The art of life

Ann Carlson's multi-media quest

by Johnette Rodriguez

New York-based choreographer Ann Carlson has danced with lawyers and nuns, with goats and kittens. But in the performance piece that she will bring to the Carriage House Theatre this weekend (kicking off their fourth annual Around the Block series), she becomes the animal (a bird), the non-dancer (a rodeo roper), and the essence of spring greening (a slow-movement artist in a grass suit). Combining monologue with questions from the audience, abstract movement with her own thoughts about the pieces, Carlson pulls together three sequences from earlier works to form a triumvirate whole in Grass/Bird/Rodeo, with the Rhode Island string ensemble Quattro Amici accompanying her at the Carriage House.

The Grass section is seen by Carlson as "a knock-off of a Magritte painting -- hyper-real but odd." It includes a song by Pierce Turner called "Zero Here," which he wrote after watching a heroin addict whose head kept falling toward the ground though it never actually hit the sidewalk.

"I use that song in this first piece," Carlson explained, "to think about being able to start one's life over at any moment. "It's also about the pull and the paradox of life -- suffering and enjoyment going on simultaneously. Reconciling that, holding that in one's heart."

The bird section has a burlesque showgirl aspect to it, as Carlson dons a high-plumed headdress and a single large wing while strutting through Frank Sinatra's version of "I've Got You Under My Skin." She also recites a children's picture book called Big Al, by Arthur Yorinks, whose message she perceives as "backing up and really appreciating where one is, an awareness of life." The tone shifts at the end of Bird when the taped crying of a child (one of her own children, it turns out) is heard.

"It's oddly tragic, but you don't quite know why," Carlson mused. "There's really a layer in it about aging -- so that whole piece spins with meaning."

The third part of the evening, Rodeo, grew out of an installation Carlson did in Los Angeles, where she trained with a rodeo, took a bad fall from a horse (enduring a few hours of amnesia) and got the voice of a rodeo announcer down pat. In Rodeo, she is alternately that announcer, a country-western singer and a "post-modern roper."

"At the end of the piece, I try to poke holes in the very thing I was already poking holes in," Carlson pointed out. "I've been open and earnest throughout, but there's a breakdown at the end, where I invite everyone to fall through this structure I've set up."

Carlson first put the three elements together at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires last summer -- "they sit like a salt and pepper shaker and something else on a kitchen table, side by side," she quips. Minus any real narrative thread among the three, they nevertheless suggest issues that Carlson was considering when she formed them.

"On one layer are the issues of performance, with a small `p'," noted Carlson. "Is everything a performance? Do we perform gender? Social class? Human beingness? I'm talking about performance in a larger-than-life way here.

"Secondly, it's about issues of transformation," she continued. "I change costumes in front of the audience, in order to suspend that suspension of disbelief. It's an exercise of taking these uncanny elements and making them into images and movement right in front of you. They become a real person, a real thing."

Carlson won the1988 Bessie Award, has been a multi-year National Endowment for the Arts fellow and was the first choreographer to win the prestigious $50,000 CALArts/Alpert award in 1995.

She herself had always enjoyed the Q&A sessions after dance performances and decided to incorporate them into her work. "Could these worlds co-exist -- what one's intentions were and how you react to it, all at once?" she asked herself and has repeatedly asked her audiences. Recently she had the experience of no one in the entire audience asking her a question. And once a viewer became so agitated by the breakdown at the end that he started yelling at the rest of the audience, "She's all right! She's all right!"

Carlson's hoping to add one more layer to the performance in Providence, perhaps a well-known narrative from a literary source that introduces another world into the mix. And she's curious what questions she'll get from Providence audiences-- don't let her down!

Around the Block presentations continue through June 12, with Rhode Island's best choreographers and performance artists on tap: Paula Hunter and Performers; Improv Jones teaming up with Everett Dance Theatre and the Carriage House hip-hoppers; a choreographers' showcase, with Groundwerx's Heather Ahern and Cathy Nicoli, Roger Williams University's Kelli Wicke Davis, Perishable Theatre's Heather Henson and many others; and "Waking Dreams and Warrior Women," a multi-media benefit to promote breast health awareness, including dances by Colleen Cavanaugh and Donald Acevedo. Check Listings for further information.