Helene Eriksen

🪔 About

Helene Eriksen is a distinguished dance ethnologist, teacher, performer, and choreographer with a diverse background in traditional dance forms. She pursued her academic journey by studying Dance Ethnology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and later became a doctoral candidate in Folklore, Slavistics, and Turcology at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany. Her early performance career in Los Angeles included engagements with AVAZ International Dance Theater, Gypsy Dance Company, and Jasna Planina Ensemble. Further enriching her understanding of global dance, she spent a year at the Folkdance Academy in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and was subsequently a guest of the Turkish State Folkdance Ensemble in Ankara. Eriksen's commitment to traditional dance extends to Indian classical dance, as evidenced by her completion of the Second Year Kathak Accreditation with honors from the Prayag Sangit Samiti, Allahabad, India. She also produced a "Kathak Lesson with Helene Eriksen" CD for practice, featuring Shubhankar Banerjee on tabla and Tejendra Narazan Majumdar on sarod. For several years, she directed her own ensemble, Raqs-e Hilal, in Germany. Since 1994, Eriksen has been the director of ANAR DANA, an intensive international training program focused on traditional dances of the Balkans and Islamic Orient, as well as Argentine Tango and folk dance. This program, which she leads in locations such as the US, Germany, and Argentina, emphasizes technique, choreography, dance notation, music analysis, yoga, staging, costuming, and the historical and cultural backgrounds of various women's dance styles from North Africa to Central Asia. As an active member of the Study Group on Ethnochoreology (ICTM/UNESCO), she lectures and publishes extensively on dance ethnology and costume studies, drawing from her extensive field research across numerous countries. Her international performance career has taken her to stages in Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Pakistan, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States.