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Ross, native to the San Francisco Bay Area, attended the University of California, Berkeley; she first saw Ann Halprin and her group perform in 1970 at U.C. Berkeley Art Museum's opening. Subsequently, Ross became the area correspondent for Dance Magazine and spent ten years as the first full-time dance critic on The Oakland Tribune, a Bay Area daily newspaper to which I contributed monthly essays on dance from 1964-1966, the first such specialist.

During those two years I interviewed Ann Halprin for a San Francisco peninsula-based quarterly, since discontinued; I was roundly hounded for my "would be mystical approach." Only after the editor interviewed Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest" did he experience the timelessness enabling his understanding my comments. He had the grace to apologize to me.

Ross herself straddled marriage and motherhood during the decade of reporting and beginning her teaching career at Stanford University. She received her doctorate on the subject of Margaret D'Houbler, Ann Halprin's mentor at the University of Wisconsin and now is an Associate Professor in the Theatre Department at Stanford, following presidencies of the Dance Critics Association and the Society for Dance History Scholars.

Ross, a beneficiary of the redefinition of the possible in women's lives with multiplicity of roles and ability to juggle tasks included, in this study of Halprin's life and creative endeavors discusses many of the influential trends in the twentieth century's second half as they affected social attitudes about women and also what was considered legitimate artistic practice.

Ann/Anna Schuman Halprin was born in Chicago to a Russian Jewish family, recent immigrants from Russia. Ann/Anna, born in 1920, was third child and only daughter. The family moved to Winnetka, a Chicago suburb, where she attended schools influenced by John Dewey and his associate's educational theories. A WASP enclave, Ann/Anna felt the outsider, excluded from birthday parties and sleep-overs. However, she started to study dance early and was good enough as a teen ager to have Doris Humphrey invite her to join the Humphrey-Weidman modern dance company, an early, major recognition.
 

Not accepted at Bennington, Ann/Anna enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she encountered Margaret D'Houbler, whose scientific approach to movement influenced a good many dancers finding their way into many facets of modern dance. The scientific and educational aspects D'Houbler expounded found fertile ground in the young red-headed dancer. Halprin carried the information to expand on it when she joined her new husband Lawrence in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was studying architecture, wedding it to his knowledge of botany. Here Ann, like her husband, came into contact with many of the emigre/refugee members of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. She also concurrently taught dance in an elite girls' school and in a Boston Settlement House, a revelatory experience of cultural differences and opportunities. She continued to teach while Larry Halprin served in the U.S. Navy.

Following World War II the Halprins moved to San Francisco where Lawrence initially worked in architecture, soon veering into landscape design. Ann/Anna taught with Welland Lathrop, a Graham exponent who had a Victorian housed studio on Union Street in the city's Cow Hollow, source of San Francisco's early milk supply. During this collaboration, Ann/Anna was chosen as the only West Coast representative to appear in a two-week Modern Dance Festival, funded by Bethesbee de Rothschild. Though a Graham devotee, Welland Lathrop was not invited. This caused a major disruption in their collaboration.

The Halprins soon moved to Marin County into a Lawrence Halprin-influenced building on the side of a hill where they still live; Ann continued to teach children in a cooperative. As Lawrence Halprin's landscape architectural firm flourished, he took the time to build a dance deck on a downward slope of the family property; this construction played an influential part in the careers of young dancers, several of whom were key to the Judson movement of the mid-sixties.

Ross discusses works and collaborators which I saw, couching them in terms of the social fabric of the time, asserting that Ann/Anna was doing in dance what was revolutionary in other disciplines. She discusses some of the major works, Birds of America, Parades and Changes, premiered in Sweden, where nudity, really quite chaste, became a major issue in U.S. venues.

She discusses Ann/Anna's bout with cancer, her method of healing and that it led to involvement with the aging and the AIDS patients in the Bay Area. Finally, she discusses Ann/Anna's method of facing her own mortality at 80, in what Ross considers a progression from outside to within. Here I felt the commentary got heavy; I wished Ross would simply let Ann/Anna dance. At other points her perception is extremely acute.

Some points I dispute, significant to me because Ross' writings evoke some of my own writing and experiential beginnings four decades plus past. In the early Sixties Ann/Anna Halprin took breath classes from Magda Proskauer, a breath therapist who also had ties to Esalen. I took classes from Proskauer at a different time, and remember that Halprin utilized the information from those classes to build her approach utilized in some of the workshops on the Deck. In the text Magda Proskauer is neither mentioned, much less acknowledged. Many of Halprin's assertions regarding art and the artist's life seem like direct quotations. Proskauer, who had absorbed many Jungian approaches, used to speak of the dark or shadow side, phrases common to Jungian-oriented seminars I attended in the early-mid Sixties, involving drawing, working with clay, periods of silence, sharing of dreams and other revelations in groups, guided by Jungian psychologists. These principles and terms, Jungian in origin, are introduced in a way as to sound unique to Halprin's approach. Jung is never mentioned.

Towards the end .I became restless; many assertions seemed belonging to a totally Western frame of reference, exacerbated by the sudden explosion in the early Sixties, from the Vietnam War, to civil rights and the free speech movement, well documented by Mark Kurlansky in 1968: The Year That Rocked The World. Finally Ross identifies the focus as being Western, citing the Butoh master Kazuo Ohno, active in his '90's. It is interesting Ross cited Ohno, a man, as her example of continuing activity in Japan, India and China where the veneration of older artists honors their achievements, women as well as men. In classical Indian dance the art of abinaya can be practiced indefinitely.

Ross makes an effective case for Ann/Anna Halprin as a major dance figure in the twentieth century modern dance, in many respects a loner, veering from performance into a community- based expression, but not before having influenced a number of important contemporary dancers and choreographers, a dancer who deliberately eschewed any formalized expression in modern dance, in contrast to Twyla Tharp whose focus has remained on performance.

Ross writes with singular precision, detail and possesses an admirable ability to identify, summarize and categorize dance elements which many, myself included, absorb emotionally and stop there. She is, however, far from a deconstructionist; I doubt Halprin would have allowed her the access which Ross so obviously enjoyed. She has produced a formidable biography about a singular figure in the American dance landscape which needs reading by anyone interested in modern dance development.