The amazing Golden Gate Bridge, which we crossed a number of times on our way to and from digit productions, where we rented gear
San Francisco and its gorgeous surrounds was where James Broughton spent most of his life.
It’s always fun to go there and meet people who were influenced directly and indirectly by him. You can still feel his spritely spirit dancing around the city.
Eric Slade, Big Joy documentary director, and I swung through for two interviews after our time in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Art Adams worked skillfully behind the camera.
Keith Hennessy is an amazing performance artist, dancer, and queer theorist who considers Broughton one of his ancestors and inspirations. “There’s a queer scene and an artistic scene that I’m in, where Broughton has always been present,” Hennessy told us before a dress rehearsal for his current performance, CROTCH.
“The more I see him as someone who helped set up the conditions – the material, the psychological, the imagistic, the psychic conditions under which I operate, as both as an artist and as a gay person—the more I start to perform out of that place, to extend that lineage.”
Keith Hennessy at Dance Mission before he took off his clothes for (part of) the performance, "Crotch"
“He has a kind of child’s eye view on the body and sex and God and the earth and all their interrelations. He brings a combination of innocence and curiosity to each of those pursuits.”
Here I am with Anna Halprin, at the beautiful Marin County home she and her husband Lawrence built in the 1950's
Friday, we got to visit Anna Halprin, the dancer and choreographer who was part of James’s life from the 1940’s on. In a way, she was his muse – the dancer he always wanted to be. And she danced to his poetry, as you can see in a brief scene in the Big Joy trailer.
Anna was married to Lawrence Halprin, one of the great landscape architects of the 20th Century, who passed on last October. Together, they inhabited a creative space in Marin County, where we interviewed Anna.
She and James were part of the “San Francisco Renaissance” after World War II – an important story we’ll be able to tell in the Big Joy film. She described the creative environment: “We were very free and open-ended, not very self-aware. There was a lot of fun, excitement, cross-pollination between us.
“In New York, the dance scene was more traditional. I was working alone, but in connection with the painters, the poets, architects, the actors’ workshop – looking for stimulation, cross-fertilization. The word multi-disciplinary came up as a description of the work we were doing.
“James and I had a special relationship because we both enjoy wit. I never could take anything too seriously around him. … We both dealt with serious subjects in a witty way.”
Being with Anna in her beautiful home was inspiring to me, and gave me a better sense of the community she and Lawrence shared with James Broughton, Alan Watts, Imogene Cunningham, Richard Brautigan, and others.
