Lacking physical grace myself dancers are not in my usual circle. But some decades ago I spent a week with Jean Erdman, the wife of 49 years of Joseph Campbell, a Joyce scholar whose recounting of myths inspired epics like Star Wars and a nearly religious contemplative movement, A week of TaiJiQuan and Thought of Joseph Campbell at Esalen Institute was led in part by his widow Jean. For me it was a quest to replicate Elliott Porter's iconic photograph from the spot at Big Sur, and an opportunity to do it all with herbal aids to consciousness. - GWC
Jean Erdman, Dancer Moved by Myth, Wife of Joseph Campbell Is Dead at 104
Her death, in a nursing facility, was announced by Nola Hague, a friend.
A former principal dancer for Martha Graham, Ms. Erdman first came to wide notice as a choreographer in the 1940s, and she remained in the vanguard of the field for decades. She later created performance pieces for the Theater of the Open Eye, an avant-garde New York stage she founded in 1972 with her husband, Joseph Campbell, the scholar of literature and myth.
Ms. Erdman was among the first choreographers to exploit the inherent theatricality of dance, melding it with drama, poetry, music and visual art to form a seamless whole, or “total theater,” as it was known then. Today it might be described as performance art.
Her dances, among them “The Transformations of Medusa” and “Ophelia,” often focused on the inner lives of women — unorthodox fare at midcentury.
