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Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Kelvin Vu
So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Janice Ross
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Kelvin Vu
Hi and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Kelvin Vu and I'm an architect, landscape architect, and dancer based in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm speaking with Dr. Janice Ross, Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at the Theater and Performance Studies Department at Stanford University, where she taught for 34 years. Through numerous books and articles, Janice has explored the intersections of social issues and their expression through performance. Today we'll talk about her latest book, the Choreography of How the Anna and Lawrence Halperin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance in Urban Design, published by the Oxford University Press in 2025. In the book, Janice explores the domestic environment of dance artist and teacher Anna Halperin and landscape architect and urban designer Lawrence or Larry Halperin through four representative objects in their home the staircase, the deck, the chair, and the window. Janice traces how their domestic space was a laboratory for Anna and Larry's individual and collaborative creative practices in postmodern dance, landscape architecture, and urban design. Janice, thank you so much for joining me today and welcome to the New Books Network. How are you doing and is there anything you'd like to add or share about yourself before we get into the.
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Dr. Janice Ross
Book well, thank you for that gracious introduction, Kelvin, and I'm delighted to be here and especially to be in conversation with you about this book, since you sit at the nexus of all of its various points. Great.
- [03:03]
Kelvin Vu
So with that, we can get right into it. So you have a long research history with the Halperns, Anna in particular. I'm curious what led you to develop this project on both Anna and Larry and their domestic environment when you did?
- [03:19]
Dr. Janice Ross
It's a very interesting question because I think that the project found me in a way rather than me finding it. And if I think back over the time that I've been watching, writing about Anna's work, It was actually 55 years ago this autumn that I first saw her perform. September 1970. And I was an undergrad at Berkeley. And the occasion was the opening of Mario Ciompi's $4.8 million Berkeley Art Museum, which was this brutalist cement structure of spiraling ramps. And Anna had been invited to perform her Parades and Changes, which turns out to be her signature work 55 years later. It's the most often reconstructed and really stands for what her launch of dance into postmodernism began with. And there I was in undergrad, crowding around these cement ramps, looking at the dance being performed on the basement level in the nude. And it was a real flashpoint. Berkeley in the 70s was the center of anti Vietnam War protests. So you had this kind of art protest happening in the midst of this cold, brutalist surrounding, where a block away on Sproul Plaza, you had the activist political protests happening. And that was my inauguration into Anna's work. And I think that I spent the next 55 years trying to put together. In some ways, the paradox is that I describe her work as being radical for its time. Peter Seltz, who was the famous art historian and director of the Berkeley Art Museum, was terrified that he was going to lose his job if she performed nude, and pleaded with her to wear flesh unitards. She said no. He came back. He said, okay, let's have the lights really dim. And she said that would make it look even more, you know, prurient that it's something wrong. So she finally agreed. She said, listen, I'm going to do it nude. If you get in trouble, just say I disobeyed your instructions and it went forward. He kept his job, she kept her integrity. So, you know, that was as political as she got. And she was in amazing politician in the art realm, but not in the on the streets protest realm. And I think that's an interesting tension in her work and Larry's. So Fast forward to 2021. Anna died a few months before she turned 101. Larry had predeceased her in 2009 at the age of 93. And I was alerted that the house was going on the market, the Halperin home. And I suddenly felt I need to walk through it. And I connected with their eldest daughter, Daria, and she agreed to let me do a final walkthrough of this space right before it went on the market. And at that point, the house had some Halperin stuff in it, but it had really been sanitized of a lot of things and was partially staged in preparation for marketing it. And I walked through it, and I kind of thought it was a personal farewell. And then weeks later, I realized I needed to think more about it. I really needed to go back to it. So that was kind of the genesis. And what led me to it was just the triggering of it's going to be sold into private hands.
- [07:10]
Kelvin Vu
That's an amazing start to the project. I love how, you know, the walk through the home is kind of the genesis of the project, which kind of comes back to the idea of, you know, spaces, environments and objects kind of speaking to us and influencing us. So I love that that was the start of this. Of this book project. So when you're thinking about the house and the objects within it, when you were thinking about, you know, writing about them and researching it from this perspective, what sorts of questions were guiding you from the start, and what sorts of questions kind of came up through the process?
- [07:49]
Dr. Janice Ross
You know, as I walk through, I was kind of asking the Halperin daughter, Daria, what happened in this room? What do you remember about this space? I really wanted to bring alive the history in the space. I mean, I've. I've always been drawn to abandoned architectural spaces. I'm the kind of person, when I'm traveling, particularly prisons or hospitals, sites where bodies have been under extreme duress. And to step into those rooms, breaching fences or whatever you have to do to go in them, if it's not a site of dark tourism that's been commercialized, and really think about something, about the body undergoing extreme experiences in a space, to me, suggests that there are resonance that remain there. And with the Halperins, these were, you know, art extremes. But I really was trying to understand what memories and revelations were in the house. And I began to think back just as someone who spends a lot of time in the archives. And I began to realize Artists homes, dancers in particular, are not memorialized in archives. You never get. It's incidental. You know, it's there, posed with some celebrity visitor. And in the corner you glimpse a JB Blunk chair, or you notice there are a lot of windows, but you don't. You can't find artists homes, archived dancers homes. And I briefly detoured into trying to get historical status for the Halperin home, contacted a former colleague who heads up that initiative for visual artists Home. And I was told it's never happened for a dancer. Somehow the space in which dancers live doesn't carry the cachet in which visual artists and writers homes do. I was told maybe I could leverage it through Larry, because the idea of a landscape architect's home had some. You know, there was some traction there, but it was a long, expensive process, and the house was going on in a matter of weeks. So I felt what I do as a historian is I write, and I thought I could interview the house is what I thought. I would interview the house, and that would be my contribution to its legacy.
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Kelvin Vu
Wow, that's amazing. I think when I think about dancers and dance makers, so often the photos that we see of them are either on stage or in, you know, the sort of more conventional studio, which is normally like a white box of some sort. So I can see why, you know, the idea of the dancer's house isn't a type that's memorialized or that's preserved as much as, you know, artist studios are. But in this case, it's a really different case. Right. When we think about the dance deck, which we'll get to later, and all the parts of the house that are really special and kind of emblematic, not only of the Halperins as makers, but also the Halperns as kind of interested in that process. So at the beginning of the book, you mentioned borrowing the concept of spatial bricolage from spatial humanities and anthropology. So I'm wondering if you can talk more about this concept and how it helped you, as you say, kind of interview the house.
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Dr. Janice Ross
Yes. And I think I'm certainly not an expert in bricolage, but I think of the researcher as a bricoleur, for me, helped kind of make explicit this focus on the poetics and maybe affects of space, and that there are frameworks that really shape how space is put into practice in our daily lives, our utilitarian lives, but also our art lives. And I think, for me, you know, Levi Strauss writes about the bricoleurs as someone who makes do with whatever is at hand, you know, these odd bits that are left over from human experience. And for me, that really captured what was in the Halperin house because there was a lot of prosaic stuff that didn't interest me. There was a lot of self consciously art stuff. Larry collected a lot of artifacts from Israel on his travels, and those had a prize shelf in the Halperin dining room. And I wasn't really drawn to that. It was, you know, as a researcher, how could I kind of step into making meaning from space as a sensorial experience? And I think as the Bri coleure that gave me permission, I didn't have to have a clear structure in advance. I could immerse myself, I could embed myself into it and. And think about myself and space as kind of coming from the Halperin world. There's a word gleaning that's sometimes used in conjunction with what Abricolord is doing, where you pick up and repurpose material that's already out there. And I think that's what I was doing with the traces on the stairs, on the windows, on the chairs, on the deck. You know, they were fragments from the Halperin's former lives for me. And I was thinking about the way that these objects remained evocative. I thought briefly about thing theory and Cheryl Turkle and that whole notion about Marcel Maus and the animation of objects and how they retained something of their history if they're a gift, who the giver was. And I'm not a theorist at heart, really. I'm an experiential, kind of based historian. But it seemed to me there were a lot of rich readings that were possible from focusing on objects, particularly objects that came from this world that artists once inhabited and that their bodies touched daily, interacted with daily. So that's the way in which I was using it.
- [14:14]
Kelvin Vu
Do you feel like this way of working and this way of understanding the history of an artist's practice is different from how you had seen it before? Or I guess what I'm asking is, were the research kind of methods for this project similar or different from projects you've done in the past? And then kind of relatedly, you know, there's a lot of objects we have in our lives, and I'm wondering how you kind of filtered through all the objects in the house and really selected these four as sort of representative objects.
- [14:50]
Dr. Janice Ross
Yeah, it was a real process. I mean, two things jumped out immediately for me which were kind of already art in their own One is the deck, which is such a famous space. And I knew that had to be written about. And the other were the JV Blunk chairs. I had spoken a couple years earlier when the Blunk furniture was the focus of a gallery show in Los Angeles. And there was a discussion kind of about that period of California craftsmen and sort of the Halperins as owners of Blanc furniture. So I was aware that Blanc's stuff had its own meaning. The fact that one of his mentors was Isamu Noguchi, who, of course, was famous for the Motha Gram sets and the anthropomorphism of those objects. So I realized I was very curious about these. And I had to immediately give up traditional dance archives. I'm used to spending a lot of time in the New York Public Library, Museum of Performance and Design, individual artists archives. And those only let me go so far. I discovered that I needed to do strange things, Like I needed to do screenshots of films to get what was in the background that wasn't even meant to be there. To capture Anna interacting with the burned ruins of their Sea Ranch house, for example, which for me was a really telling point of how she read Holmes as performative directives because she makes a ritual after she huddles in the burned ruins of the Sea Ranch house. And I had to read back, why a deck? Like, when did decks come into play? You know that. Cause that's your field of expertise. But for me, it was fascinating. Like the front porch, what that symbolized in 19th century and early 20th century America as a kind of site of socialization. And then the retreat to the interior of the backyard. And what that the difference it meant for black Americans versus white and the coding of kind of racial freedom or racial protection that homes and yards and gardens and decks connoted. And that, for me, was fascinating. And then I realized, well, Larry did a really weird thing. The deck's not off the back porch. It's 50ft off the hillside. Like it slid off or something. And, you know, read that to read that. So I also found anecdotes were very useful, which you don't usually call for a lot of meaning. I would prompt the Halperin daughters. Do you remember anything weird about the stairs? You know, and then I got stories of people getting seriously injured on the stairs. And how did Larry and Anna react? Well, they didn't care. So that let me know what the hierarchy of privileging was of object over childhood safety. So it was a really interesting notion of having to search very broadly for meanings where you normally don't, particularly as a dance studies scholar, you don't go there and then the last tier is a quick follow up. I was aware that in recent years there have been a lot of major international exhibitions. The Venice Biennale and in Germany the name escapes neat map, but the major exhibition of emerging art and very important art that left a huge influence on the field. Moma had a couple of shows about kind of futures of environmental activism and looked at the work done at Sea Ranch as a genesis for a lot of that. And the Judson Church work was also featured at MoMA with a huge backdrop of the deck in the first gallery. So I realized that the deck and the Halperin work was now being rediscovered as background for the current moment and that was very interesting for me. And which objects figured in that background? So those were that was part of.
- [19:24]
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Kelvin Vu
That you mentioned that this project kind of influenced you to interact with the archives in a different way. That's something I hadn't really thought about in the sense of taking screenshots of performances or footage and really understanding what's the scenography of it, what's the set in which all these actions are taking place, whether they're performances or, you know, or moments from daily life. And I think that's such a rich way of looking at history and looking at archives as well as looking at kind of the world around us as like a sonography for how we think and how we interact with things, which I think really gets to the heart of this project in particular. I want to talk also just a little bit about some of the other kind of secondary sources that you bring in. As you said, this is a very experiential process of research for you. And a lot of things came from anecdotes, from stories, from footage, as well as all of the materials that you would typically consult. I'm wondering, since you use so many primary sources, when did it feel necessary to kind of bring in secondary voices or other theorists, since that's less of a focus of this particular book. But I'm just wondering how you also filtered that information.
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Dr. Janice Ross
Yeah, I think I used it most heavily in looking at Larry's work. Larry has written a lot about his work over the years, but I think particularly, I mean, Alison Hirsch's brilliant book on city choreographer and the way in which she, you know, from a very new perspective, looks at Larry and also from a critical perspective about his, you know, his contributions and shortcomings. So I think I went back, I reread all of Larry's stuff. I reread the taking part documentation of the Sea Ranch workshops, interviewed people who were there. Paul Ryan, who was the documenter with all this beautiful still film photos, who's in his 80s, but has a memory clear as a bell about it. And what went on and surprised me by sending me out of the blue these never before seen photos of Anna eating sand, you know, which I had seen her on the log, I think maybe probably in the archives at the Museum of Performance and Design. I never realized that was sand. And I thought, oh, you know, she rolled in the sand and he was saying, no, Janice, she was eating it. And you know, so that to follow through that. And you know, then he sent me the follow up of it dribbling down her face. So, you know, there were following threads that I think the Halperins in their lifetime edited out. And I will say that they were both. They were both conscious of the impression that they wanted to give and what they didn't want to give, an impression of Larry in particular. And so all that messiness was free for the taking in a respectful way. But yeah, it did absolutely turn me into a kind of voyeur, I think.
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Kelvin Vu
Yeah, I remember seeing that photo in the book of Anna eating sand and really thinking to myself, I've never seen that photo before. And you know, and there's a lot of sort of iconic photos of Both of them, of their works, of their processes, of their workshops. And that one really stuck out. And so, yeah, I'm glad that you shared that. It was, you know, kind of a serendipitous kind of research moment for you. And I also appreciate what you're. What you said about how there's a lot of information and material that was kind of filtered out of the archives. You know, I've been to both Anna and Larry's archives and there is kind of this self conscious curation of it. Right. I mean, every archive is curated, but for them, it feels. You can kind of feel that. That they were kind of curating it along the way, thinking that this would all be collected in some manner. So, yeah, I appreciate that feeling of it. So in thinking about, I guess, the objects themselves, I really appreciate how you write about each of the objects as object lessons, but not only that, but as models, prototypes, tutorials, and even rehearsals for ways in which Anna and Larry would both practice or the process for which they would make work. I love the phrase that you use in the introduction, the implicit choreography and pedagogy of the ordinary. That's an amazing phrase. And kind of at the core of this is this idea that there is an iterative cycle between our attunement and influence, between our daily environments and then how we move and how we think, especially for the Halperns, how we create. And these creative processes, especially for space designers like Larry, kind of come back in the way we shape the environment in turn. And kind of any one of the objects is a great example of this. But I was really struck by the floating staircase and. And how you wove the way it showed up, not only as a staircase, but in different forms. You know, the procession and Anna's work or the fountains and waterfalls in Larry's work. So I'm wondering if you can talk more about how you went from object to performance work to build work, and kind of toggled between the original source object and then how it wove its way and came back into many other forms.
- [26:35]
Dr. Janice Ross
Yeah, thank you. It's a beautifully and insightfully shaped question, so I'm going to try to do it justice. I will say the path was much clearer with Larry. He was, as we've said, much more of a documenter than Anna was. Much more conscious of his legacy. He sketched, he photographed continuously, kept notebooks, you know, massive numbers of his notebooks. So from an early point, I think he was very conscious, as we've said, he was curating his archives and I just. I remember one of the early interviews I did with him in his old office on Harrison Street. And at that point, I was writing my first book about Anna, and I wanted to know his memories of a certain part of parades and changes. And so he was sketching on a napkin as he was talking to me, kind of the blocking of the dancers. And, you know, it was very useful to explain this point. And the second he was done, he snatched it off the table and he said, you can't have this. I need to save it. And it was such a trivial little sketch, honestly, but it was like, you know, this isn't Picasso. I'm sorry. But anyway, so, I mean, that consciousness was definitely there, and I will never forget that. And Anna was the opposite. I'll just say profligate in lending her archives to people in the beginning of my. Not on this book, but my earlier research. So people walked off with photos. They walked off with scores or parts of costumes. And part of what I did was push her to put stuff in the archives, which I was grateful for when I came back to do this book, which was 20 years after my first book, because now the stuff I needed to go back and revisit had been saved from this kind of free distribution to people with no record of who brought it back or who didn't. But I think, so just in terms about the connections, I think for me, I was liberated because Anna and Larry had both passed away. This is not a project I could have written in their lifetimes. So I could be very experimental in that link between object, creative process and creative artifact in a way that they, I think, would have put roadblocks on or said no, or it wouldn't have fit with the narrative. I think maybe they wanted shaped about them. Not that it's critical, but it's a bit quirky. And so for me, I think movement was the steady through line. I always started from the point of movement. What happens to the body when it walks up or down stairs? And we know there's a repertoire with the Nicholas Brothers of famous dances on stairs. There are a lot of really interesting work done. There's a lot of interesting work, particularly among the postmoderns, done on stairs. And so I really thought more. I looked at robotics. When you try to make a robot walk up and down stairs, and what's the challenge there with Boston Dynamics and stuff? How do you. It's a very, very hard task. And so I thought about that, and then I thought, what are the traces in Anna's work? And I realized it had just escaped me. She has stairs in parades and changes. She has a scaffold of stairs in procession. She actually uses stairs as part of the mise en scene of her dances. And it's very literal. And then I realized Larry's very literal stairs are what makes water fall in many of his landscapes. Certainly the Portland sequence, the fdr, Levi's Plaza. And then you look. And if it was completely dry, they'd be stairs. Just straight up stairs. Seattle Freeway project. So this sort of iterative process going from the creative artifact to the object to how did they get there, and starting with the object to how do they get to the creative artifact? And I doubt that they ever thought of those connections. I mean, it's interesting just to briefly reference the entrance stairway, which you mentioned. I was aware every time I walked in the Halperin house. It just felt weird. But I just thought, okay, no big thing. That was the one thing that was almost impossible to find a photo of. There's one shot from the upstairs looking down. You don't really get a sense of it. And then an oblique little slide where they were taking a picture of the front courtyard. And you glimpse through the window the floating staircase. But there is, you know, since I couldn't go back in the house, that was a problem. After that initial visit, I was ready to go back with Paul Ryan to shoot the whole house. And I couldn't. And so I had to work from memory and archive. I thought I could redocument and have a fresh. A book of all new photos of the house, which would have been a very different book, but there was no way to go back to it. Yeah.
- [32:16]
Kelvin Vu
Just responding to that. I really appreciate how you said you wouldn't have been able to write this book while Anna and Larry were alive because a lot of the narratives maybe were things that they weren't conscious of, perhaps. You know, I think there's a lot of parts of the artistic process, you know, a lot of things that kind of come in by osmosis, and some things that come in very intentionally and some things that come in because they're part of the mise en scene of the process. Right. And, you know, so I think it is kind of the. It sounds like it's part of the job of the historian and the scholar to kind of do these experiments with all the objects and parts of the environment in place, but then knowing where things go and being able to be playful in time and weaving together these things. And it's, of course, hard to pinpoint direct causation, because that's also not typically maybe how the artistic process works, but that there are these influences kind of all around us, whether they are physical material objects or the nature around a house. And so I just really appreciate that and how you talked about that.
- [33:32]
Dr. Janice Ross
Thank you. I'll accept that, too. Yeah. The Hauperns wouldn't have, you know, wouldn't have been thrilled, I think, like when I mentioned Larry, you know, I find it funny and ironic that he prohibits building on the Sea Ranch coastline. That's one of the rules, that Sea Sea Ranch. And he's got this gorgeous coastal 5 acre plot there. That paradox. Sorry to interrupt there, but yeah, and that wouldn't have flown. Even Anna, I talk about, she looks like a chic suburban housewife really, in what she's wearing when she's eating sand. So that bridging these, straddling these two worlds always. And it's almost comical now when you think this is a radical, this was a radical effort in the 60s. I don't think I would have been a little uncomfortable writing that for her consumption. I will just say both of the Halperin daughters read the book when the manuscript was done, when it was in press and they loved it. They said, you got it. This, this is what it was. They came forth with more stories. It was too late to add, but that was, that was reassuring because I didn't know how it was going to land.
- [34:53]
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- [35:24]
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- [36:25]
Kelvin Vu
And that's also a great segue into my next question about the dance deck in particular. As you said, you know, it's the most kind of iconic aspect of the house, and it has a life of its own. You know, I remember seeing at moma, I remember seeing it in other exhibitions, and it's celebrated. You know, Bill Whitaker at the University of Pennsylvania Archives loves bringing out the drawings of the dance deck, which are amazing and really beautiful in their sort of original form. But one thing I hadn't thought about before this book is how the dance deck is its own kind of infrastructure. You talk about it as kind of like a hybrid domestic professional infrastructure that really allowed Anna to kind of slip between roles, between mom and wife and professional artist. That's something that I think is unique between. Among the other objects. I think that this particular object, the dance deck, is special about or special for that. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about how you see the dance deck playing this role.
- [37:31]
Dr. Janice Ross
Yeah. And thank you for acknowledging that kind of complexity about it. When I think about it, many dancers have spaces they use as home studios in their house, or the rooms that are barely furnished, that they can push back the sofa and the rug and give themselves a warmup or a bar or the reverse. In New York, a lot of dancers have studios where living spaces are tucked off the margins of it. But I think the dance deck was something entirely different. It definitely was an artifact of privilege to be able to have this distinctive and dramatic space in the midst of nature that was so rustic. You didn't have a sense of any structures around it when you're on the deck. No neighboring homes. You can't really see the house up the hill. So it really was a separate world from the house. And then you had this liminal space of the stairs linking the 200 steps, 50ft. And that was the site of transition, I realized, between these two identities, between two lives, two movement vocabularies, you know, what constituted play with her kids in the house. When she exported it to the deck, it became a minimalist exercise in trust and weight bearing, almost the precursor to contact. The floppy dance, you know, ordinary rituals, you know, like food prep, undressing to go to bed, showering and bathing in the morning, exported to the deck became these sort of prosaic Duchampian readymades, in a sense, for dance. And they were really starting points for her choreographic inquiry. And there was a lot of tension between the movement from the deck back up to the house, which I don't write about that much. But certainly the nudity that was sanctioned on the deck was forbidden in the house among the daughters. If it was sexualized, you know, there was a lot of confusion and I think, you know, forms of conflict around that. So I think also because the deck was not a formal dance studio in the midst of an urban center with an implicit sense that. That this is a secret space, but we're making art and we're gonna deliver it to you to consume at some point. It didn't have that imperative around it. And I think that also freed her to, as you say, transcend roles. She didn't have to be a dance maker necessarily. She could be a researcher as she was messing around on the deck. And, yeah, I think she transcended her role as a dance artist much more than she transcended her role as a post war homemaker or spouse.
- [40:47]
Kelvin Vu
And I love that the dance deck allowed her to do this. Right. And on its own, it's a beautifully designed object. You know, it's a beautifully designed deck in a really scenic place. But I love that it not only allowed Anna to kind of bring things from both the domestic and the professional and kind of play with them there that also created things that wouldn't have been able to have been created otherwise. Right. Like this, the sort of newness of certain things and the tensions that come with them. And this kind of transitioning into the chapter about chairs that you write about, but kind of this idea that there's, you know, discomfort and disorientation. And I think, you know, whenever there is something that is radical or new, there is this kind of. There's always. There are always tensions, right. In ways in which some things are consistent. But then there are contradictions, like with what you mentioned about nudity kind of not being able to be transported back up to the house. I guess, as a researcher, like, how did you attune yourself to these moments of tension or disorientation or discomfort as something to kind of research more. And then how did you write about that?
- [42:03]
Dr. Janice Ross
Yeah, another, you know, really interesting question. I don't know that I have a comprehensive answer for it, but I will say that if I go back to my early. My first early meeting with Anna Halperin in the early 70s, she was preparing City Dance. I interviewed her and she was unhappy with something I had written about an earlier work, Male and Female Ritual, which I was kind of dismissive of because it made me very uncomfortable. There was no position as an outside critic or spectator. Everyone had to participate. So I was dragged into the performance physically, and I was pissed off about that.
- [42:48]
Kelvin Vu
So.
- [42:48]
Dr. Janice Ross
So she agreed to let herself be interviewed by me for the San Francisco Chronicle to write a feature about this, her centennial dance for the City of San Francisco, which she began working on in 75. And I sat down to interview her and turned on my little reel to reel tape recorder, and she pulled out from her desk her tape recorder and turned it on. It was like, touche. And so I felt the discomfort. I felt myself being unsettled, you know, as the one who was doing the interviewing or what the power dynamic was there. She was a combative presence through those decades. She was a misunderstood, angry artist, I think. And so the work that came out of that 10 myths, which she admits was an extreme point of really wanting to, I think, emotionally injure the audience in a way, through sound, through light, through physical discomfort. And interviewing people who were at those performances, looking, you know, hearing from the dancers, I mean, they were physically assaulted, some of the women, because there were no boundaries as to what went on. Carrie sounds sort of benign when you read about it, but it was also a total license to feel women's bodies as you pick them up and move them around the room. So kind of a naivete in that moment for how we regard those issues now. So I was aware that it was like a hazing ritual. Some of these works, in a sense, for the audience, and Anna was casting about for how to foster engagement, and it was trying to do it through brute force. I don't think Larry ever really reached those extremes at all, but I think it was more the reverse. I think the people in his landscapes and urban designs, to me, they don't look uncomfortable. I don't feel uncomfortable. When I'm in Levi's Plaza or the FDR memorial and I sit on a cold granite block or a little stone by the creek, I feel inserted into his environment. And it's almost like, you know, a slight trick to get me into the environment because you're looking, where am I going to sit? So that my experience is visceral in his environments, and I'm not even conscious how that started. And so I think it's different. But you look around and there are no metal. There are no wooden benches with metal arms. In Larry's environments, there just aren't and, you know, I think comfort in Larry's works comes at the price of participation. If you want to sit down, you're part of the environment. You merge into his landscape. With Anna's, there's no point of comfort in those aggressive works, I think.
- [45:53]
Kelvin Vu
Yeah, I like that distinction between different ways of challenging an audience or a challenging sort of people in this space. You know, I've been to the Portland open space sequence and also to the Seattle Freeway park, and they're like, challenging, but in kind of a friendly, subtle way. Right. Like, when you're in them, you know, you're right away kind of viscerally, as you said in them. But then if you stop to think, you're like, oh, actually, yeah, I do need to jump from this concrete block to that concrete block, or, oh, that's actually like quite a steep drop in kind of these ways that kind of trick you into engaging your body more than you would in other types of urban public spaces. So, yeah, there is kind of a subtlety, but that still ends up being quite challenging on an everyday basis. You know, whereas you talk about Anna's work is like having the brute force of engagement, which I think is a great way to describe that and her kind of tactics for that. So I guess.
- [47:03]
Dr. Janice Ross
May I ask you a question on that note and someone who's a historian of Larry and so do you think Larry was conscious trying to make people part of his environment and he thought this was a tactic, or do you think he was designing an environment and this was the. This was the truth, this was the narrative of that environment to have those kinds of objects proceeding?
- [47:28]
Kelvin Vu
I think it's a little bit of both, you know, from what I understand about his design process, I think so much of his inspiration came from, you know, being out hiking with his daughters or hiking on his own. Places that have, like, dramatic, engaging landscapes and scenes that sort of bring you in. But they are challenging. Right. Many of them take a very high level of engagement with the terrain, with the topography. So I think that he wanted to bring a lot of that into cities. And I think that there is kind of a molding and an abstraction of those elements into concrete blocks so that they fit the idea of, like, what is a city made of? So there is that kind of, you know, the. The import of the outside in, you know, which I think is a fascinating process when you think about also, you know, the ways in which Anna exported things back out, you know, from, you know, the dance deck, for example, to audiences. So there's this Kind of like always process of bringing things in and then exporting them out, but then processing them kind of along the way, which is, you know, I think also in the book you write about this a lot. You know, this kind of. You call it seepage or slippage. And that was, you know, specifically in relation to Anna's work and her roles in the dance deck. But I think there is a slippage in seepage kind of facilitated by a lot of these objects, you know, so I think that that's always an interesting way to look at artistic process. You know, that doesn't happen in a vacuum, but there's always things that enable it or challenge it. So I really appreciate it. Appreciated how you wrote about that.
- [49:17]
Dr. Janice Ross
Yeah, thank you. That was interesting to hear you talk about how Larry works in that way.
- [49:22]
Kelvin Vu
And I like also, you know, kind of transitioning to our next question. But, you know, the idea of framing. And for this you use the windows as the object lesson here and saying that you. The ways in which Anna and Larry framed things was very particular and it was intentional and experimental and often very radical. And windows are really different from the chairs or the stairs or the dance deck. So I'm wondering, how did you choose windows that seem like a different kind of object?
- [49:54]
Dr. Janice Ross
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Windows are the least kinesthetically functional of any of the objects I explore. And they were the most challenging, I think, for me to tease out meaning from. So that's why my links were more metaphorical than kinesthetic there. I think they were such an important part of Wurster's mid century modern homes in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophy of windows to dematerialize walls and connect the interior with the outdoors. And I think I was just struck with the Halperinholm in particular that they never had curtains on them. You know, if they'd had curtains, I might have passed over the windows and moved to something else. But that's weird. That is weird, you know, to be that remote and just no sense of being on view all the time. And I think I also like this notion that Wurster had that the best way to light a house is God's way, he said, which is sunlight. And there weren't a lot of lights, you know, I mean, artificial lights. When I was in the Halperin's home, I also, for myself as someone who thinks about dance studios as spaces of performance, just as you said earlier, Kelvin Studios in an urban setting. Dance studios have no windows. Mirrors take the place of windows so you're always seeing yourself or the body that you're just out of sync with, trying to get reflected back to you. And here it is, a house where Anna never had mirrors on the studio. The indoor studio did, but certainly the deck doesn't. And so for me, the notion that a window at night that has no covering becomes a mirror as well. So, you know, it was more of a kind of intellectual escapade for me to think more about using it and. Yeah, being on view all the time with nature as your most persistent voyeur or spectator.
- [52:09]
Kelvin Vu
Yeah, like you had written about, you know, Anna and Larry being conscious of seeing themselves, seeing, being seen, kind of this, like, toggling back and forth, which I really appreciate, kind of wrapping things up. Now that, you know, you've. Now that you published this book, you've done this project and you've really explored objects and environments in this way. How has that affected the way you kind of see things around you now, if at all?
- [52:36]
Dr. Janice Ross
Well, I just say, personally, as I wrote this book, I began it when I was still living on the west coast. And in the process, I moved out to the east coast thinking it was a temporary move and it's since become permanent. And in the process, I left all my objects in storage in California, and I realized I don't miss most of them. So for me, it's been very interesting that I think that objects have a life. And my objects, I realize I'm disengaging from them and whatever history they represent for my life onto a new chapter. And I think maybe that would have happened over time with the Halperin's home, you know, if it had been turned into some kind of a historical site. And Daria still gets occasional access to the deck for her Tamalpa workshops. That was part of what she contracted with the new owner, who's very sympathetic to the historical legacy of the house. So I think, anyway, for me, yeah, it led me also to become curious about objects in other dancers lives and toying with the idea. I spent time in the NYPL trying to find other dancers. Did they have any objects in the archive? And they don't accept objects. Most archives, because of storage. They have somebody's tennis shoes or something, and that's it.
- [54:09]
Kelvin Vu
Wow, the tennis shoes. So I guess that brings me to ask you, what are you working on or looking forward to next? Is there a project in the works? Are there questions that you're curious about?
- [54:21]
Dr. Janice Ross
I have two longstanding projects which I've abandoned and may come back to one is looking at religious orthodoxy and ballet and fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism and the attraction it has for ballet as a kind of disciplinary training that meshes with religious fundamentalism. And I'm really intrigued by that. With Christian fundamentalism, Mormonism, Jewish orthodoxy, there are robust dance practices of ballet and all those communities of women. And so that's something I spent time on. And given the situation in Israel now, it's not something that I'm looking to go back to do. The other is performance in prisons, which I taught for years at Stanford, and the use of performance and the performative nature of incarceration. And that, too, I may return to. Yeah, great.
- [55:20]
Kelvin Vu
And my very last question is, what are one or two books that you might recommend to our listeners?
- [55:27]
Dr. Janice Ross
Well, two that come to mind are Richard Powers, the Overstory, an old book from 2018. And I think it aligns with Larry, is certainly how this ecological imagination can animate us to think about trees and the environment more responsibly. That trees deserve representation. I love that idea. And I think Larry gave representation to Sea Ranch and the land there, for sure. And I think the other is Ian McEwan's atonement, which I think is just a beautifully written book, this portrait of guilt and forgiveness and penitence and what it is to be able to sympathize with the suffering of others as central to Atonement. And I was trying to sympathize with the suffering of the house, maybe in a very small, modest way. I don't know.
- [56:24]
Kelvin Vu
I like that. That's really poetic. Yeah, I like that sort of emotional connection to the house itself, you know, and thinking along with it. Well, Janice, thank you so much for talking with me today and sharing your insights, and congratulations on this book. It's really. It's really wonderful. I enjoyed reading it.
- [56:42]
Dr. Janice Ross
Well, thank you very, very much for just a totally delightful interview and your questions. So it was an honor to be part of it.
- [56:52]
Kelvin Vu
Thank you. And thank you also to the New Books Network to all of our listeners. Until next time, please take care and enjoy reading.