Perspective Tour: Allison Orr
Exploring Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses
Join us on Sunday, October 20, starting at 2P for a Perspective Tour led by choreographer and founder of Forklift Danceworks, Allison Orr. Perspective Tours is a new talk and tour series in which guest artists and curators share information about their own work while lending insights into our exhibitions. This season, we’ll be exploring Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses through the eyes of members of Austin’s creative community.
For our first Perspective Tour, Orr will connect her own creative practice with the public artworks of Carl Cheng, offering a unique lens on how movement, machinery, and the natural world intersect within time-based public projects or performances. Beginning with an artist-presentation in our Community Room, guests will then venture into the galleries with Orr to discuss specific works.
As the Artistic Director of Forklift Danceworks, Allison Orr creates inclusive, one-of-a-kind performance projects that share stories and build understanding. Inspired by the beauty and virtuosity in the movement of labor, and building on her background in anthropology and social work, Allison has honed a methodology of ethnographic choreography that engages frontline personnel and other community members as co-authors and performers in the creation of large-scale civic spectacles. Challenging audiences to expand notions of dance and performer, her dances have been performed for audiences of 60 to 6,000+. With over 20 years of experience partnering with civic entities, Allison and Forklift’s projects build capacity for more informed civic dialogue, greater collaboration between individuals, and stronger connections and leadership across communities.
Join Allison as she reflects on her projects, as well as public works by Carl Cheng that similarly engage public space, industrial tools or machines, and civic dialogue.
About Allison Orr
Allison Orr is the Artistic Director of Forklift Danceworks, where she co-creates award-winning performances with essential workers such as sanitation crews, firefighters, power linemen, and maintenance teams—individuals whose labor sustains our daily lives. Drawing from her background in anthropology and social work, Allison has developed an ethnographic choreography methodology that engages community members as co-authors and performers in large-scale civic spectacles, celebrating the beauty and virtuosity in the movement of labor.
Allison’s work has earned her numerous accolades, including being named a MacDowell Fellow, a Dance | USA Fellow in Social Change, a Doris Duke United States Artist Fellow, and Best Choreographer by The Austin Chronicle. Her production “The Trash Project” was named a #1 Arts Event by the Austin American-Statesman and is the subject of a feature-length documentary entitled “Trash Dance.”
Currently a Distinguished Fellow of the College of Environment at Wesleyan University, Allison directed “The Artist in the City” — a hands-on course in her community-based dance-making practice where Wesleyan students embedded within the local water/wastewater department to create collaborative artistic projects with city employees. Before founding Forklift Danceworks in 2001, Allison danced and studied with Deborah Hay and MacArthur Award winner Liz Lerman. She holds an MFA in Choreography from Mills College and a BA in Anthropology from Wake Forest University,.