Artists

Carrie Hanson has been performing, teaching and making dance in Chicago since 1991, and is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Seldoms. Her solo and ensemble dance work has been performed nationally and in Germany. Since founding The Seldoms in 2001, she has directed and choreographed sixteen new works for the company. Time Out Chicago calls her "a virtuoso of meticulous composition" who makes "clear-edged, challenging dances".

Ms. Hanson has received two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships for Choreography and a Ruth Page Award for Outstanding Dance for her performance with Jan Erkert and Dancers. In 2005, she was awarded a prestigious Chicago Dancemaker's Forum Lab Artist grant, and created GIANT FIX, a site-specific work for an Olympic sized outdoor, drained pool. Her interest in staging dance outside the traditional theater has also placed The Seldoms under the Tiffany glass dome in the Chicago Cultural Center, an 80,000 sq.ft. antiques showroom, on the grounds of a historic Arts & Crafts mansion, in Millenium Park in downtown Chicago, and a 17,000 sq. ft. garage.

In her work, Ms. Hanson is interested in combining physical risk with a rigorous inscription of idea onto body and the mining of bodily sensation. Attentive to space in both its function as a supportive container and a topography that the body rides, and also its variously pedestrian or public or performance designation, she frequently locates her dances in unconventional venues or reconsiders the spatial construction of more traditional stages. Her recent processes, in building Monument (2008), Overflow (2007) and GIANT FIX/dance in a pool (2005), have focused her attention on particular choreographic challenges such as balancing abstraction and legibility, and positioning movement as the primary conveyor of meaning in multidisciplinary work.

Also a dance educator, Ms. Hanson teaches contemporary technique, dancemaking and anatomy classes at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago. She has been a guest teacher for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, River North Dance Company, Mordine and Company, and Thodos and Dancers. Contemporary technique classes are informed by Bartenieff Fundamentals, release technique, and yoga, and are grounded in the language of Laban Movement Analysis. An emphasis is placed on spatial clarity, the use of weight as momentum, and efficiency of effort. The material is athletic and plays with inversion, moving often into and away from the floor. An elevated awareness of individual anatomy and spatial geography are goals for each class.

Ms. Hanson holds an MA in Dance Studies from Laban Centre London and a BFA in Modern Dance from Texas Christian University, and is certified in Laban Movement Analysis.