Elizabeth
Waterhouse Dramaturg

Elizabeth Waterhouse is a dramaturg, dance maker, researcher and teacher of dance/choreographic practices and dance studies. Born at the end of Generation X in New York, she currently works at the Institute of Theatre Studies at the University of Bern where her research focuses on the body/embodiment, choreographic praxis and process, dance documentation, dance historiography and ethnography. A long-standing collaborator of choreographer Fabrice Mazliah and also a former dancer of Ballett Frankfurt/The Forsythe Company (2004–2012), she is delighted to assist in Mazliah’s world premier for Ballett Basel, ‹The Ends of Things: The Things of Ends›. Waterhouse received her doctorate in dance studies from the SINTA (Studies in the Arts) program at the University of Bern in 2020 for the dissertation ‹Processing Choreography: Thinking with William Forsythe’s Duo› (2022). She is currently writing her second book, ‹Body-Biographies: Our Life Stories in Dance› (2024), also supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Outside of her teaching and research at the University of Bern, she is a guest teacher and mentor in international contexts: including the Zurich University of the Arts, Bern Ballett and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Making use of her broad education across the humanities, arts and natural sciences (Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Harvard University), she has often been involved in projects that examine movement practices and their discourses from a transdisciplinary perspective, such as William Forsythe’s ‹Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced›a nd Monica Gillette’s ‹Störung/Hafra'ah›, a research dramaturgy involving people with Parkinson’s disease, dancers and scientists. Her most recent artistic work has been with the cooperative music ensemble tō, initiated by composer Saskia Bladt and visual artist Sophie von Arnim, with whom she returned to the stage to dance ‹Dido and Aeneas› (2021) and plans new concerts for 2024. As a dramaturg and outside eye, she has assisted in dance and music theater productions from William Forsythe, Fabrice Mazliah, MaMaZa, Emma Murray, Jens Heitjohann and Christian Grammel, among others.