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TRANSCRIPT - AUDIO LABEL FOR FOUR-LEGGED STOOL
By Anna Halprin
Four-legged Stool. In the Sixties, Dancers' Workshop was located in a two story building known as 321 Divisidero, where an explosion of avant-garde experimentation in the arts was taking place. We had the Tape Music Center upstairs, Dancers' Workshop downstairs, the KPFA across the street, and Actor's Workshop down the road. I'd given up all connections with the influences of modern dance defined by Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, all of them based in New York City on the East Coast. You know Curt Sachs, the renowned anthropologist commented that dance is the mother of all the arts. Well, of course it is. The body is our instrument, not like other art forms, and movement then is our language. We can integrate all the arts because we can do everything, and it's the way we respond to the world around us is through movements so it has the possibilities of being absolutely open ended. And so with this in mind, I was spending time developing experimental works with people like A.A. Leath, a graduate of my professor of dance at Wisconsin University so we had a lot in common, also John Graham originally an actor, and Simon Forti, married to a painter, and she was herself originally a painter. So it was quite natural for us to begin to collaborate together to develop a new work called the Four-legged Stool. The dance that evolved reflected our mutual influences. The Four-legged Stool was a radical departure from the dance world, and I soon dropped off the tree of dance history. Other art forms like the playwright Samuel Beckett and Ionesco and The Living Theatre and musicians from the Tape Music Center were all doing similar experimentations. I was now working with dance as a multidisciplinary art, combining all the art forms but based primarily on dance and movement.
By Anna Halprin
Four-legged Stool. In the Sixties, Dancers' Workshop was located in a two story building known as 321 Divisidero, where an explosion of avant-garde experimentation in the arts was taking place. We had the Tape Music Center upstairs, Dancers' Workshop downstairs, the KPFA across the street, and Actor's Workshop down the road. I'd given up all connections with the influences of modern dance defined by Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, all of them based in New York City on the East Coast. You know Curt Sachs, the renowned anthropologist commented that dance is the mother of all the arts. Well, of course it is. The body is our instrument, not like other art forms, and movement then is our language. We can integrate all the arts because we can do everything, and it's the way we respond to the world around us is through movements so it has the possibilities of being absolutely open ended. And so with this in mind, I was spending time developing experimental works with people like A.A. Leath, a graduate of my professor of dance at Wisconsin University so we had a lot in common, also John Graham originally an actor, and Simon Forti, married to a painter, and she was herself originally a painter. So it was quite natural for us to begin to collaborate together to develop a new work called the Four-legged Stool. The dance that evolved reflected our mutual influences. The Four-legged Stool was a radical departure from the dance world, and I soon dropped off the tree of dance history. Other art forms like the playwright Samuel Beckett and Ionesco and The Living Theatre and musicians from the Tape Music Center were all doing similar experimentations. I was now working with dance as a multidisciplinary art, combining all the art forms but based primarily on dance and movement.