The Choreography of Environments
How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 17 April 2025
- ISBN 9780197775639
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages268 pages
- Size 234x157x15 mm
- Weight 476 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 101 596
Categories
Short description:
The Choreography of Environments traces how the objects and architectural features of our homes and gardens shape who we are. Specifically, this book focuses on the 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and gardens of urban designer Lawrence Halprin and dancer Anna Halprin as a hidden archive. It 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 laboratory reshaping postmodern dance invention urban design and their expansion into civic, social, and environmental awareness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
MoreLong description:
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.
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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Floating Staircase and the Choreography of Processions
Choreographing Nature: The Dance Deck
Disappearing Chairs and Participatory Dances
The Picture Frame, Not the Picture: Windows in the Halprin House
Expanding Home: The Sea Ranch
Appendix Selected List of Exhibitions and Films of Anna Halprin, 2005-2021
Notes
Bibliography
Index
