‘City Dance’ hails the Halprin heritage

Performance lauds couple’s impact on Portland public spaces

By ERIC BARTELS

The Portland Tribune, Sep 11, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

©2008 ALICIA ROSE

TBA’s “City Dance” celebrates the experiments in movement, sound and space done in the ’70s by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and his wife, Anna, a modern dance pioneer, and will take place at the Ira Keller Fountain Park.

The dramatic Ira Keller Fountain and two others designed by the influential landscape architect Lawrence Halprin sprang from a vibrant cultural milieu involving music and dance as well as cutting-edge design.

On Sunday, Sept. 14, as part of the Time-Based Art Festival, scores of local artists will participate in a mobile performance piece called “The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin,” spotlighting the work of Halprin and his wife, a pioneer of modern dance.

Choreographer Linda Austin, one of four involved in the project, was serving on a TBA panel years ago when she learned about the San Francisco-based couple.

Linda K. Johnson, another dancemaker involved with the project, says an awareness campaign began with local architectural historian and critic Randy Gragg.

“Randy almost five years ago wrote a piece about the Halprin sequence,” says Johnson, using shorthand for the architect’s Portland oeuvre. “It needed the city’s attention in terms of preservation.”

Not long after that, Johnson approached Gragg with the idea that art could be the lens through which the public might view Lawrence Halprin’s work.

In 2005, Gragg partnered with Third Angle New Music Ensemble, a group founded by Oregon Symphony violinist Ron Blessinger, on “Frozen Music,” a site-specific performance that aligned music and architecture.

Later, the company’s board contacted Gragg about undertaking another such project involving Halprin. This year’s TBA provided the opportunity.

Sunday’s two performances will send audiences on a tour of Halprin’s creations, fountains and plazas that were part of an urban renewal effort at the far south end of downtown in the early ’70s.

The architect worked closely with his wife, whose experiments with movement – in conjunction with a circle of avant-garde composers – informed his user-friendly designs.

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