Reviews

Library Journal
Reviewed by Amy Cantu

RETURNING HOME celebrates the post-modern style of 80-year old dance pioneer Anna Halprin. Halprin, an influential dance artist and recent recipient of the American Dance Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award in Modern Dance, treats the viewer to several performances, behind-the-scenes preparations, and interviews concerning her unique artistic expression. Halprin doesn't conform to the conventional definition of a dancer; her creative process is more along the lines of a holistic fusion of dance, ecology, anthropology, and spirituality, through which she aims to connect us as individuals to the wider world of humanism. Using her immediate environment as both studio and costume, her dances involve a quasi-surrendering to the forces of nature. In one performance, for example, Halprin is covered in blue paint with a nest of twigs in her hair, sitting beside a pond in a forest as she slowly paints herself with pond mud. In this reviewer's favorite sequence, Halprin is plastered from head to toe in a forest floor's duff while lying in the hollow of a large rotting log. In this stunning time-lapse segment, she disappears slowly beneath an accumulation of crushed leaves. Artistic Director Eeo Stubblefield deserves some recognition for her vivid costumes and choreography; the haunting minimalist score and lush cinematography in turn enhance these features of the documentary. For all dance collections and larger performance arts collections.