the purpose. So that became a very important shift for me. And so we developed the RSVP Cycles in which people were able to learn how to score in a very direct and simple way. And this made it possible for us now to deal with groups of people. Because an individual can kind of feel things out, be intuitive, but if you’re dealing with groups of people, you can’t just feel things out and be intuitive.
Through the RSVP Cycles people can validate what they are doing in terms of their own experience. I wanted to create something for a group of people to do in which they’re given the opportunity to explore the theme and find out what’s real for them, find out what our differences are and what our commonalities are. It’s a particular way of being a choreographer. It allows for social impact in process as well as in the final product.
We did ten myths for small audiences. It was really a research process because I wanted to find out what were the natural forms that groups did. If you got a group of 50 people together and you gave them a very open score, what would they do? Because finding order is biologically how we’re made. We can’t exist in a totally random form.
NANCY: What are you hoping to change as people are finding their own creativiy and moving through these various forms that arise?
ANNA: In those exploratory myths, the purpose was to empower people to create together and to impart the experience of the power that comes from cooperating through movement as a collective body and find out what are the collective forms and perhaps even the archetypes.
This led to another issue that was coming up. I was invited to the American Humanist Psychology Conference on androgyny. And this was about the time, about 1967 I think, when the feminist movement was just getting hot. And the whole question of male and female differences or alikeness, the concept of androgyny, was on everybody’s lips. I felt that what was going on at that time was creating a tremendous cultural upheaval. Families were being drastically affected by the feminist movement, the workplace was being affected, people at that time felt that the feminist movement was the biggest cultural and economic and political issue that would hit us in this century.
principles of a creative process.
So I had an opportunity to deal with that issue at this conference. I just had the men dance alone. And had the women just watch. Then I had the women dance alone and I had the men just watch. And after this whole conference in which everybody was intellectualizing about the male and female issues and that we’re alike and that the only reason that we’re different is because of conditioning processes and so forth, we did this dance. They had exactly the same score. And it was just astonishing. I mean, it was funny, we all laughed at ourselves. We cried, we got so excited, because it was such a relief for the men to be together, to do their work and to work as a team, and to do their kind of movement. And the women were so delighted to be together as women and they had a totally different tone about what they did. Then when the men and women came together, they came together with mutual respect. That was truly a transformative experience.
The issues we had been dealing with at the conference were not the real issue. The issue was—we are different and it doesn’t matter that we’re different. What matters is that we’re able to respect our differences and bring those differences together and find our commonality.
NANCY: Where did you go from there?
ANNA: About this same time I got a call from James Woods in Watts asking if I would do a performance at the Mark Taper [Theater] with my company. This was at the time they were having the riots in Watts in 1967. His idea was that the Studio Watts, the black community, would bring us down to the Mark Taper, which is like the Opera House. It’s the big theater in the middle of Los Angeles. And Watts is in the ghetto. And I said, “No, no. Instead of bringing me in as a symbol, we’re going to take on this issue of the separation that you feel in a ghetto from not being part of the mainstream and the cultural life. I will come down and work with an all-black group in Studio Watts for a year.” Which I did, every Saturday. And I said I’d work simultaneously in San Francisco and start a new company, all-white. We’ll start exactly at the same time and it’ll just be two new groups doing the same scores.
At the end of the year I brought the black group up to San Francisco and the two groups essentially spent 24 hours a day together for 10 days. We developed a dance based on our encounter, our prejudice. We performed it at the Mark Taper Theater in Los Angeles. It was called Ceremony of Us.
The dance showed the whole process of how these two groups came together. We started separate and then we showed the conflict and confrontation and so forth. And then at the end, the performers came out and did a procession and gathered the audience. And when we went outside to the Mark Taper Plaza we were all dancing together. So the transformation was not just in the performers. But our purpose was to bring it out into the audience.
NANCY: Do you wait for an actual transformation in the workshop process to show you what forms to use, or do you just lay out a symbolic structural transformation and let it happen in the performance?
ANNA: I know what you’re saying. No, you can’t score a transformation. In the Watts/S.F. workshops, I had each group work separately on the same score. It was a simple follow-the-leader type of score. When we came together for the first time, the Watts group did the black dance for the whites and then the S.F. group of whites danced for the blacks. Then the next score was to do these two lines, the black and the white, at the same time so you both have to use the same space. But what happened is that they started interacting. Cutting through lines. They tried to take the people out of one line and seduce them to their group, and all hell broke loose. It became very competitive but in a charged and creative way. Issues of how far you would go with the movement came up. The degree of outrageousness was a big issue. All the issues came out that first day, and most of them were unresolved. So then we had to deal with setting up situations where we could explore issues of competition, leadership, sexuality, abandonment, issues of self-esteem. We had no notion beforehand what the outcome would be. It took its own form as we danced the issues that emerged.
NANCY: In what way does the RSVP Cycles allow people to participate in the creation of the event?
ANNA: You see, the RSVP Cycles wasn’t developed when I first was doing the black and white Ceremony of Us. We developed it because of that, because we didn’t have a common language for communicating. Our way of speaking, and our language and our images were so different we weren’t hearing each other. We didn’t know how. So we developed this RSVP Cycles so that we could listen to each other and find a way to respect our differences and find our commonality.
The RSVP Cycles is so simple. You take the creative process and you look at it in four different ways. One is collecting Resources, the other is Scoring, the other is Performing, and the fourth is Valuacting. Now, when you collect resources, you collect them objectively or subjectively. That includes what we are trying to achieve by it, what are the changes we want to create, what is the theme? What are our resources, our people resources, our movement resources that we might use in this, our space resources, our prop resources, whatever … it’s like an inventory. What is possible? Everybody chips in. This is my idea. My ideas are resources. And then we take those resources and we start to score them. We score them in relation to activity, over time, in space, with people. Now we know where that score came from. The score is graphic and absolutely visible. We put the score up and we try it. We perform it. And then after we perform it we valuact it. We say, it didn’t work, or it did work. Or I liked this, or I didn’t like that. What new resources do we need, how can we change the score? So we’re very involved in it.
NANCY: How are you making decisions together?
ANNA: There’s always a facilitator. Sometimes in scoring, it’s done totally co-operatively. Other times, I’ll come in with, “These are the resources I got from watching you. This is the score I think will work. Do you have anything to add to that?” And then we will valuact