“Taking Part: A Workshop Approach to Collective Creativity” 1974

…is the awesome 1974 book by my heroes Lawrence and Anna Halprin, with Jim Burns and Paul Baum, which I can’t believe I am just discovering now – as I prepare for a series of workshops at home in LA and in Northern California produced by the Graham Foundation in conjunction with their soon-to-open exhibition “Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971” – a long overdue survey of this important work that is so relevant to the ways that many of us are working today…and much more on this very soon.

In the late 1960s, American landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and avant-garde dance pioneer Anna Halprin organized a series of experimental, cross-disciplinary workshops in San Francisco and along the coast of northern California that brought dancers, architects, environmental designers, artists, and others together in a process designed to facilitate collaboration and group creativity through new approaches to environmental awareness.

Held over the course of several weeks, the Halprin workshops took place between the urban context of San Francisco; the dance deck and surrounding wooded areas of the Halprins’ Kentfield home in Marin County (Lawrence Halprin and William Wurster, 1951-54); and the Halprins’ cabin (Charles Moore, Lawrence Halprin, and William Turnbull, 1965-66) at Sea Ranch—a coastal community for which Lawrence Halprin designed the master plan (1962-67). From movement sessions on the Halprins’ dance deck, blindfolded awareness walks through the landscape, collective building projects using driftwood, and choreographed journeys diagramming everyday use and experience of urban plazas, parks, and rail cars, participants engaged in a series of multi-sensory activities in alternating environments according to loosely-structured, written guidelines in the form of open “scores.”

– from the Graham Foundation