Ann Carlson is a dancer, choreographer, and performance artist. She creates “dances that reflect and investigate the metaphor of the everyday” and are coauthored by the performers, who have included non-dancers, such as lawyers, doctors, and nuns. With a background in visual and performance art, Carlson often shows her work in unconventional dance sites, including museums, trains, and barnyards. Ann has received over thirty commissions and numerous awards for her artistic work. Ms. Carlson received a 2006 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography as well as a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance. Ms. Carlson has received multiple awards from the National Choreographic Initiative, Doris Duke Award for New Work a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance in l999. She was the first choreographer to receive the CalArts/Alpert Award and also was the recipient of a prestigious three-year choreographic fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ann Carlson's award-winning, performance-based works are renowned for expanding the boundaries of dance and choreography. Collaborative in content and process, Mary Ellen Strom's video works blur the line between activism and art history, media and representation. Through their collaborative work since the early 1990s, Carlson and Strom have married social, political, historical and formal concerns. These collaborations are notable for their community engagement, experimental form, technological experimentation, and activist sensibilities. Among their highly celebrated works are Geyser Land (2003), a multi-media installation and performance experience that took place on a Montana train ride; West (1997), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and projects at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Creative Time; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
Headline
Green Movement
A Site-Specific Work by Choreographer Ann Carlson Performed by Alissa Cardone, Lorraine Chapman, DeAnna Pellecchia and Ingrid Schatz
Ann Carlson's "Green Movement" is inspired by “Madame 710”, a video installation co-authored by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom which offers an unlikely scenario. Encased by the white cube of a white-box gallery setting is a large, beautiful Holstein dairy cow, a dancing figure clad in a clear plastic coat stuffed with money, and blowing straw that lifts upward. The human figure (Carlson) moves in bovine contemplation; shrouded in plastic, this money-stuffed milkmaid leads her charge in a muffled, ecstatic dance of gratitude and surrender. Working to build a substantive relationship with the animal, seeking intersections and likenesses, the human ultimately cannot be released from her position of the consumer. She is performing the complexity of being inside the system.
The live performance installation "Green Movement" incorporates signs, symbols and metaphors emerging from the dialogue around climate change. Carlson’s four dancers Alissa Cardone, Lorraine Chapman, DeAnna Pellecchia and Ingrid Schatz, “cloaked in capitalism” dance in open fields with two dairy cows. Issues explored in the work include an examination of what is consumed, what resources we use to live, work, eat, thrive and how that impacts the environment. "Green Movement" was commissioned by Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts and Environmental Studies Program for the Feet to the Fire Festival 2008, as part of Feet to the Fire: Exploring Global Climate Change from Science to Art.
"Part Greek chorus, part Doris Humphrey movement choir, part tongue in cheek, part cynical take on the notion of 'green'...a ritual, a quirky, silent response to climate change. Maybe it could happen anywhere, at places where consciousness was being raised or needed raising around humanity's relationship with the Earth, and specific places on the Earth." - Ann Carlson on Green Movement
CLICK HEREto view excerpts from the premiere of Green Movement
