For my choreographed triptych in the series, Volution, (re)Volution, and (e)Volution, I was settling into a different kind of concentric rhythm. I was moved by the works and processes of vanguard postmodern dancer and community artist Anna Halprin and her book, Making Dances That Matter: Resources for Community Creativity. Halprin states that, “it’s through our relationship to the sun above us and the earth under our feet that we come to know where we are in the pattern of life1 .” The moment we were living in at the time felt like a pattern interrupted and re-directed, so I chose to honor what it meant to cycle through it, again and again.

The summer of 2020 was also a moment in time that called for planetary motion, vacillation, and continual reflection based on new information; all of which led me to Halprin’s “Planetary Dance” and “Earth Run” improvisational scores. The “Planetary Dance” originated as a ritual to facilitate community healing after the murders of six women on Mt. Tamalpais in San Francisco. Halprin’s movement ritual on the site was recognized by the community as purifying the mountain, and coincidentally the killer was caught a few days after the ritual finished. As the ritual reoccurred every five years, it was renamed “Circle the Earth” and spread worldwide. Inside of that movement score was the “Earth Run,” which invites people to commit to creating peace on the planet through movement. It calls upon an ancient dance phenomenon, the circle, which is used to channel the power of the group’s collective energies to renew, inspire, teach, create, and heal.

Volution spaced dancers 20 feet apart for a masked, hour-long performance along a bike path dotted with trees and encircled by a bay. I extrapolated the circularity from Halprin’s Earth Run, as well her task to the dancers to voice their intentions—who or what they were dancing for—in that moment.