HANGAR 1957

HANGAR features Anna Halprin's dancers (including a young Simone Forti) improvising at a construction site at San Francisco International Airport.

Filmmaker W.R. Heick captures them from both ground and air and demonstrates an extraordinary early example of a cinematic approach to site specific performance capture. Films like Hangar (in addition to many site specific captures) present provocative and still pressing questions regarding the delineations between dance documentation and dance film.

The full version print of Hangar is regrettably lost and the only complete version that exists is a copy taken from a VHS adorned with a time code. While unfortunate, this speaks to the precarity of preservation and the ease with which important work becomes lost.