Carolyn Carlson
Guest at Moviment
Born in California, Carolyn Carlson is a dancer, choreographer and poet.
Heiress to the movement, composition and teaching concepts of Alwin Nikolais, Carolyn Carlson moved to France in 1971 and with Rituel pour un rêve mort (1972) signed a poetic manifesto which defined her working method: dance resolutely focused on philosophy and spirituality. Carolyn Carlson prefers the term "visual poetry" to "choreography".
For five decades she has had considerable influence and success in many European countries. She played a leading role in the emergence of contemporary French and Italian dance with GRTOP [Choreographic Research Group] at the Opera de Paris and Teatrodanza at La Fenice. She has created more than a hundred dance works, many of which mark major chapters in the history of dance, from Density 21.5 to The Year of the Horse, Blue Lady, Steppe, Maa, Signes, Writings on Water and Inanna.
Founder in 1999 and present-day Honorary President of the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson at La Cartoucherie, she was the first choreographer to be awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2006. She is also a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters and the Legion of Honour.
Following nine years at the helm of the National Centre for Choreography in Roubaix, she created the Carolyn Carlson Company, which was in residence at the National Theatre of Chaillot from 2014 to 2016. Since then, thanks to an outstanding repertoire and the loyalty of her dancers, she has pursued her poetic approach blending choreography, teaching and the transmission and dissemination of her works, in addition to more occasional projects such as museum exhibitions, films for cinema or poetry anthologies.
She obtained French nationality in 2019 and was elected the following year to the choreography section of the Academy of Fine Arts.
A never-ending dance with Carolyn Carlson
Dance Performance, screenings, meeting
In June 1976, on the terrace of the Centre Pompidou, which was still under construction at the time, Carolyn Carlson performed an improvised dance wearing a red leotard and with a camera as her only audience. At the same time, she devised a continuous choreography – a non-stop dance – to launch the public spaces of this new cultural institution due to open in 1977.
Let’s return for a day, in search of these lost dances, to this dreamlike and ephemeral event, to the concrete utopia of a new institution housing art in the heart of the city. Archives, poems and experimental films will be set in motion, to retrace their origins and imagine their possible reinvention 46 years later.
With her dancers, Carolyn Carlson prompts us to rethink the space and time of both the human body and the architectural structure and invites us to watch, once more, this "moviment" that is the Centre Pompidou through the prism of its "visual poetry".
Wednesday, 10 May 2023
Performance – reservation strongly recommanded at spectacles.vivants@centrepompidou.fr
