Rachel Rosenthal | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1926-11-09)November 9, 1926 Paris, France |
| Died | May 10, 2015(2015-05-10) (aged 88) Los Angeles,California, U.S. |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1955–2015 |
| Known for | Performance Art |
| Notable work | Pangean Dreams |
| Spouse | |
| Awards | J. Paul Getty Fellowship, Vesta Award, Obie Award |
| Website | www |
Rachel Rosenthal (November 9, 1926 – May 10, 2015) was a French-born interdisciplinary and performance artist, teacher, actress, andanimal rights activist based inLos Angeles.
She was best known for her full-length performance art pieces which offered unique combinations of theatre, dance, creative slides and live music.[1] She toured her pieces, with The Rachel Rosenthal Company, to numerous venues both within the United States and abroad. Theatres and festivals she visited include: the Dance Theatre Workshop and Serious Fun! atLincoln Center inNew York City, the Kaaitheater inBrussels, The Internationals Summer Theater Festival inHamburg, The Performance Space inSydney and the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques, Théâtre Centaur,Montréal. One of her key ambitions was to help heal the earth through art.[1]
Rosenthal was born on November 9, 1926, inParis, France, into an assimilatedRussian Jewish family.[2] Her father, Léonard Rosenthal, was a well-known merchant of Oriental pearls and precious stones.[3][4] Her mother was Mara Jacoubovitch Rosenthal.[2]
She described her childhood home as one filled with the works ofMonet andChagall; purchases brought home from her father's travels to Italy. Her knack for performing developed at an early age; she was only three when she started performing and often entertained up to 150 guests at family events.[1] She was only six when she started learning ballet under the guidance of the acclaimedPreobrajenska.[5]
DuringWorld War II, her family escaped France, moving toRio de Janeiro, Brazil, via a short stay in Portugal. This journey inspired the creation of her piece,My Brazil.[2] In April 1941, her family left Brazil to settle in New York, where Rosenthal would later graduate from theHigh School of Music and Art.
She studied acting at the Jean-Louis Barrault School of Theatre and with Herbert Berghoff. At some stage she was an apprentice of directorErwin Piscator and directed someoff-Broadway productions. Additionally, she was an assistant designer to Heinz Condella at theNew York City Opera and danced in Merce Cunningham's company.[6] It is the integration of these various skills and talents that have enabled her to produce complex and multi-layered performance art pieces.
After settling back in New York in 1953, her social circle includedJohn Cage,Merce Cunningham,Sari Dienes,Robert Rauschenberg andJasper Johns.[7] She was introduced toZen Buddhism and Asian philosophy by Cage. She soon grew an interest inmartial arts (kung fu,tai chi,karate) and started training in them.[6]
Improvisation and spontaneity became significantly more important to her and her move in the direction towards experimental theatre was influenced by reading of Antonin Artaud's "The Theatre and Its Double." She returned to visual arts and sculpture as well; creating unique performance art that allowed the freedom to improvise.[1]
In 1955, she moved toCalifornia, and became involved with the art scene surrounding theFerus Gallery.[8] That year she created the experimental "Instant Theatre," within the Cast Theatre (now namedEl Centro Theatre), performing in and directing it for ten years. She was a leading figure in the L.A. Women's Art Movement in the 1970s and co-founded theWomanspace Gallery, a cooperatively run gallery devoted to work by female artists, in 1973.[9] She is considered one of the "first-generation feminist artists," a group that also includesMary Beth Edelson,Carolee Schneeman, andJudy Chicago. They were part of theFeminist art movement in Europe and theUnited States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art.[10] By 1975, she had written, created, directed and acted in more than 30 full-length performances in the United States and Europe.[1] Rosenthal began teaching classes in performance in 1979.[2]
The Others (1984) was her landmark show in which the stage was shared with forty-two animals ranging from goats, snakes to monkeys; all animals had a printed bio and were treated as equals.[11] In 1984 Rosenthal collaborated with fellow performance artist/musician The Dark Bob onKABBALAMOBILE (Words: Rachel Rosenthal, Music: The Dark Bob), presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Mark Taper Forum. Critic Joan Hugo of Artweek called it"A brilliant tour de force...Kabbalamobilewas a Masterpiece". In 1987, she was invited to design a piece specifically for the international art fair, Documenta 8, occurring in Kassel, West Germany. Her original piece for this was Rachel's Brain, with music byStephen Nachmanovitch. Rachel's Brain dealt with brain research findings, intellectual history and hubris.[6] Alan M. Kriegsman, a writer for the Washington Post, describes her performance as notably magnetic, skillful and sufficient to keep you raptured.[5]
She was married to actorKing Moody, three years her junior, for 20 years. The couple had no children.[1]
Rosenthal was the director of the Rachel Rosenthal Company which she formed in 1989 in Los Angeles, California. The company's repertoire deals with themes such as environmental destruction, social justice issues,animal rights, earth-based spirituality, in a hybrid form that combines voice, text, movement, music, video projection, and elaborate theatrical costuming, set design, and dramatic lighting, ultimately challenging the rigid boundaries that have traditionally separated performance art from theater. She was an advisory board member of theNew Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.[1]
In 1990, Rosenthal premieredPangaean Dreams at The Santa Monica Museum Of Art for The L.A. Festival. In 1992,filename: FUTURFAX was commissioned by theWhitney Museum in New York. This work showed the audience a world of rationed food, government hydro-farms with the purpose of raising climate change dialogue and the possibility ofhuman extinction.[1]
In 1994, she was an honoree of theWomen's Caucus for Art honor awards selection committee at the annual WCA conference held in New York City.[12]
In 1994 she premiered her 56-performer pieceZone at the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts Wadsworth Theatre. Between 1994 and 1997, with her newly formed Company, she revived the "Instant Theatre" of the 1950s and 1960s as TOHUBOHU! and went on to collaboratively createDBDBDB-d: An Evening(1994), TOHUBOHU! (1995–97),Meditation on the Life and Death of Ken Saro-Wiwa,Timepiece (1996),The Swans andThe Unexpurgated Virgin (1997).
BothTimepiece andThe Unexpurgated Virgin premiered at the Fall Ahead Festival at Cal State Los Angeles. In 2000, at the FADO Performance Art Centre, Paul Couillard, in collaboration with the 7a*11d International Performance Art Festival, presented Rosenthal's final full-length performance piece,UR-BOOR, for two nights only.[13] In 2000, aged 73, Rosenthal announced that she was retiring from performance to dedicate herself to her animal rights activism and pursue a career as a painter.[citation needed]
She was interviewed for the 2010 film!Women Art Revolution.[14]
Rosenthal lectured atCarnegie-Mellon University'sRobert Lepper Distinguished Lecture in Creative Inquiry series, as a lecturer/presenter at the first Performance, Culture and Pedagogy Conference at Penn. State (1996). Rosenthal was also a visiting artist atThe Art Institute of Chicago,New York University,University of California Los Angeles,UC Irvine,UC Santa Barbara,California Institute of the Arts, and at theNaropa,Esalen andOmega Institutes.ArtistRobert Rauschenberg honored her in a suite of prints entitledTribute 21.[15]
Rosenthal had a small part in two Season 1 episodes of the television seriesFrasier, called "The Crucible", and “Call Me Irresponsible” (uncredited). She also had a small part in theMichael Tolkin film,The New Age, which starredJudy Davis.[16]
Rosenthal died on May 10, 2015, in Los Angeles from congestive heart failure. She was 88.[17]
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