The purpose of this paper is to study the philosophy of Anna Halprin's life and art, who developed the modern dance, established the artistry, and rediscovered various functions and values of dance. Halprin is one of the pioneer artists who represente...
The purpose of this paper is to study the philosophy of Anna Halprin's life and art, who developed the modern dance, established the artistry, and rediscovered various functions and values of dance. Halprin is one of the pioneer artists who represented the early post-modern dance. Halprin constructed a vision that the body is combined with physical, emotional, and mental standards, which approached to dancing and healing. She also developed a dance that combined emotions and images, reflecting the relationship between the body, mind, and feeling, and had a post-modern philosophy, which harmonized the life and art through the dance as a new paradigm of the 21st century: creativity and art. The solid philosophy of Halprin has helped her combine the life and art as a stage art, a healing art, and a community art and this is making a big influence today.
Her works stimulated the modern dancers, who were noticing the limitations of the modern dance styles and contents, a spirit of improvised experiments which made it possible for the dancers to approach to the dancing more lively and freely. The new attempts expanded the limited motion areas, as well as helped the dancers to develop their own style and characters, breaking the barriers of the dances which used to have in an art form, and created progressive and ground breaking works by exchanging different art forms with music, poetries, architects, and paintings. Halprin did not only develop the artistic recognition on approaching to the motions, but also brought out the methodology to approach to a unique and innovative dance, which puts emphasis on the emotional and imagery experiences of movements, with anatomical and scientific principles of the body on the basis. Halprin built on and expanded a new innovative field of dance: dances as a stage art, a community art, and a healing art. Through the developing process, Halprin danced a combined dance that harmonized the body, mind and spirit, and tried to find a way to overcome the crisis of the body by making the people strengthen the will to live.
Halprin's achievements, which improvised post-modern works, advanced dances that came out from the early avant-garde movement, and developed the healing art that was created in during the progress of overcoming the cancer, did not only accomplish each individual dancer's concepts, but also kept on developing as new type of dances like 'Planetary Dance', which seeks to accomplish the communal goal, such as fighting the race discrimination and working for a world peace.
Halprin's art philosophy emphasizes that people need to bring art into their life in order to enrich the life of humans. The life and art were regarded as one before Renaissance period, but the life and art became separated after that. Halprin pointed out that the life of humans started having problems since then, when people saw the value of art as artistry and technically. The process of Halprin's art development started off from emphasizing the creativity and continued on by attempting improvisation to keep each dancer's individuality, which later expanded even more to be applied to art and community. Halprin helped the community members to solve their individual physical and mental problems through the dances as art, and helped the Life/Art Process to become one again by establishing a new field of dance where people could resolve the social discriminations.
The efforts Halprin has made clearly indicates the direction which the modern dance should be developed. The increased importance in the role of the dance as an art should be recognized as an important signal to notify the new possibilities that the dances could have. The healing function and the role of the fundamental dance that Halprin had practised will become highly recognized when the value of the dance is found not only as one of the fields in art, but also as in life.