Erdman, Jean

Jean Erdman was born in 1916. A native of Honolulu, she began her formal dance instruction at Sarah Lawrence College. Her career as professional dancer began in 1938 as a member of Martha Graham Dance Company, and in the same year she married Joseph Campbell, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and noted mythologist. In 1943 Erdman began her solo career. Soon afterwards she founded her own company, and in 1948 she founded the Jean Erdman School of Dance. The period from the 1940s to 1960s was a period of intense choreographing, dancing, teaching, and touring. During these years she choreographed and performed her own works in New York City and throughout the United States and Canada, in cooperation with the Arts Program of the Association of American Colleges. She also conducted several world tours. In 1955 she was the first American dancer to perform in Japan after World War II, and also held performances in India, and several European countries. At the same time, Erdman's career as dance instructor in academic institutions developed. She gave numerous lecture-demonstrations and master classes in American colleges throughout the United States. In 1949-1955 she was Artist-in-Residence and head of the Dance Department at the University of Colorado. In 1954-1957 she served as Head of Dance Department and Director at Bard College. She was a founding member of the Dance Theater Program for the School of the Arts at New York University, where she remained from 1967 until 1972. As faculty member and dance instructor, her contribution was significant in adding a theater art dimension to American college dance, which to that date focused largely on physical education. Reflecting her interests in different cultural traditions through the looking-glass of dance, Erdman participated in several academic conferences and published a number of articles on modern dance and Japanese theater and dance. Throughout her career Erdman choreographed numerous pieces for solo and group dances, often joining forces with visual artists and composers who produced works specifically for these collaborative pieces. Some of the noted composers and designers with whom Erdman collaborated include John Cage, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Louis Horst, Paul Jenkins, Ezra Laderman, Peter Max, Ralph Lee, as well as Teiji Ito, with whom she worked closely for several years, and who was a vital member of the Theater of the Open Eye. Eleven of her early choreographed pieces from the 1940s and 1950s were later reproduced and recorded in a three-volume documentary series, Dance and Myth: The World of Jean Erdman . Through an ongoing creative exchange with her husband's research, Erdman's search for a more abstract direction to American Modern Dance led her to create innovative and challenging choreographed works, in an ever-renewing language. Erdman's most celebrated production, The Coach with the Six Insides, was a turning point in her career. Based on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and partly inspired by her husband's own research on James Joyce, Erdman created a work that won the 1962 Vernon-Rice and OBIE Awards. Erdman's three-act event opened in November 1962, went on tour in the U.S. and Canada as well as Europe and Japan, and was later revived twice, in 1977-1978 and 1981-1982. As she stated herself in one of the numerous interviews she gave, the success and royalties she received from The Coach gave her the means to open her own theater and fulfill her artistic vision with much greater freedom than before. Certainly this is evident in the prolific creativity of the 1970s. In 1972 Erdman and Joseph Campbell founded the Theater of the Open Eye, an institution that aimed at creating dance-based works following the concept of Total Theater, and became the venue of many of Campbell's talks and seminars. Erdman served as the artistic director of the Theater of the Open Eye for fifteen years, during which she directed and produced several shows. Erdman's productions there all display her interest in blending Total Theater with literary and mythological explorations. Productions from this period include works such as Moon Mysteries, Paul Gauguin in Tahiti, and The Shining House, while other projects created under her direction at the Theater of the Open Eye included residency programs, and several shows for Children's Theater. After the death of Joseph Campbell in 1987, Erdman moved back to Honolulu, where she still resides to this date.

From the guide to the Jean Erdman papers, 1925-2001, 1935-1996, (The New York Public Library. Jerome Robbins Dance Division.)

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