Rethinking Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes: Postmodern Dance, Racialized Urban Restructuring, and Mid-1960s San Francisco

Abstract

While choreographer Anna Halprin’s work has been characterized as embodying the cultural ethos of the New Left, it is also aligned with the race and class interests that spearheaded urban renewal in San Francisco. Contextualizing Halprin’s Parades and Changes in relation to political and economic developments during the 1960s suggests the work’s contradictory affiliation with both an urban elite and utopian countercultures.