Ann Carlson (dancer)

Last updated
Ann Carlson
Born (1954-10-21) October 21, 1954 (age 67)
Park Ridge, Illinois
NationalityAmerican
OccupationDancer

Ann Carlson (born October 21, 1954 ) is an American dancer, choreographer and performance artist whose work explores contemporary social issues. She has performed throughout the United States and internationally and has won a number of awards.

Contents

Beginnings in dance

Carlson was born in Park Ridge, Illinois. [1] She graduated magna cum laude with a BFA in modern dance from the University of Utah in 1976. In 1983 she became one of the first students of the University of Arizona to earn a graduate degree in dance. [2] Even though Carlson received extensive dance training as a child, she defined dance as "any conscious movement in time and space". [1] Carlson came to this conclusion when she was 12 years old after attending a lecture and demonstration by Murray Louis at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. [1] Because of her broad view of dance, Carlson often tackles important issues in her work and works within a number of disciplines to respond to ideas, concepts and themes. [1] As a result, Carlson takes her work far beyond the confines of traditional "dance" into a realm that could be called performance art. [3]

Career

In the early part of her  dance  career, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Carlson performed with Territory Dance Theater in  Tucson,  Arizona, and later, when she moved to New York in 1984, performed with  Susan Rethorst  and  Meredith Monk. [1] She was an original member of the PS 122 Field Trip Tours, a group of solo performance artists and choreographers that toured their works throughout the United States in the late 1980s. Ms. Carlson presented her first evening-length work, "Real People", in 1986 at Performance Space 122. That piece became the catalyst for an ongoing group of works that Carlson referred to as the "Real People series", works made with and performed by people gathered together around common professions, activities or shared relationships. This body of work, described as "delegated performance", became the foundation for much of Carlson's later choreography. The work "Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore" (or "the lawyer piece") was performed by four (actual) New York attorneys. Carlson's second evening-length work, "Animals", debuted at Dance Theater Workshop in 1988 and toured throughout the U.S. into the mid-1990s. Carlson choreographed the opera "Kabballah" to music composed by Stewart Wallace. [1] Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass's chamber opera "Hydrogen Jukebox" was staged by Ann Carlson in June 1990. [4] A 2017 work by the artist entitled "Doggie Hamlet," which included "five performers, three herding dogs, a dog handler, a dog trainer and a flock of sheep," was performed in a meadow at dusk. [5]

As a choreographer, Carlson’s work has been performed throughout the United States; some notable places her choreography has been featured include Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. [1] Internationally her work has been performed in West Germany, Prague and Mexico City. From 1990 until 2010 Carlson collaborated with video maker Mary Ellen Strom on a number of performances and performance videos. These videos are held in collections in museums and private collections.

Awards

Carlson’s choreography has earned her a New York Dance and Performance Award in 1988, American Dance Festival Award in 1988, a prestigious three year choreographic award from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1989–1991, the CalArts Alpert Award in Dance in 1995, [1] and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award in 1998, A New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2000, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003, a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University in 2004, a USA Artist Fellowship in 2008, an American Master's Award in 2010, and a Creative Capital Award in 2016.

Style of work

Some critics refer to Carlson’s work as dance-theater and some refer to it as talking dancing. [6] Her work often incorporates different movement components, speaking or acting components, and props or sometimes animals. [7] A piece entitled The Dog Inside the Man Inside represents all these areas of Carlson’s work and is from a series of work called Animals. The setup of this piece includes a straight chair, a television set, a white picket fence, and, most notably, a real live dog. [8] Other animals are later featured, including a goldfish, a cat and a goat. [1] Carlson said she wanted "to make works that could respond to a living being, that I couldn’t choreograph in the way that I’d been taught to choreograph". [1]

Related Research Articles

Agnes de Mille American dancer and choreographer (1905–1993)

Agnes George de Mille was an American dancer and choreographer.

Anna Sokolow American dance artist

Anna Sokolow was an American dancer and choreographer known for the social justice focus and theatricality of her work, and for her support of the development of Modern Dance in Mexico and in Israel. At the beginning of her career, Anna Sokolow was a principal dancer in the Martha Graham Company (1930-1938) and she soon became an independent choreographer who went on to form multiple dance companies throughout her life beginning with “Dance Unit” in the 1930s and later The Player's Project which launched in 1971 and re-launched in the 1980s. Sokolow choreographed for and set her work on companies around the world, including major companies such as Batsheva Dance Company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Jose Limón Dance Company, Joffery Ballet and the Daniel Lewis Dance Company. Her work continues to be performed by the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble in New York City. Her work is preserved and set by the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble and the Sokolow Dance Foundation in Massachusetts. 

Trisha Brown

Trisha Brown was an American choreographer and dancer, and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern dance movement.

Mia Michaels American choreographer and judge

Mia Michaels Melchiona is an American choreographer and judge on the television show So You Think You Can Dance. She has worked with Tom Cruise, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Madonna, Ricky Martin, Prince, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In 2005 she choreographed Cirque du Soleil's world tour Delirium and Celine Dion's A New Day..., for which she received an Emmy Award nomination. In 2007 she won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Choreography for her routine on "Calling You" during season two of So You Think You Can Dance. She won another Emmy Award during season five in 2010. She was a judge during season 7 with Adam Shankman and Nigel Lythgoe. She choreographed the dance sequence for "Get Happy" in the episode "Bombshells" of the television series House.

Judith Jamison American dancer and choreographer (born 1943)

Judith Ann Jamison is an American dancer and choreographer. She is the artistic director emerita of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Susan Marshall is an American choreographer and the Artistic Director of Susan Marshall & Company. She has held the position of Director of the Program in Dance at Princeton University since 2009.

Zoe Scofield is a choreographer and dancer best known for her work with Juniper Shuey as co-directors of zoe|juniper, a Seattle-based dance and visual art company. Her work is characterized by multi-media, cross-genre works utilizing stage performance, video installation, photography and complex technical elements.

Deborah Hay is an experimental choreographer working in the field of postmodern dance. She is one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater.

Laura Dean is an American dancer, choreographer and composer. She is known for her collaborations with Steve Reich, a number of commissioned works for the Joffrey Ballet, and works for her own dance companies. Dean's earliest works were marked by a minimalist approach and an affinity for spinning; her later work saw more use of traditional dance methods.

Paul Taylor (choreographer) American choreographer

Paul Belville Taylor Jr. was an American dancer and choreographer. He was one of the last living members of the third generation of America's modern dance artists. He founded the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1954 in New York City.

Bessie Schonberg

Bessie Schonberg was a highly influential dancer, choreographer and teacher of the 20th century. She was at the center of contemporary modern dance from her beginning at Bennington College up until her death in 1997. Her career spanned sixty-five years and she helped mold a new generation of modern dancers including Lucinda Childs, Elizabeth Keen, Meredith Monk and Carolyn Adams (dancer).

Capturing a sense of the life and work of Bessie Schonberg is possible if one evokes the image of a prism, a multi-face crystalline object which cannot be perceived in its entirety, but can be appreciated and understood by catching glimpses of light from its different sides.

Crystal Pite Canadian choreographer and dancer (born 1970)

Crystal Pite is a Canadian choreographer and dancer. She began her professional dance career in 1988 at Ballet BC, and in 1996 she joined Ballett Frankfurt under the tutelage of William Forsythe. After leaving Ballett Frankfurt she became the resident choreographer of Montreal company Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal from 2001 to 2004. She then returned to Vancouver where she focused on choreographing while continuing to dance in her own pieces until 2010. In 2002 she formed her own company called Kidd Pivot, which produced her original works Uncollected Work (2003), Double Story (2004), Lost Action (2006), Dark Matters (2009), The You Show (2010), The Tempest Replica (2011), Betroffenheit (2015), and Revisor (2019) to date. Throughout her career she has been commissioned by many international dance companies to create new pieces, including The Second Person (2007) for Netherlands Dans Theater and Emergence (2009) for the National Ballet of Canada, the latter of which was awarded four Dora Mavor Moore Awards.

Ann Marie DeAngelo

Ann Marie DeAngelo is an American choreographer, director, producer, teacher, consultant and former dancer - an expert in all areas of dance. She was leading ballerina with the Joffrey Ballet, where early on she was pegged by Time magazine as "one of America's most outstanding ballerinas" and where she later served as associate director at the time of the company's move to Chicago, Illinois, in 1995. DeAngelo was the founding artistic director of Mexico's Ballet de Monterrey, and served as artistic director of Ballet Omaha during the 1990s. She founded her own experimental troupe in the late 1980s called Ballet D'Angelo, creating several full-evening productions, which toured extensively in Europe. She is currently the director of DeAngelo Productions, an umbrella company for creating and producing dance related projects. DeAngelo continues to work internationally as a director, choreographer, and teacher.

Marie-Agnès Gillot is a French ballet dancer and choreographer. She danced with the Paris Opera Ballet as an étoiles. She is also POB's first in-house female dancer to choreograph for the company.

Sharon Kinney is an American dancer, choreographer, teacher, and videographer. She was an original member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company and has worked with other notable artists such as Dan Wagoner, Yuriko, and Twyla Tharp. She is noted for creating dance for stage and film, and for exploring dance for the camera. She was awarded the 2009 Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching to honor her outstanding contributions as a teacher to "shape and preserve dance across generations."

Merián Soto is a choreographer and performance artist. Soto is best known for her interdisciplinary solo, group and collaborative works that explore and reflect upon the legacy of colonialism and Latino heritage, history and culture. Simply, Soto creates choreographic works that intertwine improvisational movements and post-modern structures she calls “energy modes”. By means of her choreography that accesses the personal history of Puerto Ricans, expresses the experiences of Puerto Ricans, and elicits the cultural memory of Puerto Ricans, Soto attempts to “blur the line between “real” life everyday/commonplace movement/dance/performance and staged/”artistic” dance and performance.”

Nejla Y. Yatkin is a German-American choreographer.

Blondell Cummings American dancer and choreographer (1944–2015)

Blondell Cummings was an American modern dancer and choreographer. She is known for her experimental choreography and was a fixture in the New York and Harlem dance scene for decades.

Rachel Browne was a dancer, teacher and choreographer based in Winnipeg. In 1964, she founded Canada's longest running modern dance company, Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers, and she remained its artistic director until 1983. She remained with the company as a fundraiser and advisor, and continued to teach dance. She was awarded the Order of Canada in 1997 and the Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers performance venue was renamed The Rachel Browne Theatre in 2008. She died in 2012 in Ottawa while visiting to watch a performance at the Canada Dance Festival.

Sarah Michelson is a British choreographer and dancer who lives and works in New York City, New York. Her work is characterized by demanding physicality and repetition, rigorous formal structures, and inventive lighting and sound design. She was one of two choreographers whose work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, the first time dance was presented as part of the bi-annual exhibition. Her work has also been staged at The Walker Art Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, The Kitchen, and the White Oak Dance Project. She received New York Dance and Performance awards for Group Experience (2002), Shadowmann Parts One and Two (2003), and Dogs (2008). She has served as associate director of The Center for Movement Research and associate curator of dance at The Kitchen. Currently choreographer in residence at Bard's Fisher Center, she is the recipient of their four-year fellowship to develop a commissioned work with Bard students and professional dancers.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn. International Dictionary of Modern Dance. (Detroit, MI: St. James Press, 1998), p. 106–108.
  2. ↑ Harris, William. "DANCE; On a Tour of Tableaus, You Move, They Don't." The New York Times. 14 May 2000. Section 2; Page 46. University of Texas Lib., Austin, TX. 24 March 2008. LexisNexis
  3. ↑ "About". Ann Carlson. Retrieved 2022-07-07.
  4. ↑ Henahan, Donal (4 June 1990). "A Spoleto Premiere: Glass and Ginsburg". Arts: Review/Music. The New York Times. Retrieved 12 January 2018.
  5. ↑ Kourlas, Gia (7 April 2017). "But Is It Art? In the Case of 'Doggie Hamlet,' Yes". Dance. The New York Times. Retrieved 12 January 2018.
  6. ↑ Tobias, Tobi. "Dance Review: Ann Carlson Is Her Own Kind of Down-to-earth." New York Magazine. (28 Feb 2000). 24 March 2008 http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/dance/reviews/2246/
  7. ↑ Keefe, Maura. Talking Dancing: The Choreography of Space and Character in Contemporary U.S. Dance. (Ann Arbor, MI.: ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2002), 127
  8. ↑ Keefe, Talking Dancing, 122
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.