Anna Halprint’s The Dance Deck
Kentfield, California
The deck was built in collaboration with her husband, Lawrence Halprin — a landscape architect, urban designer, and ecologist — as part of their shared investigation into how movement practices could engage with the environment as a co-creator in artistic expression. Suspended among the trees, the wooden platform offers a kinesthetic experience that functions as both a space for collective creation and a site for reconnection with nature. In this way, it reflects Halprin’s artistic trajectory, rooted in the foundations of modern dance yet continually evolving toward ecological awareness and social engagement.
At the time the dance deck was constructed, ideas about artistic collaboration were undergoing radical change. Influenced by the Bauhaus movement, Halprin organised workshops that brought together visual artists, composers, poets, architects, filmmakers, and dancers from the burgeoning San Francisco art scene. This interdisciplinary approach, which they termed “instant theatre,” emphasised new ways of creating performance by inviting direct input from collaborators. The shift from traditional choreography to collective creativity marked a decisive turning point in Halprin’s practice, intertwining ecology, embodiment, and community participation.
The Halprins’ dance deck became both a shared experimental space and a landscape score, where movement was developed through observation and awareness of the body in relation to its environment. Among the methods emerging from Halprin’s dance deck was her “task performances” — exercises designed to heighten the dialogue between body and place. These activities laid the foundation for her “movement rituals”, and includes activities as blindfolded walks and collaborative workshops with students including Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer. The latter three would go on to play pivotal roles in New York’s Judson Dance Theater, a central force in the development of postmodern dance.
To this day, on the Kentfield dance deck, Anna Halprin’s legacy continues. The space remains a living laboratory where she — and now others — have conducted weekly performance labs, inviting multidisciplinary artists to share original movement scores before bringing them into public spaces. The deck stands as both a physical and symbolic platform for art, ecology, and embodied creativity — a place where dance and life remain inseparably intertwined.