ABSTRACT
I’ve been exploring the subject of Anna Halprin’s work for years and this is her last dance – Song of Songs, positioned as new but actually a work about tourism to youth from the country of old age. On an intimate level this dance is most profoundly an enactment of intimate scenes from Halprin’s earlier life in her body. Here are some questions it raises for me in relationship to the question, what is the act of making a dance in old age? What precisely is Halprin seeking to recover? If a dance maker whose medium has always been her own body revisits that body through the surrogate of a younger artist on whom she builds a dance about her youth, what is being reenacted and how is the aging body present?
