Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin, born in 1920, is a major figure of American post-modern dance. She’s a leading California experimentalist of the 1950s and 1960s and a pioneer in the use of dance as a healing technique and a source of ritual experience. In 1955 she founded the Dancers’ Workshop, an interdisciplinary group of artists and performers. Her use of improvisation, tasks, interactions between performer and environment, links between art and society set a new area for avant-garde artists and influenced a number of Judson choreographers, including Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. Developing collective processes, she has been working with a number of artists, such  as Lawrence Halprin, her husband, architect and landartist, the composers La Monte Young and Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick or Luciano Berio, as well as with poetes, visual artists, filmmakers, etc. Since the 1970s, when she was diagnosed with cancer and developed a «psychokinetic visualization process» to approach its treatment holistically, she has given workshops for people living with cancer, AIDS, and other life-threatening diseases. In recent decades she has focused on rituals performed by ordinary people about real life issues. At age 97 she’s still dancing, creating and teaching. Her many honors include the Doris Duke Impact Award and Isadora Duncan Dance Award in 2014, as well as earlier awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, American Dance Festival, University of Wisconsin, and San Francisco Foundation.

Anne Collod

Anne Collod is a French contemporary dancer and choreographer. Initially graduated in biology and environmental sciences, she danced for various choreographers and started her own work focused on the topics of reinterpretation of major dance works from the past, and on the utopias of the collective. In her projects she links performance, research and teaching. She received a Bessie Award in 2009 for her reinterpretation of Halprin’s Parades & Changes (1965), and is the recipient of the French Villa Medicis Hors les Murs programm. She’s teaching in various contexts and is certified in Feldenkrais technique.

Cécile Proust

Cécile Proust is a choreographic artist. She questions in her work gender constructs and has created numerous performances. She holds a SPEAP master (Sciences Po Experimental Program in Art and Politics) directed by Bruno Latour. She regularly collaborates with Anne Collod.

Creative Team

Choreographer: Anne Collod
Artistic Collaboration and Transmission: Sherwood Chen
Original Creator: Anna Halprin
Distribution: La Magnanerie-Paris