The Ecstasy of Being

By Joseph Campbell.

Dance was among mythologist Joseph Campbell’s enduring interests. His wife, Jean Erdman, was a central figure in modern dance, having worked with Martha Graham and founded Merce Cunningham’s first company. After Campbell retired from teaching in 1972, the pair established the Theater of the Open Eye, presenting dance and theater productions, lectures, and performance works for nearly fifteen years.

The Ecstasy of Being gathers seven previously uncollected essays on dance, alongside “Mythology and Form in the Performing and Visual Arts,” the unfinished treatise Campbell was writing at the time of his death, published here for the first time.

Campbell considers the development of modern art and dance in the twentieth century, the work of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, and art’s relationship to myth, aesthetic form, and human psychology.