1. Jean Erdman was an American dancer and choreographer of modern dance as well as an avant-garde theater director, and the wife of Joseph Campbell.
17 Facts About Jean Erdman
1. 2.
Jean Erdman's mother, Marion Dillingham Erdman, was a member of one of the founding industrialist families of Hawaii.
3.
Jean Erdman attended the Punahou School in Honolulu where she learned, as a form of physical education, Isadora Duncan interpretive dance.
4.
From Hawaii, Jean Erdman went to Miss Hall's School for Girls in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1934.
5.
Jean Erdman was troubled by the attitude towards dancing that caused her to be disciplined for teaching the hula to her classmates.
6.
In 1937 Jean Erdman joined her parents and younger sister on a trip around the world during which she saw the traditional dance and theater of many countries including Bali, Java and India.
7.
Shortly after Jean Erdman returned to New York, she married Campbell on May 5,1938, and following a brief honeymoon began rehearsal as a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company.
8.
Jean Erdman distinguished herself as a principal dancer in Graham's company in solo roles such as the Ideal Spectator in Every Soul is a Circus, the Speaking Fate in Punch and the Judy and the One Who Speaks in Letter to the World, Graham's ode to the American poet, Emily Dickinson.
9.
Dance critic Margaret Lloyd of The Christian Science Monitor praised the "felicitous humor" Jean Erdman brought to her role as the Speaking Fate and called her "irreplaceable" in the 1941 revival of Letter to the World.
10.
Jean Erdman developed the second and third sections following the development of the mythological archetype.
11.
In 1960, Jean Erdman reorganized and renamed her dance company to reflect her explorations of the inter-relationship of movement, music, visual arts and spoken text.
12.
In 1962 with the aid of a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Jean Erdman began what was to become her best-known work, The Coach with the Six Insides, an adaptation of James Joyce's, Finnegans Wake.
13.
Jean Erdman became acquainted with the novel during the four-and-a-half-year period that her husband collaborated with Henry Morton Robinson to write A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.
14.
Jean Erdman danced all the aspects of Anna Livia from young woman, to old crone, to the rain itself that becomes the River Liffey flowing through the heart of Dublin.
15.
Jean Erdman was founding director of the dance program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and taught there from 1966 to 1971.
16.
In 1990, Jean Erdman became the founding president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and continued as its president emerita until her death.
17.
Jean Erdman died at the age of 104 in a nursing facility in Honolulu on May 4,2020.