Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of What Matters to Us?, performed in San Francisco on May 16, 2015. Of her participation in the event, author Vanessa Kauffman notes, “The act of protest alone had absolved us of nothing. What matters to us is still out there, waiting.” This article was originally published on June 11, 2015. 

What Matters to Us?: A Reenactment of Anna Halprin’s Blank Placard Dance, Saturday, May 16, 2015, San Francisco. Photo: Emily Holmes.

Emerging one by one from the doors of San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center, thirty-six white-shirted performers nimbly and stoically perched between parking meters, ready for the opening beats of the performance that was about to unfold. Standing shoulder to shoulder in one long row, they silently gazed out onto the street’s two-way flux of traffic. The expressions on their faces mirrored the signs they held above their heads: Both were blank.

What Matters to Us? (May 16, 2015) was the inaugural event of Dances for Anna: A Worldwide Celebration of Anna Halprin’s 95th Year, a series of performances taking place over the next three months across sixteen countries. Organized by the Tamalpa Institute (the dance and expressive arts therapy nonprofit cofounded by Halprin and her daughter Daria), and directed by Associate Director Rosario Sammartino, Dances for Anna is a tribute to a choreographer whose work and teachings have rigorously challenged traditional definitions of dance, informing and influencing many threads of experimental movement since the late 1930s.

Read the full article here.