ABSTRACT
At the far end of Divisidero Street in San Francisco, in a predominantly black neighbourhood, is Anna Halprin's Dancers' Workshop. For sixteen years she worked with her own company of professional dancers and then they dispersed. It was this company which first brought frontal nudity to the New York stage, long before Oh, Calcutta, at one of the Hunter College Auditorium series. Speaking of this group she comments,
We had evolved such a technique that, were we still working, we'd be another Polish Laboratory Theatre – but who needs that in this country? We have to work with the way the situation is. Here, in San Francisco, I choose to work with non-dancers, and I have to work with the materials they offer.
