Charles Atlas is known as one of the premier interpreters of dance, theater, and performance art on video. For over five decades, he has created multi-media, multiplatform works for screen, stage, gallery, and television. Atlas was a pioneer of “video dance” (or “media-dance”), collaborating on works that were created, choreographed, and performed specifically for the camera. His groundbreaking early works, including the seminal Blue Studio: Five Segments (1975-76), evolved from an extraordinary collaboration with the legendary choreographer/dancer Merce Cunningham, for whose company Atlas served as filmmaker-in- residence from 1978 to 1983.
Collaboration lies at the heart of Atlas’s practice. Even a partial list of the figures that Atlas has collaborated with on stage and screen productions, as well as on multi-media installations, reads like a ‘who’s who’ of the international worlds of dance (Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Karole Armitage), performance art (Leigh Bowery, John Kelly, Marina Abramovic) and music (Anohni, formerly Antony), among many others. He has directed several feature films, including The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2001), about the iconic performance artist; Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime in Dance (2000), and, in 2011, Turning, a full-length documentary film that follows his live performance tour with the singer Anohni.
Atlas has also been commissioned to produce works for television in Great Britain, France, Spain, Ireland, and the United States. These works often take the form of what Atlas terms “documentary fictions,” productions in which Atlas manifests his fascination with, in his own words, “narrative, psychology, dance, and flights of fantasy.” Such works are often characterized by inventive set design and lighting, outrageous costuming, post-punk music, and a playfully rebellious attitude. In recent years, Atlas’s multi-media installation works have grown in scale and ambition; his exploration of new technologies chart new terrain for dance.
Over the course of five decades, Atlas has also pursued an ongoing, informal video project that continues today: he has been documenting downtown York’s queer, transgender, and drag performance art scene, recording lo-fi video at venues such as the Pyramid club and Jackie 60. Atlas is at home in this community, and at times these videos seem like “home movies” of friends. His portraits of downtown superstars like Lady Bunny are affectionate, intimate, playful, and often outrageously funny.
In an astonishing fifty years of creative practice, Atlas’s unique body of work in media is distinguished by the artist’s generosity of spirit: his fabulously envisioned worlds are animated with a celebratory, radical joy of dance, performance, and movement itself.
