Anna Halprin/Anne Collod & guests: parades & changes, replays
parades & changes, replays is a full scale re-creation of the masterpiece Parades & Changes, a major 1965 work of American postmodern dance legend Anna Halprin. The provocative Parades & Changes, Halprin’s first “collective creation” dynamited the codes dominating dance by exposing the process of performance: improvising around several “scores,” dancers dress and undress, inventing gestures and vanishing naked in rolls of skin colored paper.
This “ceremony of trust,” as it was named by Halprin, seeks to utilize dance as a medium for being together: her prolific composition addresses the process, the place, the action, and the performer as both unique and corresponding entities.
Now, in collaboration with Halprin, French choreographer/performer Anne Collod seeks to reactivate the revolutionary piece with parades & changes, replays. With an exceptional team of contemporary American and European performers, parades & changes, replays examines the original message of collectiveness through a contemporary lens: in what way and to what extent does being together invented then and there, concern us now?
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ANNA HALPRIN/ANNE COLLOD and GUESTS: "PARADES and CHANGES, REPLAYS"
By Laura Molzahn:
Who'd have thought that undressing, baring every square millimeter of flesh, could be the least interesting part of a performance? The three men and three women in "Parades & Changes, Replays" take off all their clothes three times (and put them back on twice) at the top of the show, and it gets pretty ho-hum.
Fortunately the rest of the 75-minute piece is more exciting. In fact Thursday's performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (shows continue Saturday and Sunday) revealed the lasting power of a celebratory dance firmly rooted in yet transcending the hippie ethos of 1965. Set to Morton Subotnick's percolating, murmuring electronic and pop score, "Parades & Changes, Replays" figuratively takes off all our clothes to uncover the wondering, playful, delightfully serious children we are underneath, clothed or unclothed.
That's all the more needed in a time when we're even more regimented, more guarded and fearful, more litigious and judgmental, than we were in the 60s.
Naturally this 45-year-old work has a backstory. Created by Anna Halprin, now 89, "Parades & Changes" was banned in New York in 1965 because of the nudity, then reincarnated 12 times through 1967. First revived in 2006, it attained its current form this year, when Halprin and French choreographer Anne Collod jointly edited out some of the original movement "scores" and decided on the arrangement of the remaining ones.
The scores give performers a road map but don't tell them specifically what to do, so they improvise. But don't think contact improv. Halprin was the originator of pedestrian movement and task- and prop-oriented performance, a fundamental influence on such Judson Church artists as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. As a result of this orientation, Halprin's performers can seem somewhat isolated from one another, disaffected, almost like automatons. Combine that affectless approach with the piece's methodical pace, and you can see why undressing could get boring. Even though each iteration is increasingly personal and sexual-gazes meet, actions mirror each other-the undressing-and-dressing sections remain chilly, not erotic behavior but a dissection of it.
Then all hell-or heaven-breaks loose. To the strains of Petula Clark's 1964 hit "Downtown," the naked dancers begin ripping up and tossing around huge sheets of butcher paper. Rising and falling over and over like a fountain of bodies, with the shreds of paper lifted up and wafting down over and over, the dancers look like kids playing in a leaf pile, and the paper rustling and crackling sounds like leaves. But, awash in golden light, the dancers also seem pagan gods and goddesses. When they finally clasp big armfuls of paper before them as if to armor their nakedness, they're like Adam and Eve leaving the Garden-to the strains of the Beach Boys' 1964 hit "The Warmth of the Sun."
The first half of "Parades and Changes, Replays" begins with austere clothedness and ends in this rapturous nudity. The second begins with the dancers half-dressed and ends in exuberantly excessive adornment.
Funny how erotic it is to be partially rather than completely undressed. When the dancers reappear in the second half, they're wearing tighty-whiteys, some kind of footgear, and little else. Studiously setting out brightly colored wooden platforms, which they later stomp on, they're not performing actions anyone would consider sexual, yet their unglamorous movements hold an erotic charge. So does their familiarity with one another when a dancer calls out another's name and they meet and embrace.
But the real payoff comes in the final section of "Parades & Changes, Replays." In another methodical process, each performer receives a big bag of...things, and lays them out in a line from back to front of the stage. These items include a huge wad of tulle, shoes, a fox pelt, a Mylar hood, transparent coiled tubes, knitted and furry hats, wading boots, a crowd-controlling velvet rope, a long-handled duster. Each dancer gets about ten of them, and-you guessed it-proceeds to play dress-up like a kid.
In Halprin's creation, the end of any given action is often in clear sight, yet you watch, fascinated, as it inexorably comes to pass. The conclusion isn't predictable, however-and I don't want to spoil it. Let's just say that a king and queen are crowned, becoming figures of awe, strange and monstrous mountains sprouting a huge variety of accessories, scepters, headgear, footwear. And then they venture forth.
