The Instinctual Dance of Stair Walking

If there is a single object that sets the body dancing, it is a set of stairs. Domestically, functionally, theatrically, stairs allow the body to partner with itself and move through space with a rhythm. It’s not clear precisely when stairs began to creep into the dance vocabulary of Anna Halprin—but for the visitor to the Halprin home an encounter with stairs is immediate and the impression lasting. Entering a home by stepping under a staircase sounds like the opening line of a fairytale. Indeed, walking through the front door into the Halprin house in Kentfield, and stepping directly under the home’s floating interior staircase, was both ordinary and exceptional. Ordinary because, after all, it was the front door, and exceptional because one was standing under a staircase that seemed to hover in the air. If this was indeed the front door, the mini foyer was curiously scraped of the grandeur and the ceremony of an entrance, replaced by this sly demonstration of engineering and architectural virtuosity. Instead of trumpeting arrival, one slid into a slender hallway shadowed by a levitating staircase with no supports between treads as it marched in a steep rise up the wall and out of view into the private second floor.

The sensation for a visitor to the entranceway stairs was one of being swept into an invisible stream, beginning with this plunge into unwitting participation in an architectural sleight of hand. “Trust me,” the floating staircase seemed to say. “Yes, there are no supports between these wooden treads. And, did you notice, also no side anchor on the right, just one slender pipe handrail? But you will be safe. Just stay alert.” Alertness, an openness to risk, a parking of caution at the door, and a dispensing of formalities were the tickets of entry into the home, lives, and art of Anna and Lawrence Halprin.

Passing underneath the staircase, visitors are immediately propelled into the flow of life and performance inside, toward the big island in the compact kitchen, the sunny wall of glass windows extending from the kitchen to the breakfast room and the long rectangular combined dining room and living room; wherever the gathering of people happens to be, a force impels guests inward. Upon entering, the little pas de deux with the staircase helps prompt participation into the flow and community of the Halprin home. Equally important as an introduction to domestic choreography, it also announces the house and its surrounding gardens as players.

The presence of this staircase, and its several companion stairways crisscrossing the Halprin property, set in motion subtle yet persistent movement patterns for Anna as a dancer that rippled through her life as a choreographer. Walking on stairs presents a unique test for maintaining dynamic balance. Steps present uncertain challenges to gait because one is always actively balancing. Absorbing the gait disturbance of level changes forces a repeated shift from standing to walking to stabilizing. It involves careful placement of the individual foot in these three dimensions. Effectively the body is unstable in the static sense at all times when walking stairs as it shifts between foot placement and actively rebalancing, and this rhythm undergirds Anna’s work. Stairs demand an immediate attention to the body’s position in space and a physical alertness to its proximate environment. This continual and close dynamic between the objects in our lives and ourselves parallels that between ourselves and the physical forms we inhabit—which Pierre Bourdieu theorized as a facet of habitus, the way the containers of our lives contour our actions in the world outside. The fact that Anna was a dancer interacting with the stairs of an architect and landscape designer so intimately, intensified the impact of domestic space and its objects on her and imparted a unique legibility of the repercussions on her dance work. Like a cyclical ripple effect, the dances she would create as a consequence offered lessons and models of physical responses to designed objects that would return to influence Larry’s own methods of urban design.

In 1951, when the Halprins commissioned the architectural firm of Wurster, Bernardi, and Emmons to design a simple, compact redwood and glass home for them on a dramatic two-and-a half-acre site Larry had picked out on the bayside flank of Mt. Tamalpais, floating staircases were still novel (figure 1.3).[1] They evolved domestically from the 1930s sculpted wood experiments of Wharton Esherick, who not only floated but also spiraled his hand-hewn wooden treads in arabesques upward, from one level in a home to the next (figure 1.4). Esherick’s work, particularly this staircase, had been featured prominently in the 1940 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. Poised between a staircase and a work of sculpture, it was a major element of the World of Tomorrow displays of futuristic homes and their furnishings. With its treads made of oak and its vertical support of a single redwood tree, this staircase presented simultaneously the rugged past of rough-hewn wood and its modernist future with its silky, smooth finish. “Make it like a puppy’s ears,” Esherick was known to instruct his assistants as to how smoothly polished he wanted his wood surfaces. In the Halprin home, the opening staircase marched as much as floated.  It was sparely functional and linear, dispensing with the Arts and Crafts funkiness of Esherick’s staircases while retaining their quiet drama. Its boards were sleek and smooth, stained a warm golden hue. It immediately established the open airy yet controlled atmosphere of the home. One ascended or descended. One did not make an entrance from either the front door or the stairs. The basic forthrightness of staircase design was honored but accented with a sleek modern utility. This entranceway staircase asserted, as did the other various stairs interlacing the balcony and gardens on the Halprin property, the belief that beauty is derived from utility, not ornamentation or sentimental expression. This also aligned with the credo of Christopher Tunnard, whose book on landscape design was a strong early influence on Larry. [2]

This tension between the integrity of a form and the utility and safety of its functioning as a bodily experience would at times present problems in the Halprins’ domestic sphere. This was true in regard to the Halprins’ floating staircase during the early years of their life in the home as a young family. Daria, the elder of the Halprins’ two daughters, recalled how growing up in the Halprin home, despite numerous tumbles off the edge and slips through the open slats of the stairs by children and, later, grandchildren, the Halprins never modified the design of the staircase. Rather they just fastened temporary netting along the outside while preserving the open floating aesthetic with the slender metal rail on one side. Rana, the younger sister, recounted matter-of-factly how a childhood friend once got her head stuck between the treads of the stairs, and yet it continued to be a favored play space for children to race up and slide down on pillows.[3]  Safety aside, objects in the environment were there to be engaged with but one also had to be attentive to using the body thoughtfully and respectfully in relation to them. This conception of how environments are performative spaces, and our bodies are always in active negotiation with them, was one of the key lessons of the remarkable design and art of Anna and Larry. Like the staircase, their work existed in a productive tension between the accessible and the risky, the informal and the cool aesthetic of modernism. All of these competing tensions helped profoundly to shape the body of work Anna would make across her lifetime on this property.

Larry and Anna’s introduction to this modernist aesthetic stemmed from the three years they spent living in Boston as newlyweds. They resided in Boston while Larry attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, (GSD), which combined architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture. In 1941, when Larry entered Harvard after receiving a graduate degree in horticulture from the University of Wisconsin, and a year before Anna formally moved to be with him, Harvard’s program was a thriving center of design innovation. It was headed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, recent émigrés who fled Germany once the Nazis ordered the closure of the Staatliches Bauhaus, the famed school of design, architecture and applied arts in Dessau, Germany that Gropius directed.