1 actor plus an ensemble of animal cast members including a rabbit, two goats, two dogs, a tortoise, a goldfish and a hen.

The following resources are included in each performance license:

• Permission to photocopy the PDF script for your production so there is no additional cost for these assets.

The following resources may be added to you license for an additional fee:

• Logo/Media package

Carlson is the recipient of numerous awards and over thirty commissions for her artistic work. Awards include: Creative Capital Award, Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Two American Masters, numerous Creative Capital MAPfund awards; a Rockefeller Seed Grant; a USA Artist Fellowship; a Guggenheim Fellowship; a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; a MANCC’s Living Legacy Artist; and a Fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, among others. She was an artist fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship/Harvard University. Carlson has received three awards from the National Choreographic Initiative; a Doris Duke Award for New Work; the first Cal/Arts Alpert Award in Choreography; and a prestigious three-year choreographic fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Carlson completed a residency hosted by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island, Florida and most recently was in residence at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, sponsored by the Center for the Art of Performance, at UCLA.

Carlson’s current projects include; “The Symphonic Body” a performance made entirely of gestures, “Doggie Hamlet” a site specific spectacle performed by a flock of sheep, three herding dogs and six human performers, “Dumbo Redacted”, a solo made and performed by Carlson, inspired by earth’s largest land mammal, and the end of Ringling Bros Circus. Carlson’s latest project is a series of duets for women and their dogs entitled “Femme d’un certain âge avec son chien.”

Carlson’s recent collaborative projects include “Elizabeth, the dance” made with the Ririe -Woodbury Dance Company, of Salt Lake City UT, “Animal Dance” a dance for very young audience members made with Children’s Theater Company, Minneapolis, Carlson’s long time collaboration with video maker Mary Ellen Strom resulted in the creation of a number of single channel performance videos (“Madame 710”, “Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore”, “Four Parallel Lines” among others) that are held in several private and museum collections.

Carlson has taught choreography and performance in universities around the US and Mexico, including Stanford, Princeton and Wesleyan Universities, as well as the University of Minnesota, and currently at UCLA and UC Riverside.

Originally produced by Children's Theatre Company in 2015-2016

Animal Dance embraces the idea that all human and animal movement is a kind of dance – a celebration of how people and animals use their bodies to express themselves and to engage with their world. Often, dance is a series of choreographed steps and movements that are set and are performed the same way every time. But, in Animal Dance, the animals are not trained to perform certain things, the way they might be in a circus or, say, in a dolphin show. They are just moving and being – naturally!

In the world-premiere production, Ann Carlson created Animal Dance as a human dancer responding with an abstract narrative to the natural movement of the animals on stage. She used her skills as a performer to respond in the moment to whatever the animals were doing. Every day, every performance, was a new "dance" designed to help the very young see and appreciate the unique and special qualities of the different animals and to model a way of using their own bodies to express and explore their feelings and their relationship to the world around them.