Rachel Schroeder is a multi-disciplinary artist who choreographs, writes, acts, dances, mimes, sings, directs, dramaturges, and teaches. She regularly collaborates on creative projects with choreographers, directors, dancers, mimes, actors, musicians, circus artists, puppeteers, video artists and non-performers. She has worked in France, England, Wales, Zimbabwe, and throughout the United States.

Original solo works include Elephant By a Thread, produced in New York at Lark Theater and Michael Howard Studios; as well as in Massachusetts at Berkshire Theatre Festival and Simon's Rock College. In 2002, she began developing Heliantha. She has shown excerpts in NYC produced by Dixon Place at University Settlement and Chashama; at 92nd Street Y, OneArmRed, D.U.M.B.O. Arts Festival, CoolNY Festival and Joyce SoHo. With a Manhattan Community Arts Fund grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in partnership with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Schroeder staged a full-evening workshop production of Heliantha at P.S.122 in February 2005. She was invited, in the summer of 2005, to participate in DanceOmi’s inaugural year of its collaboration residency with an international group of dancer/choreographers that culminated in a walking tour / site-specific festival of dance at ArtOmi in Ghent, NY. In the spring of 2006, Schroeder appeared in RedShift Dance’s In Case of Rapture at University Settlement. She performed her work-in-progress, Who’s Rite at Joyce SoHo in March 2007.

Schroeder has directed / developed several experimental works including a live circus-theatre adaptation of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, in collaboration with Stagefright, a UK based aerial circus theatre company — presented with a cast of over two hundred youths ages 9-18, at French Woods Festival for the Performing Arts, a summer camp in Hancock, NY. Also with Stagefright, she collaborated on Levity, an aerial circus theatre myth enacted on the grounds of a 19th Century castle in Bangor, North Wales with grants from the North Wales Arts Council and Circus Syrcus. From 2001-03, she wrote Lone Wolf Tribe's production Animal, a Henson Foundation grant-winning experimental puppet theatre piece commissioned by Here Arts Center. In May 2004, she co-directed Kevin Augustine in Lone Wolf Tribe's Once Vaudeville, at the Harare International Festival of Arts in Zimbabwe. Schroeder directed Karen Bernard’s interdisciplinary performance piece Surfing the Shadow that was performed at the 2008 Performance Mix Festival.

Involvement in community-based performance includes directing a cast of 8-11 year old children in Ceridwen's Cauldron, as part of the Taliesin Festival in Conway, North Wales. Also in Wales, Schroeder taught Mime workshops to teen and adult non-performers. In NYC, she gave a mime workshop to children at the JCC. As a volunteer, she offered theatre classes in London to the Dalston Youth Project, a program designed to reintegrate (high school aged) truant / expelled students into the education system. Here in NYC she taught "Rock-n-Roll Theater" for Create-a-Play in after school programs, and she volunteers with the 52nd Street Project, helping inner city youths write, perform and produce plays. Recently she taught a workshop entitled “Journeying into Character Through Movement” at the Creative Center: an arts haven for women surviving cancer.

Schroeder has taught courses and workshops in movement for actors / mime at Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, Hofstra University, Pace University, CAP21, The Ward Studio, Ecole de Mime Corporel Dramatique (London), Danceworks (London), and University of Bangor (North Wales).

An alumna of the modern mime company, Théâtre de l’Ange Fou (Theatre of the Crazy Angel), Schroeder appeared at venues such as Battersea Arts Center and the Plaisance Theatre as part of the London International Mime Festival. She has also worked and/or studied with Mark Morris, Pilobolus, Michael Greif, Marge Champion, Eugenio Barba, Rinde Eckert, Craig Carnelia, Keely Garfield and Lawrence Goldhuber.

Schroeder has a diploma from l’Ecole de Mime Corporel Dramatique in the Decroux technique of Corporeal Mime (a modern art of dramatic movement that gives performers a rigorous physical vocabulary); as well as a BA in Theatre Arts from Brandeis University and has studied Alexander Technique since 2000.

Since 2006, Rachel Schroeder has served as a member of New Dance Alliance’s Board of Directors, and also sat on NDA’s 2005-2006 Artist Advisory Panel.

Photo by Simon Sinek