| Ann Carlson | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 21, 1954 Park Ridge, Illinois |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Dancer |
Ann Carlson (born October 21, 1954 ) is an American dancer, choreographer and performance artist whose work explores contemporary social issues. She has performed through the United States an internationally and has won a number of awards.
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Calson 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 believes that whatever methods are needed to convey a message are the methods that need to be utilized.[1] As a result Carlson takes her work far beyond the confines of traditional "dance" into a realm that could be called performance art.
Carlson spent the late 1970s to the early ‘90s of her dance career performing. During this time Carlson performed with Territory Dance Theater in Tucson, Arizona and Meredith Monk.[1] She performed her first solo concert in 1986 and performed to music composed by Stewart Wallace and Phillip Glass.[1] As a choreographer, Carlson’s work has been performed throughout the United States; some notable places her choreography has been featured have been Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles.[1] Internationally her work has been performed in West Germany, Prague and Mexico City. Carlson’s choreography has earned her a New York Dance and Performance Award in 1988, American Dance Festival Award in 1988, the CalArts Alpert Award in Dance in 1995,[1] and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award in 1998.
Some critics refer to Carlson’s work as dance-theater and some refer to it as talking dancing.[3] Her work often incorporates different movement components, speaking or acting components, and props or sometimes animals.[4] 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.[5] 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]