Rachel Rosenthal obit

Rachel Rosenthal, experimental performance artist, dies at 88

 

She was not on the list.

LOS ANGELES -- Rachel Rosenthal, the performance and theatre artist who embraced environmentalism during a half-century career devoted to the avant-garde, has died in Southern California. She was 88.

Rosenthal died Sunday at her home in west Los Angeles, said Kate Noonan, managing director of the Rachel Rosenthal Company, the non-profittheatre group the artist founded in 1989. The cause was congestive heart failure, Noonan told the Los Angeles Times.

Rosenthal's experimental productions often combined elements of drama, dance and music. Nearly all her works touched on the human connection to nature.

"The overriding theme in all my pieces is always the same," she told the Times in a 1995 interview. "It's about our relationship to the Earth. It deals with who we are as a species and how we belong on this planet."

For years, she performed with a shaved head -- a kind of artistic trademark that she started in 1981. (In later years, she let her hair grow out somewhat.)

Born in Paris to Russian parents, Rosenthal fled with her family to escape World War II, moving to Brazil and eventually settling in New York.

Rosenthal studied art in the U.S. and France before moving to Southern California in 1955. She became active in the L.A. cultural scene, creating the Instant Theatre, an experimental company, and joining the feminist art movement that took off in the 1970s.

One of her most lasting creations was the TOHUBOHU! Extreme Theatre Ensemble, a group that has carried on her legacy of avant-garde performance.

Rosenthal began teaching performance in 1979 and went on to lecture at universities around the country.

For now, the Rachel Rosenthal Company will go on without its founder, the Times said.

Rosenthal is survived by her nephew, Eric Landau. A public memorial is being planned, but details haven't been announced.

During World War II, her family escaped France, moving to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, via a short stay in Portugal. This journey inspired the creation of her piece, My Brazil. In April 1941, her family left Brazil to settle in New York, where Rosenthal would later graduate from the High 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 director Erwin Piscator and directed some off-Broadway productions. Additionally, she was an assistant designer to Heinz Condella at the New York City Opera and danced in Merce Cunningham's company. 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 included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Sari Dienes, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. She was introduced to Zen Buddhism and Asian philosophy by Cage. She soon grew an interest in martial arts (kung fu, tai chi, karate) and started training in them.

In 1955, she moved to California, and became involved with the art scene surrounding the Ferus Gallery. That year she created the experimental "Instant Theatre," within the Cast Theatre (now named El 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 the Womanspace Gallery, a cooperatively run gallery devoted to work by female artists, in 1973. She is considered one of the "first-generation feminist artists," a group that also includes Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, and Judy Chicago. They were part of the Feminist art movement in Europe and the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. By 1975, she had written, created, directed and acted in more than 30 full-length performances in the United States and Europe. Rosenthal began teaching classes in performance in 1979.

She was married to actor King Moody, three years her junior, for 20 years. The couple had no children

 

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