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Choreographer, playwright and social practice artist Eryn Rosenthal (US) investigates questions of democracy and social fabric, dreams and meaning-making based on 20 years of ongoing oral history research and collaboration with artists and activists in South Africa, Chile, Spain, and the US.  Her work uses Contact Improvisation (CI), installation and interview to examine the intimate and historical within socio-political transitions. Working across media, her body of work plays with scale, time and space to activate personal and historical connection-making, and generate meaningful public engagement with questions of power and relationship. Eryn is a founding co-director of the Sedimento Collaborative, and an active member of international Contact Improvisation research and teacher exchange networks, teaching, performing and facilitating at the Market Theatre Lab (South Africa), Teatro Montealegre (Chile), Freiburg Festival (Germany), ECITE (Hungary), Gravity Tank (US) and elsewhere since 2003.  Her ongoing series The Doors Project investigates transitions—political, social, intimate—through place-based performance in different doorways around the world.

Eryn has worked with dance artists Thomas F. DeFrantz, Sello Pesa, and Sol Picó; Chilean playwright and psychiatrist Dr. Marco Antonio de la Parra; US inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander; and documentary theater pioneer Anna Deavere Smith. Her trauma-informed work in performance and other media also comes out of formative research, interview and performance projects with anti-Apartheid activists from South Africa and genocide survivors from Bosnia, as well as the testimony of Shoah (Holocaust) survivors with Dr. Dori Laub (z”l), co-founder of the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimony and the Genocide Studies program at Yale. 

Eryn’s research and performance have been recognized with awards from the Center for Artistic Activism for work on US voting rights, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain and an Open Society Institute President’s Grant to South Africa, among elsewhere. She was honored to serve as a King-Chávez-Parks Visiting Professor and the inaugural Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives at the University of Michigan (U-M). With the Sedimento Collaborative, Eryn is currently co-creating Sediment: Studies in Movement and Memory, a dance-theater installation and performance that investigates aftermaths of authoritarianism and current questions of democratic practice in Chile, the US and elsewhere. Support the creation of Sedimento HERE! Learn more about the project’s history and origins HERE.

Eryn directs the performance and site-based collaborative Mitochondria in NYC, developing a performance on the January 6 hearings in the US, and co-teaches Contact Improvisation with Aya Wilson. She also teaches the related arts/humanities seminars Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions, and Dance and Democracy: Movement Improvisation and Liberation Pedagogies at Yale University. Be in touch here.  www.erynrosenthal.com

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To learn more about Eryn and where her work comes from, please see:  https://erynrosenthal.com/more-about/ 

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Photo of Ralf Jaroschinski and Eryn Rosenthal by Rob Sanchez