Scores Excerpts from Anna Halprin’s Parades & Changes

For the “Dance and Rituals” symposium, dancer and notation specialist Anne Collod will propose a danced tribute to Anna Halprin, who passed away in May 2021; a pioneer and major teacher of post-modern dance in the USA, Halprin has gained the aura of a shaman of movement over the course of her long career, notably through ritual works like Parades & Changes (1965) – which she thought of as a “ceremony of trust”. Anne Collod and a group of performers and Paris National Conservatory students will perform three “scores” from Parades & Changes in the atrium of the CND; this work is the result of a long collaboration with Halprin, whose works Collod has staged and performed multiple times from 2000 onwards. In 2008, Collod already presented Parades & Changes and Replays as a dialogue with Halprin and Morton Subotnick, the composer who co-created the piece. Performing this piece during the symposium will lead Collod to question its re-presentation as a contemporary ritual of remembrance and speculation.

Anne Collod is a contemporary dancer and choreographer who has in addition developed an expertise in Labanotation, which led her to work on recreating 20th-century pieces from original scores. She co-founded the Albrecht Knust Quatuor (1993- 2001) and the “&... alters” association, in which she has worked steadily over the years with Anna Halprin. Collod was associate artist with La Briqueterie/CDC du Val de Marne from 2014 to 2017, and she is also a certified Feldenkrais practitioner.

Anna Halprin, who passed away in 2021, was one of the major figures of post-modern dance in America. She was trained in modern dance between the two World Wars and started experimenting with movement with her company, the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, from the 1950’s onwards. In 1978, she co-founded the Tamalpa Institute with her daughter Daria, and went on to become a world-renowned dance teacher. Her work blurs the line between professional dancers and spectators, and she also developed dance therapy techniques.