Visiting artist Ann Carlson experiments with time and space

Four lawyers stand still in an office hallway surrounded by elevators. Dressed in typical business attire, the men’s backs are to each other, and they don’t say a word. The lawyer on the left makes the first movement, reaching over to slap his shoulder. The rest follow in a series of gestures and expressions as they bend, stretch, point and shout. What appeared to be a normal scene of lawyers in suits is transformed into a dance. To Ann Carlson, a visiting artist in the drama department, this use of everyday people in experimental settings is what makes her art distinctive.

 

After graduating from the University of Utah with a bachelor of fine arts in modern dance and the University of Arizona with a graduate degree in dance, Carlson began to collaborate with many dancers, including the award-winning Meredith Monk. Her work has been performed throughout the United States, and she has received numerous awards, including an American Masterpiece Award in 2008 and a three-year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

This quarter, Carlson is teaching two undergraduate classes at Stanford: “Performance, History and Memory: The Jasper Ridge Project” and “Stillness in Action: The Body Out of Time.” She is also the first visiting artist to collaborate with the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, a biological sanctuary on Stanford land that is designed to promote research and education. It is not a place traditionally associated with dance.

 

“The idea of having a visiting artist first came up two years ago when I was approached by Robert Buelteman, a well-known photographer, requesting access to the preserve,” said Jasper Ridge administrative director Philippe Cohen. “I then went to the vice president of the Stanford Arts Initiative about having Rob’s photography at the preserve as a way to raise funds for having a visiting artist program at Jasper Ridge.”

 

Carlson saw Jasper Ridge for the first time when she was invited to do work on campus in 2008. In March 2010, she returned to campus to collaborate with 250 students to produce “Still Life with Decoy,” in which students posed like they were studying textbooks and lying on the ground after a bike collision, among other things.

 

“I have been really interested in investigating stillness and how it resonates in different places and different contexts,” Carlson said. “It deals with Einstein’s idea that all of time exists in the present. Stillness is really interesting because it arrests movement and lets the past and future fold on into it.”

 

Based on Carlson’s previous work, Matthew Tiews M.A. ’99 Ph.D. ’04, executive director of the arts programs, invited her to be Jasper Ridge’s first visiting artist.

 

“She is a very unexpected artist, and we thought it would be an interesting collaboration,” Tiews said.

 

Carlson was interested by the history and environment at Jasper Ridge, which she described as “very ancient” and “very alive.”

 

“I got really interested in the balance of [Jasper Ridge] not being open to the public, but then inviting a time-based artist into the situation,” Carlson said. “It seemed counterintuitive and wonderfully inventive.”

 

The project follows the  tableaux vivant tradition, where actors pose as paintings or photographs, and involves restaging about eight photographs from Jasper Ridge on the spot they were taken. The performance will take place in March 2012, when the audience will be guided through a series of tours through the different stations on the preserve where actors perform scenes from the past.

 

“It’s a collision between that moment in time and the present moment,” Carlson said. “It touches on a lot of different disciplines, such as environmental biology, botany, animals, fish and birds.”

 

Carlson herself has touched on multiple disciplines in her work over the past 20 years, collaborating with a broad range of people who were united by shared professions, relationships or passions.

 

“I approach dance as any conscious movement,” Carlson said. “It can be you typing on your laptop right now as long as you are thinking about it, a keyboard dance.”

 

This diverse group of performers have included lawyers, nuns, security officers and pediatricians, and her projects have included the four lawyers skit and a piece with fly fishermen she found in a sporting goods store for a festival in Maine.

 

“The work is about labor’s imprint on the body, about how what we do or what we love is expressed through our gestures,” Carlson said.

 

Carlson is particularly fascinated everyday movements and actively explores how they can be sequenced into a dance.

 

“I feel there is a huge hunger for people to have an engagement with metaphor, pulling out their everyday movements and reconstituting them into a portrait of who they are,” Carlson said.

 

Her attention to common objects and people is evident in her personality as well as past work.

 

“She is this short, blonde fireball,” Cohen said. “I once described her as the Studs Terkel of dance. My impression of her is that she looks in the everyday and finds what she views as a performance, which I think is fascinating.”

 

Tiews expressed a similar perspective on Carlson’s energy and persona.

 

“She is incredibly dynamic and inquisitive,” Tiews said. “A part of her artwork is informed by real, almost scholarly work, which she manifests in really different ways.”

 

Carlson uses this energy to portray the body as a powerful vehicle of change to speak against what she calls “a tendency to disregard movement.”

 

“I call it the ‘real people’ work,” Carlson said. “It responds to certain kinds of social issues because it looks at stereotyping and then bursts it apart, like with the dignity of the lawyers. You wouldn’t expect those guys in the fancy suits to be doing all of that action.”

 

Through her work, Carlson continues to investigate how dance can be conveyed through anything and anyone, whether they are lawyers, fly fishermen, scientists or Stanford students. Her stillness class has discussed the possibility of “occupying” San Francisco to experiment with stillness.

 

“We have been talking about, how does the still body support or object to things in public space?” Carlson said. “Anytime you work outside of time, it scares people and is a kind of disruption. It changes the whole energy and impact of the space.”