“Visual design and dance”: dance as a research instrument

Abstract

The paper describes an unpublished document written by the choreographer Anna Halprin in 1943, aimed to organize a dance course entitled "Visual design and dance" for the students of the Barbara Mettler’s School in New Hampshire. In a moment in which modern dance had reached a great expansion in spite of the Second World War, the young Anna resigned the opportunity to dance on the Broadway stages, where were performing the best choreographers such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Hanya Holm, to undertake a personal and innovative research of experimentation, of which this document is witness and where is already possible recognize the influence of her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and the stimulating environment of Harvard and the Bauhaus masters as Walter Gropius and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy.