Ursula Neuerburg (1962-2026): “Ulla gave a space for Indigenous stories and issues to be heard”

The Concordia community is mourning the loss of Dr. Ursula Neuerburg, fondly known as Ulla, Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, who passed away on September 8, 2026. A mentor to generations of theatre students and an advocate for rigorous performance training, she joined the department in 2006, teaching Acting, Directing, and Theatre History and supervising graduate students. She organized student trips to stage productions in New York and apprenticeships at Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont and led a series of DAAD-funded exchanges at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

A lifelong practitioner and researcher, Ulla investigated how performers train their psychophysical instruments to summon and wholly embody strong, complex, often difficult emotions, evoking the most challenging affective situations we encounter. She published widely on the topic and was a regular presenter at CATR and IFTR conferences. Her chapter "High Emotion - Rasaboxes in the Emo Lab: Emotion Training for Actors in the 21^st Century" appears in Theatres of Affect (Playwrights Canada, 2014).

Her research led to collaborations with playwright Floyd Favel of the Poundmaker Cree Nation, Saskatchewan. Their ambitious stage productions, Attawapiskat is No Exception (2014) in the Concordia Theatre and the SSHRC-funded, site-responsive Dwellings (2017), investigated Indigenous housing precarity, stories of dislocation, and the loss of traditional language and culture on Northern reserves. These projects, with original music and sound design by Ralph Denzer, led to publications reflecting on the creation process and to the establishment of course offerings on Indigenous performance in the department’s curriculum.

"Ulla gave a space for Indigenous stories and issues to be heard," Floyd Favel writes, "and went beyond current Canadian colonial rules in regard to presentation and inclusion."

Born in Cologne, Germany, Ulla worked as a Certified Midwife before moving to the study of physical theatre and acting in Berlin, notably as a member of Theater Zerbrochene Fenster in Kreuzberg. She earned an MA in Performance Studies at New York University and a PhD in Emotion Theories in Acting under the supervision of Erika Fischer-Lichte at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Before moving to Montreal, she taught at the University of California/Santa Cruz, Swarthmore College, and Ramapo College.

During the 1990's she co-founded Richard Schechner's East Coast Artists, establishing the Rasaboxes technique. She directed and acted in Berlin, New York and elsewhere and was a regular summer performer at Bread and Puppet Theater, where she could be seen running flags, animating giant puppets, or collecting trash as a masked garbageman in the circus field.

Recent projects included Clare Dolan’s adaptation of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone at the Highland Center in Vermont (2024) and an original work, Mort, Mémoires, Amour | Death, Memories, Love with collaborators Ramona Benveniste, Hanna Sybille Müller, and Lisa Ndejuru, at the PSI conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Kigali Public Library, Rwanda, the IFTR conference, Accra, Ghana in 2023 and Théâtre Espace Go in Montreal in 2024.

"She was a devoted theatre person, friend, teacher, mother, and partner," writes researcher, collaborator, and psychotherapist Dr. Lisa Ndejuru. "She was a teacher who loved her students as humans and as artists. […] She took people as they presented themselves, studied them, and understood where they were coming from, what their intention was, and whenever she could, she supported them."

In recent years, Ulla faced living with cancer with extraordinary, clear-eyed determination.  She showed abundant care for close friends, spending time hiking, snowshoeing, walking her beloved dogs Romulus and Calliope, planning projects, and observing the changing landscape from a bend in the Yamaska River in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

She is survived by her two children, Emil and Clara Denzer, as well as her dear siblings and extended family in Germany, and her former husband Ralph Denzer.