About

eryn rosenthal InitialInvestigation About

A bit more about me:
I’m a site-specific choreographer, originally from Michigan, USA, and my work is alternately silly and absurdist or of a more serious nature, investigating transitions and human rights-related issues.  My choreography comes out of my background in contact improvisation, contemporary dance, theater, and several formative research and interview projects I’ve conducted with genocide survivors from Bosnia, the testimony of Holocaust survivors, and a diverse mix of artists, activists, and others throughout post-Apartheid South Africa. I’ve worked with playwright/ documentary theater pioneer Anna Deavere Smith, inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander, and choreographers Sello Pesa, Jay Pather, and Sol Picó, among others; my research and performance have been the recipients of both a Fulbright Grant as well as several other fellowships and awards, and I have published multiple articles in Spanish stemming from my work.

With my ongoing series, The Doors Project, I’ve been taking performance investigations based on observations of transition—political, familial, economic, intimate—and locating them in doorways, thresholds, and other transitory spaces around the world. The series premiered in Spain, and has taken several different forms so far: site-specific performances in doorways, archways, kiosks and stairwells throughout central Barcelona as part of Festival Lilliput; an animated short with visual artist Marta Azparren and Elliott Cooper; as well as a life-size doorframe on wheels—complete with floating door-handle—that my collaborators and I pushed uphill to La Puerta del Sol, the site of massive protests at the center of Madrid that inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. (photos, press coverage, and more information available through the links above). The Doors Project has literally opened the doors of First Street Green Art Park in New York City, and in 2018 will begin work with Spanish dancer Mari Crúz Planchuelo and Argentine painter Margarita García Faure on a different type of doorway: the horizon.

I am also honored to have been commissioned by The Studios of Key West to choreograph an inter-community initiative on local water issues, as part of the National Water Dance Project.

My research investigates the democratic underpinnings of contact improvisation, which I have taught most recently at the University of Michigan (U-M) as well as at the Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD) and the Market Theatre in South Africa, La Universidad Complutense in Madrid, the In-Touch Festival in Barcelona, and the Freiburg International Festival in Germany.  Freedom Suite: Transaction Being Processed, originally performed as my MFA thesis at U-M, examines the role of the body in transgressing previously legislated boundaries. This dance theater work is based on an ongoing oral history project with activists from the politically active township of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. I am delighted to be back at U-M as a King-Chávez-Parks Visiting Professor and Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives.   www.erynrosenthal.com