One day in 1960, La Monte Young, my fellow graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, mentioned he had recently met a dancer who was doing really new and exciting work. He asked if I would like to come to meet her and discuss a collaboration. La Monte and I had formed a close bond and had been getting together frequently for long sessions of improvised music and this presented an excellent opportunity to put these improvisations before the public.

I drove him over to Kentfield where we were to meet the amazing Anna Halprin. Her husband, Larry Halprin, a famous architect, had designed a dance deck and studio on the edge of a steep ravine where Anna conducted her rehearsals and created new dances. Meeting Anna there for the first time was a pivotal point in my life. She was wide eyed innocence, beaming optimism and crafty intelligence and by the time of our meeting a real seasoned artist who had created some of the most exciting work on the West Coast.

Anna was collaborating with dancers/actors John Graham and AA Leath and the three of them had an amazingly strong telepathic bond which produced a kind of theatre that was totally new and blurred the boundary between theatre and ‘reality’. The dancers combined improvised movement while riffing on the poetry of Richard Brautigan into a mind boggling vortex of spontaneous action.

At the time it impressed me as the most cutting edge and exciting work being produced anywhere and to this day I carry that impression. I went on to work with Anna and her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop on the 1961 piece Four Legged Stool, for which I created the first version of the tape music piece, Mescalin Mix.

After those early, heady, formative years, our paths would occasionally intersect and always on these occasions Anna was burning with new ideas, more and more moving away from the stage and into community events, at first as city wide happenings and then on to using dance as self-realisation and healing.

Our last big get together was six years ago at the SF JAZZ Center for the three day event Kronos Quartet organised for my 80th birthday where Anna did a solo dance to Sunrise Of The Planetary Dream Collector played by musicians spread throughout the hall. It was the joyous expression generously shared by a 95 year old woman whose explorations in movement had experienced it all.

Anna spent most of her life living in the magical atmosphere of the slopes of the sacred Mount Tamalpais in Marin. There is a particular vibration that can be sensed in the works of other artists who lived and worked there; I am thinking of Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Harry Partch, Sandy Jacobs and the mystical poet/film maker James Broughton.

Anna’s legacy speaks with a powerful voice that will continue to guide and feed the river of imagination carrying new generations of poets, dancers and musicians. Over her lifespan of 100 years she travelled down many alleys and side streets of artistic expression. I feel lucky to have been on one of those street corners.

Anna Halprin, choreographer/dancer, 13 July 1920–24 May 2021.