Professional Bio
Lucia Ruedenberg-Wright
188 2nd Ave, #9
New York, NY 10003tel: 212-254-3551
fax: 212-254-6175email: lucia@lrw.net
url: http://lrw.net/~luciaI was first introduced to the world of performance by my mother who had a professional puppet theater in Ames, Iowa, a midwest college town. In 1971 I came to New York to work with Robert Wilson, after participating in his production of Deafman Glance at the State University of Iowa. We performed at BAM and then toured Europe. I was enchanted by the world of experimental theatre and dance through my fellow performers, Andy de Groat, Cheryl Sutton, Kit Kation, Cindy Lubar, Minda Novek, and many others. I was also influenced by seeing the works of performance artists such as Jack Smith, Kenneth King, Dana Reitz, and Meredith Monk. I performed with the Bread & Puppet Theater in Europe and later participated in stagings by Ann Wilson in New York.
I earned my living working in costume houses (The Shakespeare Festival, Barbara Matera, Ray Diffen), as a sample maker on Seventh Avenue (Ann Klein and Halston II), and put myself through school as a freelance dressmaker for independent designers (Jenny Sharp). I studied costume design at the Lester Polakov Studio for Stage Design, and designed costumes for a few off-off-off broadway productions. I completed my undergraduate work at Sarah Lawrence College with a focus on dance and early childhood development and studied improvisational jazz piano with Liz Gorrill and Connie Crothers, students of Lennie Tristano.
By the mid 1980s I began to explore my own performance material using the Grotowski plastiques and Min Tanaka's Body Weather system. I first presented my own work, A Modern Fairy Story, in 1984 at the International Conference for Children of Holocaust Survivors, City University of New York. It was a two-woman autobiographical piece, created and performed by myself and Amelia Ender. Waters of Separation (1987) was a solo piece performed for the Village Temple in New York on Holocaust Commemoration Day. In 1994 I completed a doctorate in Performance Studies at New York University. Similarly, my dissertation examined the meaning of Holocaust memorials as performative events, ritual, public ceremony, and sites for the performance of collective identity. I examined the memorial ceremonies of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO), an organizaiton of Holocaust survivors in New York City. After teaching for several years at Ben Gurion University and The Hebrew University in Israel, and New York University, I realized that I needed to return to the practice of performance. I studied authentic movement with Zoe Avstreih at the Center for the Study of Authentic Movement in New York and in 2000 we co-taught an authentic movement workshop for choreographersat Movement Research. In 2000 I choreographed Pass Over/Safe Passage, a piece for seven dancers with an electronic score by Korean artist Chan Ji Kim. The piece was performed at the Frederick Loewe Theatre, NYU, March 2000, in completion of a Master's degree from the Program in Dance Education at NYU.
In October 2001 I started to perform a monthly solo, From The Ashes, for one year, in response to the events of 9-11. Most of these performances were presented at Dixon Place. One of them was in Huntington, NY, as part of a program of Women's Voices After 9-11. In 2002 I started to participate in workshops at The Field, including an Artward Bound residency. In the spring of 2003 I became a facilitator for Fieldwork Dance.
In my current work, I continue to explore solo movement, self produced scores, personal materials and performance as a way of responding to the world. I'm interested in creating portraits, and the aesthetic of my work is more concerned with the virtuosity of everyday life than that of high culture, with the expressions of an untrained body and unpolished sound. I draw on the inner and outer worlds, the past and the present, the personal and the collective, to make sense of life. In performance, these layers of experience inform each other in a combination of improvised and set movement and layered sound scores. My husband, Randy Wright, collaborates with me. In addition to performance, we provide an internet consulting business that focuses on technology in the arts. I also love to cook, sew, garden, and draw whenever I can.