Eryn Rosenthal
USAQ
Eryn Rosenthal is a choreographer, director and social practice artist. Her classes investigate listening and empowerment, play and joy as forces that shift what's possible when we come together. Eryn's body-based work examines questions of democracy and social fabric, dreams and meaning-making within local and international contexts, grounded in ongoing collaborations with artists and activists in Chile, South Africa, Spain, and the US. She is also proud to be an active member of international contact improvisation (CI) teacher exchange networks, teaching and facilitating at the Freiburg Festival (DE), ECITE, the Market Theatre Lab (SA), La Universidad Complutense (SP), UMass-Amherst and elsewhere since 2003. Eryn’s trauma-informed practice combines contact improvisation, oral history, poetry and experimental performance to examine intimate and historical aspects of socio-political change. Her ongoing series The Doors Project investigates transitions–political, social, personal– through site-based performance in different doorways around the world. She is also a founding co-director of the Sedimento Collaborative in Chile/NYC, co-developing Sediment: Studies in Movement and Memory.
Eryn has worked with dance artists Sello Pesa, Tommy DeFrantz, and Sol Picó; poet Elizabeth Alexander; and documentary theater pioneer Anna Deavere Smith. 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. Eryn previously served as a King-Chávez-Parks Visiting Professor and inaugural Artist in Residence for Dialogue-Building and Inclusion Initiatives at the University of Michigan. She currently teaches at Yale University, with the original arts/humanities seminars Dance and Democracy: Movement Improvisation and Liberation Pedagogies, and Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions. www.erynrosenthal.com