While choreographer Anna Halprin’s work has been characterized as embodying the cultural ethos of the New Left, it is also aligned with the race and class interests that spearheaded urban renewal in San Francisco. Contextualizing Halprin’s Parades and Changes in relation to political and economic developments during the 1960s suggests the work’s contradictory affiliation with both an urban elite and utopian countercultures.

Emerging out of the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s, a group of dancers founded the Wallflower Order Dance Collective (1975–1984), one of the first explicitly feminist dance groups in the US. It’s clear from looking at the networks of support set up for creating their work, their collective process, and their eventual split, that the Wallflower Order embodies the contradictions of social reproduction.