The Mythmaker

In San Francisco every Thursday evening, several dozen people gather inside a dilapidated loft building, doff some of their clothing and begin a strangely primitive ritual. Joining hands, they wind around the room in a silent processional. Or they playfully hold one another aloft. Or they scurry, like lab animals, through a huge plastic maze. Rites of an oddball religious cult? High jinks by residents of nearby Haight-Asbury? Not at all. These outlandish ceremonies are actually "myths" performed with audience participation by Ann Halprin's avant-garde Dancers' Workshop.

Her workshop activities are as much anthropologic as choreographic. Influenced by the "structuralist" ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss, Halprin believes that a society's myths, or basic beliefs, are as fundamental to its form as its language. Even modern men are driven by such primal instincts as incest, murder, sacrifice and cannibalism, although such drives are almost entirely submerged by the character of urban life. By encouraging her audiences to act out their anxieties in terms of free-moving myths, Halprin is providing not only a therapeutic outlet but an artistic one as well. "The central idea of every evening," she says, is "to release people's buried creativity."

Orgy of Laughter. The myths usually begin with Halprin urging her visitors--who range from college professors to neighborhood hippies--to make themselves completely comfortable by shedding whatever garments they care to (most stop at shoes and socks). The weekly sessions take place in a barren room with a minimum of props; the usual musical accompaniment is the pounding of drums. After a few basic instructions from Halprin on the nature, of the evening's theme, the enactment of the myth begins. And except for some quiet and inconspicuous guidance from her workshop dancers, the non-professional participants are left almost entirely to their own creative devices.

Each myth is different, and not all are equally successful. In one sad enterprise called Atonement, the audience remained mournfully silent for an hour. In Masks, there was so much comic facemaking that the occasion literally turned into an orgy of laughter. Occasionally, Halprin's mythical world makes its own social commentary. In Maze, for example, the participants first filed docilely through a plastic labyrinth. Then they inexplicably destroyed it. Finally, after much indecision and floundering, they created an entirely new one. Explains Halprin: "I try to deal with ideas that are very common, basic and ordinary--sexuality, conflict, bewilderment, the sharing of tragedy."

Twos and Lessons. The petite, blue-eyed architect of these events hopes that her myths "are speaking out against imposed authority, against ruts and for change." At 48, she no longer dances regularly, but is busily experimenting with new variations of her myth form. So far she has concocted something called "rituals" (which are, in effect, mini-myths) and "twos" (which require participants to act as couples throughout). Next month, at Los Angeles' Music Center, she will stage her most ambitious undertaking to date: a Watts myth. "It will not be a black-white confrontation," she says, "but rather a recognition of ourselves through color differences. We hope to discover our humanness."

Many people think that Halprin has already made that discovery, and about half of her audience consists of regulars who pay the $2.50 tab to make a myth a week. Even though he knew none of the other performers at one recent myth, a city planner said: "I had no feeling of alienation or strangeness." A real estate broker commented: "It's a new look at life, which we sorely need. Great!" Halprin herself says that for some people myths are "simply fun, for some a bore, for some extraordinarily sensual, for some a happening, for some a kind of atavistic tribal reawakening. For me, it was all these things--and a new exploration."

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