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Carla Anacker (1999, Berlin) is working with dance, choreography, sculpture and writing. She is based in Berlin and Copenhagen. In Copenhagen she is currently pursuing her MA in Choreography at DASPA. She graduated with a BA in Integrated Design from University of the Arts Bremen and studied Contemporary Dance in the frame of "Dance Intensive" at Tanzfabrik Berlin. A couple of stays at Ponderosa in Stolzenhagen and Butoh workshops led by Natsuko Kono were very formative in the beginning of her dance path.
In her artistic practice, Carla Anacker is interested in transcultural understandings of the body. She understands dance and choreography as tools to know through the body and as means to transform how we think/ know the body by challenging our western, modern, colonial perspective on it. Time beyond linearity is a recurrent topic in her works as well. One character trait of her is to see connections everywhere, thus, it is impossible for her to separate her life from her work. Be it the regular baths in the cold waters of Copenhagen in front of her door that she finds difficult not to regard as a dance practice or the mending of lemon and orange peel after eating the fruit to reconnect with how long it took for the fruit to grow compared to how quick it is eaten. Anyhow, sometimes she gets too much of seeing the connection between everything all the time everywhere. She believes that art very much also offers a space where things don't have to make too much sense and seemingly contradictory elements create something that can be very moving and touching. This is her driving force, this is what keeps her going and what makes her so emotionally attached to art. To create with more space for sensuality than for things to make sense, or in other words to make sense beyond the logic and the coherent. This is extremely challenging for her and at the same time what keeps her feel alive.
In 2020, Carla co-founded the performance collective Tremenda Corporea. This was in the beginning of the pandemic. The collective was lucky to get invited to use the empty stages of the performing arts venue Schwankhalle during these first months of the pandemic and to develop the project "Bodies of Resonance". It was performed as a sonic walk and exhibition in 2021 in and around Schwankhalle in the frame of the festival "Bzw. Natur". The sounds recorded during the sonic walk were reused by the collective for an electronic live concert at aRaum some months later. In 2023 and 2024 the collective performed "Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages" at Radialsystem Berlin. A piece centered around the kidneys in the Anthropocene. Currently, the collective works on a piece to be shown in Schwankhalle again in September 2025. Stay tuned!
In 2023, Carla choreographed and danced the durational performance "The beach is accessible at low tide" in which she was attuning to the temporality of the river "Weser". In "Unfolding Decomposition"(2022), she danced with a block (which weighed as much as her body) of clay several times over the course of some weeks and created negatives (plaster casts) in-between to capture the block of clay in different moments over time. A series of clay vessels resulted from these negatives. Each vessel implicating all the other (past or future) vessels as well. This idea, she refers to as "time fold". Such "time fold" was also present in her latest work: "The place where I go to listen"(2025). Here, the 31 movements of a movement sequence were organized in the form of the Japanese poem format Tanka (five lines) and were not danced one after the other (horizontally) but (vertically). Hereby, time got layered which invited a particular rhythm to unfold. The title of the piece she understood as an invitation for the audience to listen with their eyes instead of understanding/ analyzing/ deciphering with them.
Other works Carla has created in the last years are "Lesarten und Schreibweisen"(2024), a project that was developed in the frame of "Art of Emergency" at Thealit together with Julia Höft and Emilia Sting. The three artists were interweaving collective writing practices with movement and touch and thus exploring how to write from and with the body. This work was continued in the public space of Bremen as "durch/schrift"(2024). The start of their collaboration was the reading performance "Begrenzt Grenzenlos"(2022) at Weserburg, Museum for Modern Art, Bremen. In this reading performance, they reflected on limitlessness in studying art and how the lack of a structure can feel paralyzing or can lead to self-exploitation and how important it is to support each other, to collaborate and stay in conversation. Ways of working beyond self-exploitation was also what we explored in the process of "The work to come/ le pli du temps"(2023). And how to (keep) work(ing) in times of scarcity and collapsing funding structures was the driving force behind "Library Bodies"(2024). ...And to remember why we dance, we collected sentences starting with "I dance because"(2023) together with Sigal Souk during the Dance Intensive year at Tanzfabrik. I collected all of the sentences and made a poster out of them. It serves as a great reminder and helps to reformulate my intention for dancing. Well, these last sentences have revealed that it was me (Carla) writing about her (Carla). But somehow, I needed to step a little out of myself to write all of this. There is much more to say and also much less and if you feel like reaching out, contact me via carlaanacker@aol.de.
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