90 years old and still dancing...Anna Halprin for Dazed&confused magazine

Here's the intro to my interview with Anna...coming soon in Dazed mag!

Some time after the Second World War, legendary dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin decided that everyone is a dancer (even if they got no rhythm), that every movement is a dance (even the act of putting one's socks on). And with that, she founded what we now call “postmodern dance”, an expressive arts movement whose egalitarian, anti-authoritarian ideology had more in common with future phenomena like punk rock, street art and flash mobs than with the ballet or modern dance of her time.

Unlike her predecessors, Anna Halprin had a warts 'n all approach to dance. She and her dancers got naked during performances. They refused to be corralled onto a stage, performing their dances in the streets, in nature, or among audiences. When invited to dance at a lunch for important art patrons, they made a stage in the middle of the room, sat at a table, and forced the audience to watch them eat lunch. Often, they wandered among audiences and handed them a “score”, instructing them to get up and join the dance. This approach was seen as inclusive or insulting, depending on your viewpoint.

She especially infuriated those who believed that dance should be purely aesthetic--pretty, polite, and non-confrontational. Not that she cared what they thought. “I never think about making my choices on the basis of whether people are going to like it,” she says, speaking from her home in the coastal forests of Marin, northern California. “I have to make my choices based on whether it is good art.”

By unceasingly questioning authority and shunning homogeneity, Halprin and her postmodern peers helped lay the groundwork for the hippie counterculture, as well as for punks, for culture jammers, hipster aerobicizers and cultural iconoclasts the world over (if Banksy had been a dancer, he’d probably have danced with Anna Halprin. And did we mention her daughter married Dennis Hopper?)

Today she's still dancing (sometimes naked), and still pissing people off. Some audience members walked out of a recent Anna Halprin performance, a nightmarish piece called Intensive Care about what it might feel like to die. "Some people left, but that's OK. It's none of my business." Anna Halprin is, without doubt, one of the baddest 90-year-olds you’ll ever meet.