-By Maria Garcia

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Swiss filmmaker Ruedi Gerber was a stage actor when he first met American dancer-choreographer Anna Halprin. It was 1982, and Halprin, a recent cancer survivor, had stopped performing and begun exploring dance as a healing art. Gerber remembers Halprin’s work then as an investigation into the intersection of dance, theatre and life, and he credits her with inspiring him to become a filmmaker. Halprin eventually returned to the stage, and Gerber saw her in 2000 at the Joyce Theater in New York City. He asked her if she would agree to the making of a documentary about her work; it took a few years for Halprin to decide, but when she did, she gave Gerber access to her video archives, and invited him to her California home, the site of an unusual artistic community in the 1960s and 1970s. The result, Breath Made Visible—named for Halprin’s definition of dance—is an excellent portrayal of the 86-year-old’s contribution to the art form.

Halprin, who as a girl studied in a Denishawn school (inspired by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn), distinguished herself from her famous contemporaries, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, by exploring iterations of primitive gestures. John Graham, a collaborator of Halprin’s in the 1960s, describes her style best when he discusses “The Prophetess,” a clip of which is shown in the documentary. He begins by explaining that the choreography is based on “more than the dance technique or dance idea.” In the sequence, Halprin is dressed in an elaborate hat and gypsy-like costume, and she is spinning in place or circling around an invisible object, her skirts spreading out around her. Graham says “The Prophetess” is a dance “based on a movement that merely made circles” which began in Halprin’s hands and which eventually “continued to go through the body.”

Watching the clip, the viewer is at first drawn to Halprin as one would be to a whirling dervish, but after a few moments, she seems to embody every vital, sacred and mysterious conflagration and force of nature, and we become mesmerized by the simplicity of her movements. The dance is organic, rather than ritualized through recognizable dance-like gestures. The sequence on “The Prophetess” is typical of Gerber’s technique in Breath Made Visible, which is to infuse every aspect of the documentary with Halprin’s artistic life. At least half of it is composed of dance sequences, sometimes with narration, and at other times accompanied only by the film’s excellent score, followed by Halprin’s description of her influences during that period of her life. So, “The Prophetess” connects us to a childhood memory of Halprin’s (which appeared in Janice Ross’ 2007 biography, “Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance”), where the dancer recalls watching her grandfather, an observant Jew, in an ecstatic dance, a form of prayer. She explains that she was always aware of herself as a member of a “tribe.”

In a few instances, Gerber reaches for cinematic representations of his subject’s psyche, injecting enigmatic references or symbols, such as a recurring shot of a bird in flight. The bird interrupts the narrative arc of the film, and although its presence is finally explained, its appearance is misplaced in a documentary built upon Gerber’s elemental portrait of the dancer as Earth Mother. This is a minor complaint, though, in a film that is otherwise so cleverly structured. Rather than choosing the time-worn path of chronology, Gerber portrays Halprin by spreading out from a central idea of her as an innovator who alighted here and then there, bringing to everything her idea that dance is life and that life is dance. The famous umbrageous wood deck where over the years Halprin danced and taught dance—it’s part of the Halprin compound in California—sparks archival footage of well-known collaborators and hippie participants in group dance, as well as the memories of the two Halprin daughters of a childhood spent in an artistic commune that offered no choice except dance.

Interesting sidelights of Breath Made Visible include an interview with Halprin’s late husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who takes obvious delight in his wife’s continuing vitality. Halprin moved to California to be with her husband in the 1950s, leaving behind a professional career that began on the Broadway stage. Merce Cunningham recalls Halprin’s influence on him, as do other male dancer-choreographers and long-time collaborators, including John Graham. Interviews with the Halprin daughters, Daria, who followed in her mother’s footsteps, and Rana, who is a documentary photographer, provide a glimpse of family life with artistic parents. Apparently, it was not always as idyllic as it appears in the archival footage. Gerber’s interview with Rana, who does not remember her adolescence as the “heaven” her sister does, is too brief, leaving the audience with the impression that the filmmaker left good material on the cutting room floor.

Breath Made Visible is anchored to a recent performance by Halprin in which she talks to the audience about the different phases of her life, and how they eventually found expression in her art. It is a wonderful addition to the on-camera interviews because it is a combination of theatre and dance, and it connects gestures to particular emotions of Halprin’s, for instance her memories of embracing her baby daughters. In the dancer-choreographer, Gerber finds a talented performer, teacher and therapist, but he also fashions a portrait of the artistic life. At one point, Halprin shares a meal at home with two of her longstanding friends, Graham and A.A. Leath, who, after nearly two decades with Halprin, went their own ways in the late 1960s. The two men are philosophical about their departure, but Halprin describes it as a “divorce,” the pain of that separation evident on her face and in the way she shifts in her chair.

The sequence, which begins as the sometimes awkward, sometimes banal conversation of old friends, ends in a wonderful cinematic moment when gesture communicates everything. The essence of Halprin’s journey to “breath” or life made visible in dance is to retain an acute and corporeal memory of crippling emotions of joy and grief. At one point earlier in the documentary, Halprin says that the cancer she developed was caused by deeply felt emotions that had lodged in her body. She danced in order to release them, and survived her cancer. It’s apparent during the luncheon discussion that while her art depends upon a studied retention of every sort of emotion, and the attachment of gestures to these emotions, she is not free of whatever originally inspired them. That, ironically, is the best cinematic representation of Halprin’s creative impulses and, perhaps, the quintessential definition of a creative life.