The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design

The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and choreography. If these objects and spaces happen to have been designed by a leading modernist architect and landscape designer working with the dancer, then the aesthetic imprint is amplified. Dance innovation becomes pressed into dialogue with spatial, environmental, and urban agendas. The Choreography of Environments builds on this premise to consider the use of ordinary objects from a private residence as lenses into viewing dance innovation. Author Janice Ross posits the Halprins' 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and expansive outdoor dance deck as a hidden archive. She explores four objects from their house and gardens -- staircase, deck, chair, and window -- to trace how, despite the conservative postwar climate, this intimate domestic space became a radical template reshaping postmodern dance invention and its expansion into civic, social, and environmental engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The work that happened in this white, middle class, Jewish-American home in a San Francisco suburb paved the way for changes that continue to resonate today across contemporary dance, performance, and urban design. These include: defamiliarizing urban landscape and gardens as cloistered theaters where civic identities are rehearsed, orchestrating collective problem solving and invention, normalizing the nude body, privileging a utilitarian and responsive rather than sentimental approach to dance in the environment, and re-positioning choreography as a vital medium for urban problem solving. These four representative objects in the Halprin home are also used to trace the burgeoning of dance as a forceful medium for civic engagement, and its valorization of the ordinary in movement. As a whole, this book shows how dance, architecture, and landscape design would have a profound confluence through these shared domestic spaces and objects of the Halprins' lives.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1: The Floating Staircase and the Choreography of Processions Chapter 2: Choreographing Nature: The Dance Deck Chapter 3: Disappearing Chairs and Participatory Dances Chapter 4: The Picture Frame, Not the Picture: Windows in the Halprin House Chapter 5: Expanding Home: The Sea Ranch

About the Author :
Janice Ross is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at the Theatre and Performance Studies Department, Stanford University, where she taught for 34 years. She has degrees from UC Berkeley (BA) and Stanford (MA & PhD). She is the author of five books and numerous articles. Her awards include Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships; two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships; Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Italy; NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts Fellowship; research grants from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Djerassi Foundation. She received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford and is an Honorary Fellow of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Israel.

Review :
The Choreography of Environments by Janice Ross is an exciting project that reveals the depth of Anna and Lawrence "Larry" Halprin's co-creative processes using everyday objects-staircases, a deck, chairs, and windows-in their midcentury modern home in Kentfield, California. Bringing together dance studies, architecture and design, and art history, the book illustrates how the Halprins' domestic environment shaped their aesthetic sensibilities, their understanding of movement and choreography, and their ability to mobilize the ordinary as a tool for civic and societal change. The Choreography of Environments will delight anyone wishing to delve deeply into an artistic life that seamlessly blends personal ideals of aesthetics, function, and movement into daily life. One can't leave this book without looking at one's own home space with new eyes, and what if…