'Breath Made Visible': A film biography of pioneering dancer Anna Halprin

Early on in Ruedi Gerber's affectionate documentary about dancer Anna Halprin, a passer-by in a theater is surprised to learn that he's talking to the modern-dance legend. "They said she was real old," he says, a bit gobsmacked by the vibrant, youthful woman before him. She, laughing, agrees.

Halprin, now 87, is still dancing and creating — dance, she says, in a lovely phrase that gives the film its title, is breath made visible. The film traces her beginnings as a child who loved to dance — "I thought God was a dancer" — to her modern-dance training and the move to the West Coast that would ultimately define her. Hosting dance classes and workshops on a beautiful deck outside her Marin County home (designed by her husband, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, so she could continue her work while staying near their children), she established the San Francisco Dancers Workshop in 1955, as well as what the film describes as the first integrated dance company a decade later.

While "Breath Made Visible" would have been helped by a few more voices outside of Halprin's immediate circle (to better explain her impact on the dance world), it's nonetheless a vivid and haunting portrait of an artist's long career, filled with snippets of dance film that make you want to see more — a young Merce Cunningham leaping across Halprin's deck; Halprin herself wrapped in a membrane-like sheath as she writhes in the waves of an ocean beach in her 2003 piece "Returning Home." And it's also, unexpectedly, a love story: Watching the Halprins, who met when she was 19, chatting about art and creativity feels like the latest installment in a long and perpetually fascinating conversation.

The film is given structure with clips from her recent solo performance at the Joyce Theater, in which she talks about life and dance — for her, perpetually intertwined. Contemplating the rest of her life, she bursts into a happy, hoppy prance; wordlessly, it's describing joy.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com