For Procession, choreographer Anna Halprin conceived of an object-filled stage, creating a landscape rather than a traditional set. She then devised scores that task performers to navigate and adapt to this landscapes’ various obstacles in a creative process that continuously reshapes each performer’s quality of movement, morphs stage imagery, and invites an open possibility for meaningfulness that emerges during the live performance itself.

In Procession dancers move through the architecture of the theatre, climbing up ladders and down ramps, disappearing over the tops of balconies and descending from multi-level scaffolding, emerging from behind massive tarps and vanishing into trap doors. Throughout Procession, a spontaneous, seemingly irrational juxtaposition of different kinds of movement activities continuously unfold to reveal surprisingly new contexts, creating a kaleidoscopic experience of theatrical process and bodies in motion.

Grinnell College, 2022. Artistic Advising by Daria Halprin. Environment Design by S Benjamin Farrar and Erin Howell-Gritsch.