Landscapes of Dance: the 1960 Summer Workshop of Anna Halprin

This thesis explores Bay Area choreographer Anna Halprin's 1960 summer workshop and affiliations with workshop participants such as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, La Monte Young, and Robert Morris. I selected these particular participants because of their roles in shaping overarching fields of dance, visual arts and music. Through articulating the significance of the workshop as influential on artistic process, I frame the 1960 workshop as in concert with the larger world of the avant-garde, including Allan Kaprow's Happenings, Fluxus performances, Judson Dance Theater, Minimalist sculpture and post-war experimental music. In addition, I extend the concerns of event-based performance into the lexicon of landscape architecture by acknowledging Lawrence Halprin's role in the workshop as the architect of the deck and marital collaboration with Halprin. Eventually, he adopted scores into his architectural practice, designed scores for Halprin's dances and focused on pedestrian activities in his designs of public spaces