What Is Planetary Dance?

The Planetary Dance is a tool for community resilience, collective empowerment and environmental and social awareness building.

Originally created by renowned artist and dancer, Anna Halprin in 1981, the Planetary Dance was first created as a response to severe violent events happening on Mt. Tamalpais, Marin County, California. At that time the community decided to come together, and with Anna's leadership, perform a series of rituals and events to reclaim their resiliency, power, overcome their fear and pay tribute to the women that had suffered violence on the mountain between the years of 1979-1981. The perpetrator was captured after a series of community based rituals and the Planetary Dance was born. The Planetary Dance has been performed at the base of Mt. Tamalpais for more than 35 years as a seasonal community ritual. It is now being performed and used as a tool for resiliency in diverse communities in over 30 different countries worldwide. 

In these times of great challenge and despair we, the next generation of Planetary Dance facilitators, feel the call to bring this arts based ritual to our children in their schools. Our purpose is to increase a sense of belonging, activate community, and exercise our birthright to foster health and balance within each individual and with our beloved planet Earth.

The Planetary Dance is a peace run orchestrated in a circle that allows participants to dedicate their run to a personal, family, community and or world issue that they want to bring healing to. In this way the dance integrates the physical and emotional body to have an enacted experience of taking action for your life and the lives of those you care about. In these hostile times of immigration bans and climate change acceleration, we are being called to strengthen our connections to each other and to the planet in order to protect our communities and the environment that we depend on. The Planetary Dance experience gives youth the chance to creatively confront the challenges in their lives and the world around them and to respond by building community through the arts, to orient themselves towards positive change.