ABOUT

Jan Erkert translates what dancers know into wisdom for living. As a celebrated choreographer, educator, Fulbright scholar, Professor Emerita and former head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois, she moves and writes about the body as it processes memories and identity. 

Erkert has mined movement for its deepest truths throughout her decades-long career. As artistic director of Jan Erkert & Dancers (1979 – 2000) she created over 70 critically acclaimed works, received numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council, and performed in major international festivals. 

Renowned in the dance world as a teacher’s teacher, Erkert received the 1999 Excellence in Teaching Award from Columbia College Chicago and has conducted guest artist residencies throughout the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Asia. She is the recipient of two awards from the University of Illinois: The Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award and the Larine Y. Cowan Make a Difference Award for Leadership in Diversity for her outstanding academic leadership and vision. She authored Harnessing the Wind, the Art of Teaching Modern Dance with Human Kinetics in 2003. 

Ms. Erkert has a lifetime practice of yoga with a 500-hour yoga certification. She integrates concepts from dance, kinesiology and anatomy, Vinyasa Flow, and Ashtanga Yoga to create open spaces for transformative experiences at her Live Edge Yoga Studio in Champaign, Illinois. 

Erkert’s research and writing explores embodied perspectives on leadership, politics, health, and well-being. She currently serves as a leadership coach through the Building Pathways for Emerging Leaders program and as director of the OpEd Alumni Project at the University of Illinois. She has published numerous op-eds as a Public Voices Fellow with CNN Opinion, Public Seminar, Chicago Sun-Times, Ms. Magazine and more. 

Through a lifetime devoted to dance, teaching, and embodied inquiry, Jan Erkert invites people to come home to their own bodies—to rediscover resilience, creativity, and self-knowledge within. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

I mine the body…digging, scraping, listening.  

Sometimes the silence is deafening, but a resounding holler beckons if I care to open the sinewy pathways that carry the stories that lie within. I ask where love resides....in the heart… long considered to be the mythic center of love?  Or does love’s passion churn in the tissues of the gut, which has the unfathomable responsibility to decide what to keep and what to discard. 

Etched into the muscles and bones are the scars and tattoos of life…cellular memories chattering with tales that won’t be forgotten despite our best attempts to bury them deep under the ground and the skin…oh the skin…drinks in each touch and makes us squirm, as it records the sensual tastes of life. I want to luxuriate in the skin, but there are more discoveries to unearth. 

I am curious. If I reverse my breath from the synchronous norm – inhaling while collapsing and exhaling on an upward scream – primal fear quickly grabs ahold of my body, and I sense all at once my own impermanence and the earth’s demise. I know I have hit a rich vein when my body howls with laughter and tears, or curls into the fetal curve of my birth. 

When my body breaks, I wonder who will come to my rescue and fix it, if not me, the excavator of life.  I make dances, I scribble and write, and I choreograph leadership from the body, with the body, and in the body.  One day my body will be...poof…gone…but my soul fervently hopes that the wisps of stories wrested from within will linger in the space just hovering above the earth and below the clouds.