'Parades and Changes': Anna Halprin

There's a ritualistic resonance to the return of Anna Halprin's "Parades and Changes" to the Berkeley Art Museum this weekend. Forty-three years ago, the dance piece marked the opening of BAM, symbolic of then-director Peter Selz's desire to re-engineer how art and audiences came together. Now "Parades and Changes" will mark the museum's closure, as it moves to a new home in downtown Berkeley.

In developing "Parades and Changes," Halprin and composer Morton Subotnick, who also performs this weekend, invented their own method of "scoring" the work. Various activities, the tearing of sheets of paper, dressing and undressing, musical episodes, etc., were set down on a parade of colored index cards, which could then be shuffled or changed depending on which seemed to suit the context of the performance and the culture of the moment. Halprin notes that that flexibility made "Parades and Changes" malleable enough to fit any venue, and also kept it relevant through the years.

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