![]() ![]() Then, for ten days, she brought the two groups together to develop the performance. For five months she worked separately with an all-Black group in Watts and an all-white group in San Francisco, using the same scores. She saw this as an opportunity to explore race relations through dance. Anna was invited to work with Studio Watts on a performance for a festival at the Mark Taper Forum. Increasingly, Anna’s performances moved out of the theater and into the community, helping people address social and emotional concerns.Ĭeremony of Us (1969) was created in response to Los Angeles’s 1965 Watts Uprising. They led a series of workshops called “Experiments in the Environment,” bringing dancers, architects, and other artists together to explore group creativity in relation to awareness of the environment, in both rural and urban settings. ![]() This piece, like so many of Anna’s works, is also concerned with the form of the human body and how our gestures, whether subtle or extreme, can create a landscape of movement.ĭuring the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Lawrence and Anna developed various methods of generating collective creativity. When the piece premiered in Sweden in 1965, this revolutionary use of nudity onstage was revered, but two years later, in New York City, it led to a warrant for Anna’s arrest. The work reveals how ordinary tasks such as dressing and undressing can become a dance when they are done with awareness by the performer. With “Paper Dance,” the dancers, now nude, rip up sheets of brown paper and toss them overhead. On view in the gallery, “Paper Dance” is a section from this piece in which dancers slowly, ritualistically take off their clothes while focusing on a spot far away. In 1965, Anna’s Parades and Changes shook the dance world by challenging conceptions of nudity, stillness, and the “ceremony of trust” (as she named it) between performers and audience. Presented in two discrete spaces across the gallery campus, the viewer is guided by a dance score created for this project in tribute to Anna’s choreography and the scores Lawrence would sketch and print for her. Installed alongside JB’s wooden works are streaming archival footage of two of Anna Halprin’s seminal dances and Lawrence Halprin’s abstract paintings from 1960–61. Anna once said, “These pieces are primary figures in our home.” Three Landscapes teases out this intimate relationship between Blunk and the Halprins and between the creative works and credos they cultivated together during this period. The Halprins were regularly photographed on and around the seating installation and considered the sculptures to be integral parts of their interior landscape. ![]() These immaculate sculptures that are also furniture-a throne, a bench, tables, and a stool-were participatory witnesses to the Halprins’ homelife during an exceedingly fertile period. As artist Charles Ray once put it, “If you can’t see a work of JB Blunk’s, you can sit on it. His works were made to be used, with form and function almost indistinct. Seeking to reveal the spirit of the organic materials with which he worked, JB often left much of the natural form intact, celebrating its inherent qualities. Known for using chainsaws and hand tools on massive, single blocks of wood, JB would study the grain and burl for days or weeks, and then-without the use of sketches or maquettes-he would work reductively on the single form. True to JB’s tradition, these sculptures were carved from salvaged old growth redwood burl and cypress-the artist worked with stumps often centuries old and larger than twenty feet in diameter. Made specifically for the Halprins’ home, these pieces have never before been displayed to the public. This exhibition presents key historical works created by JB Blunk in the 1960s and ‘70s. Deeply engaged with each other’s practices during the 1960s and ‘70s, these three innovators sourced “spiritual and ecological sustenance” from Marin County, culling endless inspiration from the natural landscape and incorporating its raw materials into their work. The series begins with the story of Anna, Lawrence, and JB-a dancer, a landscape architect, and a sculptor-each a pioneer of their respective disciplines. Saturday, July 30, 3pm: Still dance by Daria Halprin (watch here) followed by a panel discussion with Janice Ross and Daria Halprin, moderated by Laura Whitcomb (watch here).īlum & Poe is pleased to present Three Landscapes, the first in a series of exhibitions curated by Ruthanna Hopper and Mariah Nielson intended to share the history and profound impact of the Marin County, CA creative community from the 1950s to today. Opening reception: Saturday, July 9, 5–7pm ![]()
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