Daria Halprin - fifty four years
I met Daria when she was nineteen.
“…a 75 year old woman with hands that have a history and in other images she looks like that 20 year old. It’s pure poetry to see her posed in almost the identical posture that she was in when you made that first iconic image of her in the JB Blunk chair…”
Janice Ross
all photographs by Paul G Ryan
I met Daria when she was not even a 20 year old. About 19, I believe. I was 29. “You’re a bunch older.” she said. At Sea Ranch as part of her parents Larry and Ann Halprin’s environmental workshop. On the Gualala beach she built driftwood cites with architects and dancers.
1966 - Sea Ranch, California
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1967 - New York ~ Parades and Changes
A year later, I was at a rehearsal for her mother Ann Halprin’s Parades and Changes, a performance that with its frank, albeit innocent, nudity, created waves in the Avant Guard dance world in Sweden and New york. Daria was a part.
She was young and energetic, lifting and swirling with other dancers.
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Sea Ranch. 1968
Two years later, in a more exploratory Halprin Workshop at Sea Ranch again, the paper theme continued.
We became closer friends. We took photographs of each other
Somewhere in between, Michelangelo Antonioni cast her in his upcoming film, Zabriskie Point, his vision of revolutionary American youth in the 1960s.
I visited her in Death Valley, filming at Zabriskie Point. For a moment.
Then she was swept into the international cinema world. A long way from Marin County. Our lives diverged.
There are certain people in our lives to whom we feel connected far beyond the chronology of time spent together. A presence and energy that lingers.
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She married Dennis Hopper. At Larry’s request, I photographed the wedding. They had a daughter. But as her father Larry remarked at their Jewish wedding, after the crushing of the glass, “..some things don’t last forever.”
In a return closer to her roots, she came back to Kentfield and with her mother, started the Tamalpa Institute, delving deeper into dance as therapy. “Movement is personality and soul made visible”
Years passed. I moved to Santa Monica
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Last week, years later, Daria came to Los Angeles to perform a dance, the Still Dance, around the JB Blunk sculpture that had been a fixture in the Halprin home in Kentfield for many, many years.
At 74 years of age now, she brought with her the poignancy and insight of all her life. The dance involved large sheets of paper and she wrote from memory, the names of those who had been close, some gone, some still here. All important.
Her movements - not the explosiveness of her youth but with the grace and joy of age.
I was happy that my name was on the paper
Such a lovely tribute to an incredible woman
What fabulous pictures and story of a long long friendship. Thanks for sharing this!!