AA Leath

For the ten years between 1955-1965, AA Leath was Anna Halprin’s closest collaborator in the Dancers Workshop as the company redefined dance in the America. In groundbreaking works including The Flowerburger (based on stories by Richard Brautigan), Birds of America or Gardens Without Walls (with music by La Monte Young), Four Legged Stool (music by Terry Riley), Five Legged Stool (music by Morton Subotnick), Apartment 6, and Parades and Changes, Leath shined brightly yet never claimed the spotlight.

Arthur Augustus Leath, Jr., known throughout his life as AA, was born May 23, 1925, in Richmond, Virginia. He earned his BA and MA in Biology from the University of Virginia, then entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison to pursue a doctorate in Botany. A chance encounter with a class on modern dance changed the course of his life, and Leath switched his studies to movement education with Margaret H’Doubler for the next two years. When Halprin, herself a UWM graduate, wrote to her old teacher in Spring 1953 looking to hire someone, H’Doubler recommended Leath join her in California.

After attending Hanya Holm’s 1953 summer session in Colorado Springs, Leath arrived in San Francisco that August where he joined the faculty of the Halprin-Lathrop Dance School on Union Street to take charge of the children’s classes. Before long, Leath was teaching modern dance and improvisation to adults.

“Just at that time, Anna had decided to really focus on improvisation and to break away from the school. And I remember one class at the Halprin-Lathrop studio when one of Anna’s colleagues or senior students, AA Leath, taught an improvisation class there. And I loved it. I just loved it. I have a memory of a moment where he was having us work with “up.” I remember lying on the floor on my back and with every cell in my being, rising upward. And glancing over to the edge of the room where as a teacher AA was standing aside, and he made the gesture of casting a fishing line and reeling me in. And I felt that that was a moment I got reeled into dancing.”

-Simone Forti, from her oral history

He continued his studies with Anna Halprin and Welland Lathrop, taught for the dance cooperatives they had established around the Bay Area, and began performing publicly with the dance company in May 1955. When Halprin split from Lathrop at the end of 1955, Leath joined her in her newly-created Dancers Workshop of Marin (eventually to be renamed the San Francisco Dancers Workshop). The dance deck at her home in Kentfield, built by Halprin’s husband Lawrence with the assistance of Arch Lauterer, would become the epicenter of contemporary dance on the west coast.

“[Robert Morris] used to once in a while come and take class at Anna’s, especially if AA was teaching. And I remember one class that AA taught where he had us go out and choose something to observe for a half hour, and then come back and develop some movement from that observation. And Bob chose to observe a rock. He sat and watched the rock for a half hour. And then when he showed – because we each showed what we had worked on – he laid down on the floor and then he just clumped up I guess kind of into a fetal position but so strongly that he was just like a rock with the smallest place on the floor. It took maybe three minutes to do that, which is a long time. Maybe five minutes. So here again, it was that singular image. And it was sculptural.”

-Simone Forti, from her oral history

Leath worked closely with Halprin in summer workshops on the dance deck starting in 1956, began performing new works with the Dancers’ Workshop in 1957, and garnered rave reviews immediately. Leath danced in all of Halprin’s ensemble pieces and choreographed his own works in this period.

“Ann Halprin’s December [1958] concert, presented by the Contemporary Dancers at their Center here, was an immensely provocative display of the pure dance art which she and her Dancers Workshop of Marin have become justifiably renowned for among dancers. AA Leath’s “Earth Interval” was the most enjoyable work on the program. As danced by the choreographer, a really gifted artist, the work had all the poignancy and direct, human meaningfulness of a ballet like “Afternoon of a Faun.” In form and surface beauty Leath’s piece resembled Miss Halprin’s earlier works. If you have not had the pleasure of seeing Leath dance yet, be certain not to miss the company’s future performances.”

-Dick Moore, The SF Bay Window, January 1959

After the Dancers’ Workshop returned from a performance at the Venice Biennale and first European tour in Spring 1963, the group moved into studios at 321 Divisadero Street to share space with the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The Dancers’ Workshop continued to stretch the definitions of dance with unclassifiable works including Apartment 6 and Parades and Changes, which they took on a second tour to Europe in 1965. Shortly after returning from another critically acclaimed tour, Leath and fellow Dancers’ Workshop co-founder John Graham split from Halprin to create GrahamLeath Productions with psychotherapists Eugene Sagan and Juanita Bradshaw who were developing “Creative Behavior” under the banner of The Institute for Creative and Artistic Development.

Leath had moved beyond dance as concert art form and into a new realm of self-development through movement. In Spring 1966, Leath began teaching a course called “A Creative Movement Class for Men and Women," while GrahamLeath Productions opened an experimental performance series in Berkeley. Leath traveled with Graham, Sagan, and Bradshaw to Washington, DC, in September 1967 to participate in the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the American Psychological Association, where they presented as part of the symposium "Creative Behavior and Artistic Development in Psychotherapy."

Leath returned to Madison in the early 1970s to teach creative behavior, dance improvisation, and creative dance at the University of Wisconsin Extension Program.

AA Leath died on June 23, 2018 in Jenks, Oklahoma.

“There was some kind of magic about him.” 

-Norma Leistiko

THE AA LEATH ARCHIVE includes concert programs, photographs, and correspondence.

Licensing and research inquiries welcome.