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PRESS RELEASE Jean Erdman: A Creative Legacy

On Friday, February 19th at 7:00 pm, the Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF) will present, with the cooperation of the UHM Department of Theater & Dance, a 100th Birthday retrospective and celebration of the award-winning career of Honolulu native and longtime resident, dancer- choreographer-director Jean Erdman.

Jean Erdman, a pioneer, began her 60+-year career in 1938, immediately after her marriage to famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, when she joined ’s dance company. Erdman soon became a principle dancer in the company, performing in an array of solo roles, most notably that of One Who Speaks in Letter to the World, Graham‘s ode to American poet Emily Dickenson. After several years with the Graham company, she began to create her own choreography, collaborating over the ensuing decades s with such luminaries as , , Lou Harrison, Maya Deren, , , Isamu Noguchi, , and numerous others.

She spent most of the 1950s touring with her company across the US and abroad. In 1962 she created what would become arguably her best-known work, The Coach with the Six Insides, an adaptation of ’s . The Coach premiered in Greenwich Village on November 26, 1962, ran for 114 performances, received the OBIE and Vernon Rice Awards for Outstanding Achievement in theater, and subsequently toured the world, playing at the Spoleto Festival, in Dublin, Tokyo, , Toronto, and other major cities.

In 1972 Erdman received a Drama Desk award and a Tony nomination for her choreography of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of a rock-opera version of Two Gentlemen of Verona. That same year, she and Campbell founded the The Open Eye theater in New York City, where she served as artistic director, presenting over 100 works of traditional and experimental dance and theater.

Erdman, who will be one-hundred on February 20th, will attend this one-night-only event orchestrated by JCF president , who worked closely with Erdman and Campbell in the 1980s. The celebration, unfolding in UHM’s Earle Ernst Lab Theater, will feature never-before-seen vintage film footage, videos, and photographs that illuminate Erdman’s extraordinary career; reflections on working with Erdman from Hawaiian and mainland dancers and musicians; a screening of Hamadryad, Nancy Allison’s and Paul Allman’s award-winning cinematic revisioning of a famous Erdman dance; and many other surprises.

Friday, February 19, 2016 at 7 p.m. Earle Ernst Lab Theatre at the Kennedy Theatre University of Hawaii at Manoa 1770 East-West Road Honolulu, HI 9682

FOR RELEASE 9 A.M. PST, FEBRUARY 15, 2016