Ann Carlson’s Happy Moving Between Different Worlds : Arts: The CalArts/Alpert Award winner returns to L.A. with her eclectic dance and performance works.

Lions and tigers and bears--oh my!--don’t scare choreographer/dancer/performance artist Ann Carlson. She trips the light fantastic alongside dogs, cats, horses, goats and even human amateurs.

In fact, Carlson has made her mark on the contemporary dance-performance scene with a pack of works featuring non-traditional performers--from the creatures that interact with human dancers in “Animals,” to the nuns, lawyers, basketball players and others who collaborate with her in her “Real People” series.

But she’s no mere dance-world Dr. Doolittle.

The New York-based Carlson--who was named one of the first recipients of a $50,000 CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts last week--is an artist of surprising versatility. And her eclectic dance and performance works are known not only for their pan-species egalitarianism, but also for their eloquence.

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The petite and fast-talking Carlson, who was in town recently to pick up her award, will return to the local boards for the first time since 1989 as part of a group performance billed as “Daniel Ezralow & . . .” at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theater on Friday and Saturday. Other dancers on the program of mostly solos and duets include Lisa Giobbi, L.A.-based Oguri and Ezralow, who produced the event.

Inclusion in the group--and winning the Alpert Award in the dance category--particularly pleases Carlson. “I appreciate being (considered) part of the dance world,” says Carlson, 40, whose works typically include strong vocal and visual components. “Even though that’s my original discipline, sometimes I haven’t known where I fit.”

Her eclecticism has never been a rejection of dance per se, but of the limits of sticking to one medium. “I felt early on that whatever was going to get across an idea, that’s what needed to be used,” says the ballet and modern dance-trained Carlson.

Accordingly, Carlson has forged a signature style that moves from symbolic to whimsical, in works both intimate and epic. That range will be evident in the two solos she will perform on the UCLA bill: “Visit Woman Move Story Cat Cat Cat,” from the series “Animals,” and “Sold,” which is excerpted from a larger work of the same name.

“Animals”--which the New York Times called a “holy dance”--is probably Carlson’s best-known effort. Begun in 1987, the suite of six works won a 1988 Bessie, the prestigious New York dance and performance award.

In each “Animals” dance, an animal or animals are onstage, unfettered as humans dance nearby, and sometimes with, them. For example, in “Visit Woman Move Story Cat Cat Cat,” which the New York Times dubbed “extraordinary,” a naked Carlson scampers catlike about the stage to the strains of Beethoven, before picking up a kitten that she proceeds to cuddle.

The series began as a choreographic challenge. “I wanted to make works that could respond to a living being, that I couldn’t choreograph in the way that I’d been taught to choreograph,” Carlson says. “I didn’t want to manipulate the animals and make the dog, cat or goats do something.”

The works are also personal. “I grew up with a lot of animals and there was a special, revered place for them,” says Carlson, who was raised in Park Ridge, Ill.

Carlson began her other major series, “Real People,” in 1986. In each of these pieces, a group of non-dancers who share a profession--nuns, lawyers, basketball players--have collaborated with Carlson to create a dance that represents their lives. These people also perform the works.

The impetus was Carlson’s distaste for the insularity of the dance studio. “It had to do with being starved for information about the outside world,” she says.

In addition to these and other works of her own, Carlson has also directed/choreographed such other pieces as a chamber opera version of the Kaballah and the 1991 Philip Glass/Allen Ginsberg opera “Hydrogen Jukebox.” And if her current dance card is an indication, she’ll be branching out even more in the future.

For instance, Carlson is currently involved with a group of artists from a variety of disciplines who’ve been commissioned to create a group of as-yet-untitled installation projects, to be seen at MOCA in 1996.

She’ll be backed during this period, of course, by the CalArts/Alpert fellowship, which Carlson says will “make a huge difference” in her life. “Of course, that amount of money makes a difference in anyone’s life,” she says.

“It comes to me at a time of change,” Carlson says. “It will allow me to have a bit of relief, to relax for a while and stop and make some decisions.

“Do I go into a studio now? Am I going to write? Will the medium change? Those kind of questions come up for me with the responsibility of receiving something like this. I feel like some kind of change.”

* “Daniel Ezralow & . . .,” Wadsworth Theater, Brentwood, Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., $11-$30. (310) 825-2101.