Ann Carlson’s award winning work borrows from the disciplines of dance, performance, theater, visual and conceptual art and often dismantles conventional boundaries between artist and subject. Ann’s work takes the form of solo performance, large scale site-specific projects, ensemble stage based dances and theatrical works, public art events and performance/video.
Carlson's recent projects include The Symphonic Body, a movement-based orchestral performance made entirely of gestures. The “music” made in the Symphonic Body is a blend of unwitting everyday gestures transformed into a kind of dance. Doggie Hamlet, is a performance spectacle that weaves dance, visual and theatrical elements with aspects from competitive sheep herding trials. Performed by five human performers, a flock of sheep, and four herding dogs, Doggie Hamlet explores instinct, sentience, attachment, and loss. These Are the Ones We Fell Among is a staged-based project performed by two human performers. Originally a collaboration between Carlson and Inkboat performance group, There Are the Ones We Fell Among grapples with elegance in the face of extinction, looks for humor and grace amid excrement, entropy, fear and fury.