Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes: A harbinger of ritual transformations

This article examines the scholarly discourse on Anna Halprin’s rituals and her own use of the word ‘ritual’ in historical archives to define what determines a work as ritual. The hallmarks of ritual in both discourses include efficacious intention, audience-as-witness, transformation of space, and performers’ investment of deeper meaning in movement. In Halprin’s seminal Parades and Changes, her dancers operated in a liminal space – transitioning from what was previously acceptable to what would become acceptable for performance through embodied performativity of the nude subject. What the performance world accepted as dance changed drastically once Halprin recontextualized the nude body in performance. By its use of these hallmarks, it is clear that Parades and Changes illustrates Halprin’s early use of ritual, was transformational within theatrical contexts, and was a harbinger of the rituals to come in her later works.