Trudi Schoop; Comic Dancer, Mental Illness Therapist

Trudi Schoop, known in the 1930s as “the female Charlie Chaplin” for her comic dance performances and later an innovator in using dance movement to treat mental illness, has died. She was 95.

Schoop died July 14 in her Van Nuys home, according to Richard G. Wyatt, a former member of the Trudi Schoop and Her Dancing Comedians troupe.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper editor, Schoop was a self-taught dancer and mimic who was an instant success in a concert her father financed for her. Impresario Sol Hurok brought her to the United States in 1934 after seeing her in Vienna, and she went on to perform with her mostly European company throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.

“She performed tragicomedy, based on human frailties, a play in four acts acted out in dance with no talking,” said Wyatt, the only American dancer accepted into Schoop’s company.

Schoop made her Los Angeles debut in 1936, and delighted the audience with her antics from the time she disembarked from the Southern Pacific Lark until the final curtain call after her performance at the Philharmonic Auditorium.

During a visit to Los Angeles in 1938, Schoop described her performance for The Times: “What I depict is misfortune, but to the audience it is funny. Tragedy and comedy, you know, are very close to one another. I still think it is serious, but the audience thinks it is funny and I am satisfied. For I get a great deal of satisfaction in making people laugh and forget their misfortunes. Life is just that--tragic and comic all at once.”

After disbanding her troupe in 1947, Schoop directed her attention toward dance as therapy for schizophrenic patients.

“She believed that if she could get schizophrenics . . . to move easily and normally, their minds would relax,” said Wyatt.

After UCLA neuropsychiatric experts reviewed Schoop’s theories, they recommended her as a therapist at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Camarillo conducted a controlled experiment and gave the therapy a name--”the body-ego technique, an approach to the schizophrenic patient.” A report on the study described the technique as “a deliberate attempt to recreate for the patient the physical experience of the postures and movements associated with a wide range of emotions and attitudes, and by this route to rebuild ego structure.”

Schoop went on to teach her approach throughout the United States and Europe.

“I try to begin where they are. I don’t force them to do something they can’t do,” Schoop told a Times reporter in 1967, after teaching a dance class for patients at Resthaven Psychiatric Clinic here.

“The human being, whatever he may be feeling or thinking, or not feeling or thinking,” Schoop told The Times, “manifests himself visibly in his body. It follows that we can recognize the essence of a human being in his body tensions, his breathing and his manner of moving about.”

Schoop is survived by two nephews and one niece.