Charles Atlas
1949–
Charles Atlas moved to New York in the early 1970s and soon began to work as assistant stage manager with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. After experimenting for the first time with video— then still a new technology—he became filmmaker in residence with the company, serving in that capacity from 1974 to 1983. His collaboration with Cunningham, which continued until the choreographer’s death in 2009, forged a genre Atlas called “media-dance.”
Fusing the techniques of documentary filmmaking with video art, Atlas collaborated with other artists as well, among them Leigh Bowery, Karole Armitage, Marina Abramović, and Yvonne Rainer.
In 1984 Atlas met the young Scottish-born dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, whose newly formed London company channeled the postpunk culture of the era into cutting-edge dance. Atlas collaborated with Clark on Hail the New Puritan, a feature-length work structured as “twenty-four hours in the life of a dancer” and peppered with performances and dreamlike sequences, blurring the line between documentary and fiction.
With production design by Leigh Bowery and music by the Fall and Glenn Branca, the work employs cinema- verité techniques to create a narrative that loosely follows Clark as he prepares for a performance titled “New Puritans.” Atlas drew inspiration for this surreal performance-portrait from works that had long been important to him, such as 1940s Hollywood musicals, the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966). As Atlas later said, “It wasn’t like finding the truth, it was like doing something fun with the truth.”
Introduction
Charles Atlas (born 1949) is an American video artist and film director who also does lighting and set design. He is a pioneer in developing media-dance, also called dance for camera. Media dance is work that is created directly for the camera. While Atlas' primary artistic medium is video, he also began to experiment with live electronic performance in 2003. Atlas worked collaboratively with Merce Cunningham from 1975 to 1981. Before his time as the Cunningham company's filmmaker-in-residence (1978–1983), when he made 10 dance films, Atlas was an assistant stage manager for the company, and was already filming Cunningham in little experimental movement studies during breaks from rehearsal. Following his work with Cunningham, he worked independently in film while collaborating with other professionals in the field.
Atlas' work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is being exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts until March 16, 2025.
Wikidata identifier
Q5075231
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 22, 2025.
Introduction
Videographer and filmmaker worked closely with Merce Cunningham from ca.1975 to 1983, as an assistant stage manager, and filmmaker-in-residence. He worked with the British dancer and choreographer Michael Clark in the mid-1980s, producing a feature-length fictional documentary; "Hail the New Puritan." He has also worked collaboratively with Marina Abramovic and Yvonne Rainer. His video works have been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally; including the Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, video artist
ULAN identifier
500333810
Names
Charles Atlas
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 22, 2025.
