey’s phenomenological, experiential understanding of living and art-making into her own practice through what she called “ritual [body] consciousness.” Halprin defined this practice as “a way of shifting awareness from an automatic, habitual way of living your life to one of active awareness.” Ritual consciousness, as described above begins to resemble a method of training the mind and body to work as an integrated receptive and creative unit—a method of enacting Dewey’s principle of experience-based cognition. As Ross notes, Halprin, in her practice of ritual body consciousness, is not only resolving mind-body dualism but also challenging “the dualism…of perception and representation, creation and reception.”
Ross casts Halprin’s work The Five-Legged Stool (1962) in the category of absurdist, fragmentary thought—as that intermediary catalyst between orthogonal, planar thought (as represented by spectacle) and holistic, synthetic thought (as represented by ritual). The Five-Legged Stool was designed to address the “alienation, absurdity and cynicism of domestic ritual [in the post-war context]” by re-engaging “the gestural vocabulary of everyday life” in order to “ initiate an experience of perceptual awakening.” The collage format of the piece was aimed to jar the witness’ senses into authentic, un-filtered and attentive perception. The performance aimed to accomplish the fragmentation of perceptual habits and synthesis of perceptual ritual all in one. This momentum culminated in Halprin’s Still Dance series—“rehearsals for the final ritual of life” that explored “old age as an intensely ritualistic…condition.” However, this series was not designed to jar, to break, to fragment—that had been accomplished by The Five Legged Stool –this series was a sharpened expression of the ultimate synthesis, that of body and earth. And so we are back to the mammalian brain—that holistic, mushy, synthetic vision woven together from the so-many fragments left in the wake of the absurdist, futurist decomposition of orthogonal, planar thought.
Ultimately, it was not a dictionary that brought the concept of ritual into focus for me, but rather the associations and images drawn from Ross’s conclusion. Ross speaks of Halprin’s mission to craft a ritual body, that the performance of the body’s story is the ritual. I began to perceive the significance, the role of ritual as I read Ross’s explanation of Halprin’s process, saying that she “didn’t invent characters so much as generate a real-time context in which her performing associates could live with her onstage,” that she considered art to be a sharpened expression of life. Before the weight of these images seeped into my mind I could only think of ritual in the mundane and repetitious sense, as habit or tradition that was prescribed or inherited and repeated without distinct consciousness or awareness of the moment. As the images seeped further and began to integrate with my own experiences I began to form a fragile but substantive distinction between ritual and habit—between re-living and repeating, expanding and entrenching.
For all my conviction that spaces choreograph the movement of others (as Lawrence Halprin’s landscapes do), my fundamental interest in site-specific dance does not find its origins in my intellect alone. It comes from a desire to re-live, to examine ritualized existence, to awaken my own senses and to inhabit spaces as a fully embodied being. Yes, I wish to study spatial design but I aspire not to read it but to live it in a body infused with Halprin’s ritual consciousness.
No comments:
Post a Comment