January 23, 2025, 3-4:30pm (TPAC Chapel)
Janice Ross (Stanford University):
“The Dancer’s Home as A Hidden Archive: Anna Halprin’s Dance Deck”
Join us in person at the Chapel of the Chaplains on the Temple Campus, or through the live stream - direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
This talk theorizes domestic spaces and objects in a dancer’s home as hidden archives of aesthetic invention. It posits four objects from the mid-century modern home of the dancer Anna Halprin and the Urban Designer Lawrence Halprin’s Northern California residence - stairs, chairs, decks, and windows — as strong influences shaping both Halprins’ movement invention and choreography. Through a close reading of one of these, the large redwood deck on the side of the Halprin property, known internationally as “The Dance Deck,” this talk traces the confluence of nature, landscape, and the body in performance. Designed collaboratively by theater and lighting designer Arch Lauterer, and Lawrence Halprin, this open-air laboratory was where Anna grew the dance works that defined her as a leading contemporary dance artist. The most famous feature of the Halprin property, this platform cantilevering off the hillside below the Halprin home, is where for 70 years thousands of dancers from around the world came to study, perform, and observe. Working in the midst of nature on this dance surface punctured by the trunks of Madrone trees, Halprin and her students stretched dance’s boundaries. The result was a radical rethinking of scale, norms, and gestural repertoires of bodies as performing mediums. The material for this talk is drawn from Janice Ross’s newest book; The Choreography of Environments, (Oxford University Press, Spring 2025).
Janice Ross, Professor Emerita, Theatre and Performance Studies Dept. Stanford University, is the author of five books: Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2015/ Russian edition 2024); Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, (University of California Press 2007/2009 paper) winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation; San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007); and Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education, (University of Wisconsin 2001/Second Edition UFP 2021). She is co-editor, with Susan Manning and Rebecca Schneider, of Futures of Dance Studies, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020). Her newest book, The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Designwill be published by Oxford University Press in January 2025. Her academic articles have delt with topics as diverse as performance as training for citizenship among incarcerated immigrants in Italy and ballet by Jewish Orthodox women in Israel, Her awards include Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships; two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships; Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Italy; NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts Fellowship. She received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford and in 2022 she was named an Honorary Fellow of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance in Israel.