Anna Halprin, a longtime Marin County resident who spent her entire career in an effort to democratize dance and along the way lead the charge of the postmodern dance movement, died Monday, May 24, at her home in Kentfield, where she performed and taught indoors and outdoors for nearly 70 years.

She was 100 and died peacefully of old age, said her daughter, Daria Halprin.

“Anna radicalized dance and innovated new concepts of dance, healing and interdisciplinary arts that have influenced people in many fields,” Daria told The Chronicle. “She bridged the concepts of performing arts and healing arts in ways that touched people all over the world.”

A cancer survivor since the 1970s, Halprin used her own experience with mortality and illness to explore the concept of using dance as a means of physical healing. This was expressed through Tamalpa Dance Institute, which she formed with Daria in 1978. Tamalpa has since expanded its mission to employ dance as a means to world peace.

Her workshops and classes attracted students internationally, to study her approach to using dance as a means of bringing attention to the challenges of contemporary life.

“She was a pivotal figure in opening doors to experimentation in dance, theater, music, happenings and performance art,” said Janice Ross, professor of theater and performance studies at Stanford University, who has written about Halprin for 35 years, including the biography “Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance.” “She did this all from the West Coast, which was a forgotten continent in American art until she made it an impetus for change beginning in the 1960s.”

This change was brought about in partnership with her husband, famed San Francisco landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. Together they were one of the most dynamic and in-demand couples in Bay Area arts and culture. In the late ’60s and ’70s, they brought their disciplines together to form “Experiments in the Environment,” a series of workshops that combined dance, architecture and other disciplines.

“It was an approach to discovery that they fused,” Ross said, “bringing landscape into dance and movement into architecture.”

To do so, Halprin designed what Ross describes as “the most famous dance floor in America, the deck off the hillside behind their home in Kentfield.”

The wooden decking was rough on the feet and the wind blew through. Dancing there, clothing was optional but in a nonsexual way. All of this was in the service of “making the physical body fully accessible for discovery, in order to re-invent what dance could be,” Ross explained.

“It was dance without artifice. In her workshops something as simple as picking up a rock or dragging a branch across the deck might become the impetus that she could shape into dance,” Ross said. “That was a radical anti-New York dance establishment statement to make in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”

In a2015年纪事报》采访时哈普林in honor of her 95th birthday, dance critic Rachel Howard acknowledged that“before Halprin, American dance was cast in (Martha) Graham’s regal mold, presented formally onstage, and performed by highly trained bodies that acted out the choreographer’s vision in a rarefied movement language. Halprin’s rebellion was to declare that any movement, performed with presence and intention, could be a dance, and anybody could be a dancer.”

Indeed, among Halprin’s radical notions was that it did not take 10 years of punishing training to invent a dancer, as Martha Graham once stated. “I think it takes more like 10 seconds,” Halprin told Howard.

Ann Schuman was born July 13, 1920, in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. Both her parents were Russian immigrant Jews. At age 4, she was enrolled in ballet classes, but her style did not take shape until she was transferred into dance classes that were more free-flowing in the spirit of famed San Francisco dancer Isadora Duncan.

Schuman choreographed her first dance for the talent show at New Trier Township High School. After graduating in 1937, she attended the University of Wisconsin to study a radical method that “considered dance to be a form of deep intellectual and emotional investigation,” she later told The Chronicle.

At Wisconsin she met Lawrence Halprin, a graduate student. They married in 1940. He then enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and saw combat duty in the Pacific Theater aboard a destroyer that was torpedoed. After the war, he mustered out in San Francisco and his wife flew to meet him. That was the end of the Midwest for the couple, who eventually settled in Marin County.

Lawrence Halprin went on to design the Sea Ranch, Ghirardelli Square, Levi’s Plaza (where his office was) and the public parks at Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio, among high visibility projects. He also co-designed the “dance deck” that was cantilevered off the side of Mount Tamalpais. The deck was built around existing trees that poked through. Upon its completion in the early 1950s, it freed up the possibilities for his wife’s exploration.

“When you reach up in a room, psychologically you go as far as the roof,” Halprin told The Chronicle. “Outside, you go as far as the sky.”

As a touring performer, Halprin’s most notorious dance was “Parades and Changes,” mounted in 1965 to include a section in which the performers undressed and dressed while staying aware of their breathing and looking intensely at the audience. It worked fine in Stockholm but nearly got her arrested for obscenity in New York in 1967.

“She introduced full-on nudity to American theater,” said Ross, adding that she also introduced one of the first dance companies to integrate Black and white dancers, at the Dancers’ Workshop, in the mid-1960s.

In 1972, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. Halprin told The Chronicle that she choreographed her own recovery by creating a ritual that involved self-portraiture and the release of her anger in front of witnesses.

After beating cancer, she began work on her “Planetary Dance,” a concept that turns everyone into a performer. In 1995, more than 400 people took part in “Planetary Dance” in Berlin, to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. It has since been performed in more than 50 countries, according to Halprin’swebsite.

Fifteen years later, she was still teaching at her home studio next to the dance deck. Her students would put on workshop showings there up until a few years ago.

“You had the vista of nature enveloping you and the dancers as you watched,” Ross said. “It really was a transformative theater experience.”

Halprin was predeceased by her husband Lawrence in 2009, who died at age 93. Survivors include daughters Daria Halprin of Kentfield, and Rana Halprin of Mill Valley; son-in-law Khosrow Khalighi; grandchildren Ruthanna Hopper-Brill, LeVanna Vassau, Micah Vassau and Jahan Khaliga; and great grandchildren Ella and Nathan Brill.

”她家人都注入了一个鉴赏ation for and a spirit of creativity,” said Daria. “As a mother and grandmother she inspired each one of us.”

According to Halprin’s wishes, a planetary dance is being planned as a celebration of her life. Details of the event will be announced at a later date.