Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Oct 28, 2025

Janice Ross, Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Stanford University, dives into the transformative influence of the Halprins' mid-century modern home on dance and urban design. She explores how everyday objects like a staircase and a dance deck served as creative catalysts, melding domestic spaces with artistic expression. By viewing these items as archival traces, she reveals how they informed Anna Halprin's choreography and Lawrence Halprin's landscapes. Janice also discusses unconventional research methods and the tension between performance and audience engagement.

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ANECDOTE

First Encounter That Shaped A Career

Janice Ross first saw Anna Halprin perform in September 1970 at Berkeley, a formative encounter that shaped her research for 55 years.
That performance, with Anna dancing nude in a brutalist museum during political protests, became a pivotal memory informing Ross's later book.

ANECDOTE

Walkthrough Sparked The Project

Janice returned to the Halperin home for a final walkthrough when she learned it was going on the market in 2021 and felt compelled to document it.
That initial walkthrough became the genesis for her decision to 'interview the house' and write the book as a preservation act.

INSIGHT

Dancer Homes Are Hidden Archives

Dance artists' domestic spaces are rarely preserved in archives compared with visual artists, making homes a hidden repository of choreographic history.
Ross argues that objects in dancers' homes carry embodied traces essential for understanding movement invention.

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The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and choreography. If these objects and spaces happen to have been designed by a leading modernist architect and landscape designer working with the dancer, then the aesthetic imprint is amplified. Dance innovation becomes pressed into dialogue with spatial, environmental, and urban agendas. The Choreography of Environments builds on this premise to consider the use of ordinary objects from a private residence as lenses into viewing dance innovation.

Author Janice Ross posits the Halprins' 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and expansive outdoor dance deck as a hidden archive. She explores four objects from their house and gardens -- staircase, deck, chair, and window -- to trace how, despite the conservative postwar climate, this intimate domestic space became a radical template reshaping postmodern dance invention and its expansion into civic, social, and environmental engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The work that happened in this white, middle class, Jewish-American home in a San Francisco suburb paved the way for changes that continue to resonate today across contemporary dance, performance, and urban design. These include: defamiliarizing urban landscape and gardens as cloistered theaters where civic identities are rehearsed, orchestrating collective problem solving and invention, normalizing the nude body, privileging a utilitarian and responsive rather than sentimental approach to dance in the environment, and re-positioning choreography as a vital medium for urban problem solving.

These four representative objects in the Halprin home are also used to trace the burgeoning of dance as a forceful medium for civic engagement, and its valorization of the ordinary in movement. As a whole, this book shows how dance, architecture, and landscape design would have a profound confluence through these shared domestic spaces and objects of the Halprins' lives.

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