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THREE: The Solo That Isn’t a Solo: Ann Carlson’s Dances with Animals
- University Press of Florida
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55 three The Solo That Isn’t a Solo Ann Carlson’s Dances with Animals Janice Ross Isadora Duncan, the great soloist progenitor of modern dance, famously declared that she had never danced a solo. “When I have dancedIhavetriedalwaystobetheChorus:IhavebeentheChorusofyoung girls hailing the return of the fleet, I have been the Chorus dancing the Pyrrhic Dance or the Bacchic; I have never once danced a solo,” Duncan wrote in her 1928 essay “The Dance of the Greeks.”1 Her statement has customarily been dismissed as part of the hyperbole accompanying her epic gesture of dancing the female body politic. As the initial architect of the solo female dancer in the twentieth century and the woman who negotiated what Duncan scholar Ann Daly has called “the complex semiotics of representation” of the female form in the cultural currents of her time, Duncan’s proclamation is intriguing.2 It hints at the complex signifying work of the solo female dancer’sbodyonstageanditsefforttobebothparticularanduniversalwhile resisting traditional historical associations of the unmannered or bestial. This question of how one might read afemale modern dancer performing 56 alone as a “solo that is never a solo” offers a useful frame for this essay and its consideration of the solo work of Ann Carlson as an exposé of the mutual reinforcement and conflation of identity categories between the animal and human.3 Carlson is a highly individual American postmodern choreographer who performs relatively infrequently but whose works are important wry movement expositions about the complex negotiations of being both author and text that surround the female soloist. This essay considers the fraught negotiation of social, gender, and performance issues initiated by Carlson’s solos with and about animals. In four of her signature dances—Animals (1988), Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg and Moore (1986, 2007), Grass/Bird/Rodeo (1999), and Madame 710 (2008)—she explores the interplay between gender identification and the volatilities of the social bodies and public identities we create. She uses our relationship with animals as one of the central paths into this investigation, ironically evoking the great essentialist myths displayed in Romantic ballets of the nineteenth century where women were seen as having a uniquely close connection to animals, spirits, and the natural world. In all four of these works Carlson alsousesperformanceto inscribemultipleoverlappinghistorical,social,and behavioral movement texts on the dancer’s body. In all butSloss, Kerr, Rosenberg and Moore, her quartet of simultaneous solos for four male lawyers, this body is female and contemporary, and its actual or metaphoric counterpart is animal. Carlson, like her ghostly predecessor Isadora Duncan, occasionally breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience from the stage—at times offering a cozy tutorial to live spectators on how we can watch her performances when she is the sole performer, choreographer, and narrator. Carlson has explained that she began conversing with her audiences as a way of folding the customary postperformance question-and-answer exchange into the performance itself.4 In some works she solicits questions from the audience during the actual performance, and other times she chats amiably about specifics of the performance while changing costumes on stage. These talks become a part of a charting through performance of the “explicit body politicofthefemaledancer.”5 Theysimultaneouslyshowandcoachthespectator on how to connect with, what to attend to, and, implicitly, the agency and civilized control of the performer. Janice Ross [54.196.27.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:12 GMT) 57 A talking female dancer is herself a radical intervention historically, and Carlson’s vocalization productively challenges the power negotiation between spectator and performer in her solos. Carlson has said that between 1986 and 1988, as she was embarking on her major exploration of the solo form,shealsobegantothinkdifferentlyabouthowaudienceswerereceiving her work. “I began to think of the audience as someone who was in the position of giving keen and loving attention, as opposed to critical judgment,” she said, acknowledging that at the same time she was also developing a correspondingly gentle internal audience in herself.6 It was on the cusp of this shift in her perception of the audience as sympathetic and nonthreatening that in 1988 Carlson created Animals. This fullevening work is, in part, about the nonjudgmental and noncritical ethos of all (nonhuman) animals. It is her first dance with sentient nonhominoid partners on stage, fellow performers who in fact need precisely this kind of climate of kindness from the humans around them if they are to function effectively on display. Ineachsectionof Animals sheperformsandinMadame710,Carlson pairs herself with a live...