December 10, 2008

Misnomer Dance Theater has recently received more money in grants than any six-member, left-of-center dance group I can think of. That good fortune is due, in large part, to the several exceedingly smart and workable online systems that Misnomer’s artistic director and choreographer, Chris Elam, is developing. The interactive programs are designed to bring a given dance company into closer contact with audiences and draw in potential viewers. It helps that Elam’s choreography is appealing, witty, and just a bit weird. At present, a web surfer’s attention may easily be snagged by the photos and videos at misnomer.org.

Elam wants spectators to understand what he’s doing. And to understand that sometimes there’s nothing to understand but the intriguing dance of limbs in space and the surprise of bodies attaching to other bodies (and whatever those moves may mean to you). He prefaces his relaxed but informative program notes with these encouraging words: “The notes I offer below are an inlet into some of my thoughts on the works, but should by no means supercede your own.”

In Rock. Paper. Flock, the middle of three works on a program entitled Being Together, he makes spectators feel as if they’re in on the dance-making process by creating a simulacrum of an early stages rehearsal. He gives suggestions; the dancers (Brynne Billingsley, Luke Gutgsell, Jennifer Harmer, Coco Karol, and Dorian Nuskind-Oder) follow through very creatively—looking great in charmingly wacky costumes by Liz Prince that hint at parade-ground attire. Interestingly, Elam is almost the only one who talks, although his “materials” may shoot inquisitive or put-upon looks his way, when he gives them countdowns to find interesting group poses or says to Karol, “Coco, please do what I’m thinking.” Wearing a black jumpsuit and a leather Russian aviator’s helmet as a thinking cap, the choreographer delivers instructions that reveal, in witty ways, quite a lot about how dances get made. Sometimes he’s snared by his own creation; sometimes it takes off without him.

Fantasy and gritty reality blend. He grouses that he needs a new “element,” and man in a suit and a woman in a dress (Jenny Campbell and Val Loukiano) run on and fit themselves in. He asks Nuskind-Oder, whose back is to us, to turn blue. After a pause in which we can’t see anything happening, he says, “Good.” Later—with layers of clothing peeled off to reveal Kaibrina Sky Buck’s skimpy, ruffled, flesh-colored costumes from an earlier Elam piece—he, Gutgsell and Karol engage in some improbable Elam linkages; sometimes he picks the other two up and staggers forward—the straining base of an oblivious circus act.

His opening piece, Too Late Tulip, needs little explanation. Wearing Prince’s pastel-colored, simply cut dresses, Harmer, Karol, and Nuskind-Oder show you how Elam’s simple, attractive phrase looks when they perform it in canon or in different spatial arrangements. By attractive, I don’t mean bland. Elam’s fairly slow, luscious movements stretch the dancers’ limbs, bend their torsos, and cant their hips. When Billingsley and Gutgsell enter, the tender words of one of the musical selections—a song by Greg Brown—return to suggest a couple and a family. So now you can see the three women as daughters. If you wish.

The last dance, Zipper, continues the wide-open theme of togetherness. The audience, primed by Rock. Paper. Flock, can catch the tiny scenarios that crop up and dissolve, enjoy seeing froggy cartwheels become sleek balances, wonder why Karol is standing wiggling her fingers intently. The first week, the three-man band Real Quiet plays Evan Ziporyn’s score live, and David Cassin’s impetuous-sounding percussion contrasts with cellist Felix Fan and pianist Andrew Russo’s quirkily sweet melodies the way the dance’s beauties marry its oddities. Elam is a master of strangeness. Entering late, he struts like a supervising stork, knots his body improbably (alone or around others), and hunkers down in the angular positions that attest to his training in Balinese masked dance-drama.

The performers are all vibrant, although I find myself wishing that they would always just be themselves instead of “themselves”—that they’d be puzzled or suspicious, if that’s what’s called for, instead of telegraphing, or commenting on, that state.

To be good, choreographers need personality. They can have talent and a career sense asnd a dogged work ethic, but without personality or individuality or style, they sink into anonymity. Chris Elam doesn't sink; his dances burst with distinctiveness.

Mark Sadan
Coco Karol and Chris Elam in the premiere of his “Throw People.”

The “Throw People” double bill of premieres by his Misnomer Dance Theater, which opened a four-day run Thursday at Performance Space 122, most definitely holds your attention. Mr. Elam — already recognized through awards, good reviews, a classy advisory board for his company and a residency from the Joyce Theater Foundation, where this program was developed — is a talent, no doubt about it.

“Throw People,” the program, consists of two roughly 25-minute halves: “Land Flat” and “Throw People,” the dance. “Land Flat” is a mysteriously diverse and affecting recorded collage, even if the credits seem vague, incomplete and inaccurate. (The Belgian violinist Arthur Grumiaux is referred to as “Arthur Grumineux.”)

It enlists four women: Brynne Billingsley, Jennifer Harmer, Dorian Nuskind-Oder and the hard-working Coco Karol, who is also in “Throw People.” They wear mismatched dresses, some simple, some Victorian-ornate (costumes by Heather McArdle).

The four dance, separately and together; hard to describe, beyond that. They are good at controlled, quasi-balletic poses, and sometimes one supports or outlines or caresses the outstretched limb of another. They bow and bend and even bark. There is perhaps an Asian influence, though that may be an assumption drawn from Mr. Elam's biography, since he has studied in Turkey and Indonesia.

What makes dance so wonderfully compelling is how one such assemblage of movements can seem meaningless, and another full of ritualistic intent. “Land Flat” falls firmly on the ritualistic side of the line.

As does “Throw People,” after the intermission. Here three dancers — Ms. Karol with Mr. Elam and the red-locked, androgynous Luke Wiley — are dressed by Kaibrina Sky Buck in slightly baggy beige leotards with tacky ruffled accents, although Mr. Wiley wears a blue jumpsuit at the outset. The inconsequential live music is performed by Peck Allmond, Diana Herold and Andy Teirstein, who composed the score and contributed to the “Land Flat” collage.

Dramatically, the dance consists of Mr. Elam and Ms. Karol in an initial pas de deux, with Mr. Wiley wandering about on his own. There follows partnering in different combinations, ending with Ms. Karol reclaiming Mr. Elam. There are a lot of peculiar lifts (crotch-grabbing is a favorite) and rejections (people are thrown) and funny/sweet interactions (slaps, smiles, nuzzles).

“Throw People” is odder than “Land Flat,” less alluring but more ambitious and complex. Both dances suggest that Mr. Elam is well on his way to establishing himself as an important voice in downtown (Brooklyn, in his case) dance.

Misnomer Dance Theater's “Throw People” program continues through tomorrow at Performance Space 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street, East Village, (212) 352-3101 or ps122.org. The program will be repeated Aug. 18 to 27 at the Brooklyn Lyceum Theater.

LYNNE KILLEY followed the advice books when she opened a spa and started producing a line of natural skin care products out of her home in Pagosa Springs, Colo.: she tried to make her one-woman operation look bigger.

“I referred to the company in the third person,” she said. “I made a logo, Stella, and sometimes billed things out under Stella’s name.”

Then, last summer, Ms. Killey’s publicist organized a trip to New York so she could meet with magazine editors. In describing her business, Queen Bee Skin Care, Ms. Killey revealed that she made her products in her own kitchen. Even as she spoke, she said, she realized that perhaps her home-based model was a selling point and not something to hide.

“Here I was sitting in front of people that I needed to impress, and they just loved that I was making the stuff in my kitchen,” she said. Right about then, she rethought her strategy.

With about 50 percent of businesses in the United States based out of the home, this kind of transparency is likely to become more common. “Place honestly doesn’t matter anymore,” said Maggie Jackson, author of “What’s Happening to Home” (Sorin Books 2002).

“It is no longer a faux pas to have a life at the other end of the telephone line.” Ms. Jackson said. “It can make you feel like you’re dealing with a holistic person. And it is just another sign that we are moving away from the industrial age in that we no longer have two totally separate spheres called work and home.”

Just as customers, vendors and other outsiders are getting a chance to peek behind the curtain into home offices, home-based entrepreneurs are also getting more opportunities to interact with each other. StartupNation, an online hub for small businesses, is running a contest, the Home-Based 100, that will rank home-based businesses according to various criteria, including “the top financial performers,” “the greenest,” “the wackiest” and “boomers back in business.”

“Home-based businesses are out of the hiding part, but when we talk about business, we still talk about the Fortune 500, but not the half-trillion dollar economy of home-based businesses,” said Richard Sloan, co-founder of StartupNation. “This new community will also allow home-based businesses to connect with each other, get inspired and share best practices.”

Chris Elam, the founder and choreographer of Misnomer Dance Theater, runs the company out of his Brooklyn apartment, and he is a big proponent of transparency. His company videotapes rehearsals and even office meetings for posting on its video blog, which allows audiences to get a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run a dance company.

“Dance audiences traditionally interact with a dance company for only two hours a year and maybe get a couple of postcards,” Mr. Elam said. “But so much happens outside the performance, and we are trying to find ways of making the whole function of the company more open-source.”

Margot J. Tohn is another home-based business owner who thinks there is no point in hiding. Her decision to start a publishing business came after a disastrous evening of trying to find parking in the theater district in Manhattan. She thought she would write a book about finding parking in New York, and since she was staying in her childhood home in Larchmont, N.Y., it made sense to start her business there to keep her start-up costs low. She could also store books in the garage.

The book, “Park It! NYC”, is now in its second edition. She also works as a consultant for small financial advisers serving affluent families.

Around the same time she started her business, Ms. Tohn, 43, and her two sisters bought the house from their parents, who had moved to Florida for their retirement. Even with this rather unusual housing arrangement, Ms. Tohn says she has found that being candid often worked to her advantage.

“If the local bookstore runs out of my book, I can easily run some over,” she said. “My consulting clients know that I am unusually accessible. It isn’t uncommon for a client to call at 8 or 9 in the evening. It used to happen at 7 in the morning, but we put a stop to that.”

Clients also know that she often leaves the office midday to play tennis or tend to her garden, and leaves the cellphone behind. “When you start work 10 minutes after waking up, it’s healthy to take real breaks.”

Still, Ms. Tohn does not want to confuse her openness with a lack of professionalism. When she brings in a team of interns to help with a project, she sets them up in dining room where everyone can spread out around the table. “It’s all about creating a separate area from where I live,” she said.

She is also a stickler about noise. “I’ve learned from watching my two sisters keep home offices while raising their children,” she said. “When the door is shut to the office, it is shut, and they can’t be interrupted unless it’s blood or death.”

Debra M. Cohen, 40, by contrast, says she designed her business, a contractor referral service for homeowners, around the idea that she might be on the phone for business and her children might be making a ruckus in the background. Her company, Home Remedies of New York, has become so successful, she says, that she now offers consulting services to others who want to copy her business model in their communities. Ms. Cohen says she has home referral operators running her programs in nearly every state and Canada.

When exploring ideas for a business, she ran every idea through the “can it be done from home with kids underfoot” test, she said.

Working from home may allow for certain informalities, but it does not necessarily signal the size of an entrepreneur’s vision. Ms. Cohen’s business passed the million-dollar revenue mark four years after its founding. Bradley Rhine, 46, who works out of his home in San Jose, Calif., is a chief executive of Cogentes, a virtual consulting firm specializing in the information technology industry. Cogentes plans to hire 100 to 200 employees over the next several years.

The company has nine employees, in Atlanta, San Jose and Boston, and as it expands it does not consider where a person lives. “Our ongoing proposition as to find the best people wherever they are,” Mr. Rhine said.

He said his firm’s business model makes sense because it is now possible to outsource many aspects of a business’s operations. The company uses outside firms for payroll, benefits, human resources, recruiting and marketing.

No one commutes, and everyone can live where they want, he said. “It is just a ridiculous waste of time and resources. It is both wasteful and stressful,” he added. “Plus, it is bad for the environment.”

Then the night got seriously twisted into by far the funniest piece of the evening, the aptly titled "Throw People," when Chris Elam brought Coco Karol and Luke Gutgsell into his weird Misnomer Dance Theater world of face-smushing pretzel-monkey contortions, in a story of an innocent boy and girl and an evil jealous ogre who will not allow the natural charms of a comely lad to lure away his aggressive little sylph. In the midst of grunting lifts and caveman carries, there is also good dancing and moments of sweetly awkward tenderness. This is the beautiful world of a spasmodic half-autistic brute who cares, and the ending is priceless and hilarious."

The brilliance of "40up," DancenOw's selection of choreographers and/or dancers over 40, opened this year's festival, which ran September 4-10 at Dance Theater Workshop. The potpourri presaged an upcoming season of larger-than-life modern and contemporary dance, and led us into the festival in its totality - 70-plus works, each seven minutes or less.

In an excerpt from "Throw People" by Chris Elam, to music by Andy Tierstein, Elam, Coco Karol, and Luke Gutgsell dance, with clownish awkwardness, in leotards with fuzzy chenille trim accentuating the choice places. Karol wears cutoff fishnet tights. The costumes match their pale skin, in very bright light. The performers, punishingly acrobatic, move as a close-knit or knotted group. Their irreverent approach to lifts, and to dance in fact, is sophisticated entertainment, art that doesn't take itself too seriously. Hence, we're compelled by the serious in it.

Like its name, Misnomer Dance Theater seems devoted to contrariness. Whatever the rules of dancing or human encounter are supposed to be, choreographer Chris Elam finds 50 ways to subvert them. Misnomer returned to Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance a week ago Thursday, opening another intriguing series of July performances there.

As Elam describes his intentions, he likes to see how people function when they subject their bodies to extreme stress. This doesn’t translate into the kinds of acrobatic derring-do you see elsewhere on our dance stages. Misnomer dance is a struggle to accommodate to the impossible — after first having set up one’s own impossible circumstances. It’s a kind of counter-physicality that they exploit. The dancers never conquer the detours and distortions they’ve engineered, but they keep earnestly trying out new solutions. You get quite fond of their machinations.

Elam demonstrates the rigors of this struggle in the solo Tin Man. Planted on one bent leg with the other leg crossed over his knee, he balances for a long time, his arms, hands and fingers clutching out in improbable directions. Still folded up, he attempts a few steps, hopping on the one leg and using one fist like a cane. He angles out and twists in around his body with his arms. When he finally manages to stand upright, he sees a giant shadow of himself on the backdrop. He gazes up at it for a while, shrinking away a little, as if from a severe judge. Then he folds up again and ends the dance squatting over the other foot, which is stretched in relevé.

Elam says that Land Flat and Throw People were partly inspired by cockfighting. By putting the dancers in ongoing conflict with themselves and their companions, he hopes to induce primal states of hyper-awareness. Throughout both dances, they regard one another with curiosity, desire, aloofness, alarm, a whole gamut of feelings that their bodies can’t completely implement.

The four women in Land Flat (Brynne Billingsley, Jennifer Harmer, Coco Karol, and Dorian Nuskind-Oder) dance a kind of anti-ballet, at first pulled up and breathless, tiptoeing demonstratively around like swans on guard. They group and regroup in formal floor patterns, drawn together but pulled apart by the skewed disturbances that rack their bodies. They bourrée all bent over, reach out in contradictory directions, do high kicks with their shoulders hunched and their faces thrust forward. They dance bizarre, stressful duets and individual but fathomless solos.

They glide together into a clump, and as they reach away, resisting and clinging to each other, a romantic piece of music breaks off and the lights go out.

Karol, Elam and Luke Gutgsell become even more desperate entities, straining ineffectually toward one another, in Throw People. Elam scurries around, stiff-legged, tight-shouldered, like a ballet dancer imitating a person running. Karol submits to his amiable abuse, letting him bundle her over his shoulders and sling her sideways. Without changing her guileless expression, she retaliates by batting him in the face now and then.

Gutgsell patrols the edge of their space, looking mystified and twiddling his fingers as if searching for some occult communiqué. Then he steps out of his coverall and emerges costumed like the other two, in a peculiar body suit trimmed with crinkles. He and Karol dance together, and the three of them recombine in new extremes of dissonance. At one point, Elam picks up the other two — I think they’re stretched in arabesque at the time. They slink around one another’s bodies, get dropped on the floor. Elam hangs upside down by the knees from Gutgsell’s shoulders, making monster growls and futile scrabbling gestures.

Karol pulls Elam from one of these tangles and starts to lead him away in a sketchy foxtrot. Like everything else they did at Concord, this overture was left unresolved. The dance ended, but they could have kept on for hours without running out of moves.

The audience partied on the stage of New York University ’s Skirball Center after the concerts shared by Chris Elam and Larry Keigwin. Upstairs in the lobby, folks scarfed up guacamole and downed drinks from the free bar; downstairs in the theater they danced, while a dj cranked up the sound. The celebration wasn’t just in honor of the choreographers, their companies, and a slew of other performers. The Skirball had commissioned new works by Elam and Keigwin as part of its mission to interest the NYU community, especially students, in contemporary dance. If it takes a party to draw a crowd, so be it. In any case, the audience appeared thrilled. And that included some way past middle-aged people who’d never heard of either of these two extremely gifted young choreographers.

Seeing Elam’s work and Keigwin’s in one night certainly emphasizes the contrasts between them. Elam, abetted by his studies in Balinese dance and other forms, has built a style of movement on his own hyper-limber body. The result is anything but acrobatic. When, in his startling 1997 solo, Cast Iron Crutches, he clasps his hands between his legs and bends over until he looks like a walking egg, or wraps his limbs around one another in improbable ways, you may wonder fleetingly about the condition of his joints, but you’re more likely to ponder what tribal conventions or inner struggles have caused these deviations from the dancerly norm. When the music (by John Williams) is full of sighing, throbbing violins, and Burke Williams provides corridors of light and throws Elam’s shadow on the backdrop, illusions of journeying—perhaps along some evolutionary path—loom large. The endearingly peculiar five dancers who populate his new Future Perfect World also look as if some hereditary influence or personality trait had skewed their minds and bodies and made their goals difficult to attain. The piece seems to be happening on some small, sunny, unknown planet. As it begins, Elam, holding a large yellow ball, walks uncertainly through barely parted curtains, regards us, and exits. When the curtain opens fully, Jennifer Harmer is standing bent way forward, her curved arms reaching for another ball that’s suspended some distance away. It rises, but she seldom abandons that curious posture, except when she stands tall to tiptoe about or leaps in wild abandon. In her white party dress (the suitably strange costumes are by Sarah McMillan and Lesly Wolf), she sometimes resembles a broken doll, yet she's avid for something unreachable. To a medley of music that includes “Motherless Child” and Turkish songs, Brynne Billingsley, Elam, Harmer, Coco Karol, and Luke Wiley wander on and off the stage. They toddle cheerfully about with no evident goal. Often they stop and stare, and the music too falls silent. They try very hard to accomplish things. But what things? Their own limber bodies apparently baffle them, even though they tangle themselves into remarkable and absurd group structures. They can balance for a while on one leg, yet topple over doing quite simple things, as when, in a duet, Wiley attempts to kneel beside the seated Karol. They seem to believe that pulling on their own noses might leadto something.

Larry Keigwin and Chris Elam
photo: Elam-Keigwin
When Elton John begins to sing “Rocket Man,” they wake from slumber. Karol covers her face with one hand, and Elam carries her away, swimming her through space. Billingsley and Wiley leave too (in their underwear). Harmer is left inching along the floor on her belly, reaching for a ball that descends from an unlikely heaven. At 45 minutes, Future Perfect feels long, but Elam is a true original, and his vision of humans as awkward, naïve, and eager is both comical and curiously touching.

Keigwin, too, avoids “pretty” dancing, especially in his darker pieces. And his compelling 2004 Natural Selection also suggests an evolutionary journey. Even though his remarkable dancers—he, Julian Barnett, Alexander Gish, Liz Riga, Ying-Ying Shau, and Nicole Walcott—wear dressy clothes, they start out scrabbling around, loose as monkeys, stopping suddenly to stare in one direction or another. The music, Michaell Gordon’s Weather, with its driving pulse and a section that sounds like a Witches’ Sabbath, provides a microclimate that abets their vigorous struggles. They scramble over one another and through the colonnade of arches provided by others’ backbends. They hit the stage’s bare rear wall and attempt to clamber up, although only Shau, with the help of her friends, can actually run along it.

Keigwin also has a very big talent for creating entertaining, light-hearted romps for groups of people—assembling them into clever patterns while still bringing out traces of individuality. In Caffeinated, he makes nine members of the NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Second Avenue Dance Company look like a multitude (disclaimer: I’m on the Tisch faculty). The dancers, each clutching a styrofoam cup, form overlapping parades, lineups, clusters, individual breakouts, and scurrying confabs of two or three. Accompanying their tightly organized, near-perpetual high, Philip Glass’s music (Glasspiece #3) has never sounded so wound up and ready to explode.

Bolero NYC marks Keigwin’s second use of Ravel's eponymous escalation into frenzy. This time he and his company are joined by 46 volunteers of all ages and sizes—everyone wearing assorted red, black, white, and gray clothes. It's New York, folks—only brighter and better. Keigwin can empty a stage, refill it, wheel it like a top, and bring it to a sudden stop with a sure hand for theatrical build. Crowd flow may stop while people fix their hair and tuck in their shirts, examine unwelcome pimples or pull out cell phones. Pedestrian traffic coalesces when orderly hordes unfurl umbrellas and wait for the rain to pass; then, amid all the black umbrellas, one renegade opens a red one. Gradually, one man forces the horde into the opening behind the stage's huge sliding door; for a starling moment, just before he closes the door on the last stragglers, there, utterly alone on stage, stands an 18-month-old baby, staring gravely at us.

Amid the fray, Keigwin draws our attention to, say, a mother who fusses over her little girl's appearance, a worried woman who appears confused by everything, a very tall man who strides across in a suit and returns wearing only a red tie and a red Speedo, a woman walking two identical dogs in red coats, a posse of would-be teen models, a chubby diva surrounded by prowling men. And more. By the time Ravel's horns are braying and the cymbals are crashing, everyone's prancing down a red carpet flourishing a balloon.

Larry Keigwin may not need Broadway, but Broadway could certainly use him.

How wonderful it is to live in a great city, especially a city that dances. No wonder, then, that "Dance Party," a program shared by Keigwin + Company and Chris Elam/Misnomer Dance Theater, made city life a perpetual block party.

Elam got things going with "Cast-Iron Crutches," a solo to music by John Williams in which he kept emerging from and returning to hunched positions with tangled limbs. Despite the title, he didn't use crutches, but let his determined body assume contortionist poses while Burke Wilmore's lighting occasionally cast odd shadows on the backdrop, including one that made Elam resemble an ostrich.

He was joined by Brynne Billingsley, Jen Harmer, Coco Karol, and Luke Wiley in the new "Future Perfect," to a sound score arranged by James Sizemore. Once again, Elam was fascinated by tangled limbs. Everyone often appeared perplexed and there were sudden contrasts, as in a solo for Wiley, in which he used his hands to pick up his legs and twist them around his body in tense convolutions before collapsing in a meditation posture. Much of the choreography looked deliberately awkward, as if Elam were celebrating awkwardness as an unavoidable fact of life.

Keigwin made "Dance Party" even more riotous. In his "Caffeinated," to Philip Glass, dance students from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts dashed madly while swigging from coffee mugs, thereby suggesting that coffee nerves can be invigorating. Keigwin's own troupe made "Natural Selection," to Michael Gordon, look more serious, for its dancers moving at terrific speed might have been surviving adversities.

But everything was happily riotous in Keigwin's new "Bolero," an unexpected interpretation of Ravel's familiar score choreographed for a cast of what looked like thousands; press releases promised 80 dancers, although there were less than 80 names listed in the program. Still, the cast which combined Keigwin's company with other professional dancers, students, community people, and children (a teensy baby among them) appeared huge in this ode to city life in which pedestrians met with innumerable amiable adventures.

There was a dog walker with two pooches. An especially amusing character was a fellow who stood while trying to unfold and read a newspaper (guess which one), only to find the pages falling hopelessly apart while advertising inserts dropped out of them. People opened and closed umbrellas in a rainstorm. They also embraced, unrolled a red carpet, and paraded on it like V.I.P.'s at some great event, which "Bolero" certainly was. Finally, as stage lights were extinguished, dancers raised cellphones aloft like Lady Liberty's torches and they were joined by people in the audience with their own cellphones, bringing "Bolero" to an exhilarating conclusion.

But more followed. The revelry on stage gave way to merriment in the lobby for the audience, complete with free food and drinks. What a great "Dance Party" this was.

What better way is there to draw interest in modern dance from a young crowd than by a combined concert with two young, cool New York City choreographers and bill the show as a Dance Party? That’s exactly what Chris Elam and Larry Keigwin—both former Dance Magazine “25 to Watch’s”—did. They teamed up and presented two nights of their quirky dancing, and an onstage dance party (complete with DJ) after the show.

Always one to push the body’s limits in terms of flexibility and contortionism, Elam began the night with Cast-Iron Crutches (1997). He wrapped himself into a non-human-like form and performed a nearly nude solo with just a softly lit backdrop and his shadow. The short but sweet dance placed Elam somewhere between an egg and a bird, moving as if his long, rubbery limbs were not fully formed.

Future Perfect was a beautifully peculiar 45-minute long world premiere. The scene is set with a hanging fluorescent soccer ball that could be a sun, the moon, or some sort of alien spaceship. The movements were mesmerizing: a dancer would be pulled across the floor with heavy limbs; bodies would meld together like one, then instantly become three separate figures; or heads would be nestled into the nooks of armpits or stomachs of others. These motifs seemed new and fresh each time around. And the music that accompanied the piece was as sporadic as the dancing. From orchestrated scores by The Langley School’s Music Project, to a chorus of children singing the Beach Boy’s God Only Knows, as weird of a mixture as it was, it never seemed out of place.

Elam’s company, Misnomer Dance Theater, never ceases to impress with their connectivity and subtle-to-intense emotional interactions. It’s the abruptness of the movements—a dancer will stand completely still for moments, then all of the sudden throw herself onto the back of another dancer—that make Elam’s choreography so intense. It’s strangely comfortable to watch, as if you are having a pleasant, but non-linear, bizarre dream. Just as the cast of five seems to fall into slumber themselves, Elam emerges through a smoke screen to Elton John’s Rocket Man. And it’s funny. Really funny.

The crowd was anxious to see Keigwin’s work during the second half of the show—mainly because their friends were performing. His first piece, Caffeinated, was a work commissioned by NYU’s dance department and featured Tisch dancers in the highly charged dance, performed to a relentlessly energetic Philip Glass score. Natural Selection didn’t let up on the intense, unyielding music (Michael Gordon’s Weather) and Keigwin’s company was literally dancing on the walls. Ying-Ying Shiau sprinted upstage and with the assistance of two other dancers ran up the wall then across the bricks at the rear of the stage. And the finale? Another stab at Ravel’s famed score in the form of a New York City street scene. Bolero NYC included more than 50 performers. The crowd was as varied as the “average” New Yorker: A very tall man wearing only a tie and Speedos, a gaggle of giggling girls carrying balloons, a high-fashion woman and her tiny toy-sized pup, and a woman and her baby—who stole the show when at one point all the dancers quickly exited the stage and the toddler stood on stage all alone staring into the audience.

6. Chris Elam is a strange one, a seemingly quirky man who makes quirky dances. But they are compellingly quirky, and the program he presented in May at Performance Space 122, ''Throw People,'' was terrific. Too much modern dance today implies theatricality but remains so abstract and disconnected that the meaning is hard to discern. Mr. Elam is hardly explicit, but his imagery cuts to the quick.

MY several journeys outside the New York metropolitan area this year could only touch on all the exciting dance going on around the country and the world. So I'll confine the events -- chronologically ordered -- that particularly moved and impressed me to New York, still a hyperactive, hypercreative dance town with ample candidates for any 10 Best list.

1. Jeremy Wade has a gift. But how can he top ''Glory,'' a mostly nude, overtly erotic duet with Jessica Hill at Dance Theater Workshop in February. More nudity? More sex? More danger? More dance? Whatever he does should be exciting to see.

2. Soledad Barrio purges flamenco of its latter-day theatrical trappings, evoking the grit, mystery and passion of a Gypsy encampment. Her performance in the New York Flamenco Festival at City Center in February was riveting.

3. Stan Won't Dance, a spinoff of the pioneering DV8 Physical Theater in London, offered the year's best incarnation of British physical theater, ''Sinner,'' at Performance Space 122 in March. The tension between two men -- one a sexual dominator, the other seemingly passive but about to explode a nail bomb in the London bar where they meet -- was truly a theatrical experience, with a pungent spoken text. It was also ingeniously choreographed and brilliantly danced.

4. The Finnish Tero Saarinen's terrifying version of ''Le Sacre du Printemps,'' in which the protagonist becomes the hunted, was impressive enough at the Joyce Theater in March. But his ''Borrowed Light'' at Jacob's Pillow in July was even better: an exalted distillation of Shaker beliefs and community.

5. The Diamond Project, New York City Ballet's often critically disparaged series of newly commissioned ballets, seen last spring at the New York State Theater, had its usual ups and downs. But there were three ups, each memorable in its way. ''In Vento'' of Mauro Bigonzetti, in May, was a theatricalized depiction of a tortured loner and a femme fatale, superbly incarnated at the premiere by Benjamin Millepied and Maria Kowroski, one of several showcases for Ms. Kowroski this year. Jorma Elo's ''Slice to Sharp,'' in June, was a perhaps shallow but spectacularly physical piece of nonstop virtuosity for some of the company's many fine dancers. And Alexei Ratmansky's ''Russian Seasons,'' also in June, blended contemporary ballet and Mr. Ratmansky's roots to poetic effect.

6. Chris Elam is a strange one, a seemingly quirky man who makes quirky dances. But they are compellingly quirky, and the program he presented in May at Performance Space 122, ''Throw People,'' was terrific. Too much modern dance today implies theatricality but remains so abstract and disconnected that the meaning is hard to discern. Mr. Elam is hardly explicit, but his imagery cuts to the quick.

7. American Ballet Theater's two seasons -- at the Metropolitan Opera House in the late spring and early summer, and at City Center in the fall -- offered the usual quotient of fine dancing and alternately hoary and lively choreography. For me the single most exciting moment came at the season-opening gala in May: in an excerpt from Kenneth MacMillan's ''Manon,'' Diana Vishneva, as the wayward courtesan, was passed sensuously yet degradingly from man to anonymous man.

8. Yvonne Rainer seems to be making a welcome return to choreography after years of devoting herself to experimental film. But her most striking achievement this year came in a third form, literature, with her fascinating memoir of her earlier dance years, ''Feelings Are Facts.'' Personality and artistry are never far apart with Ms. Rainer, and both receive full attention here.

9. Mark Morris had an even busier year than usual, with his company's 25th-anniversary season in Brooklyn in the spring, a dance for the Boston Ballet in March, the New York premiere of his up-and-down version of ''Sylvia'' at the Lincoln Center Festival in July and the return of ''The Hard Nut'' at Bard College this month. But there were two clear highlights: ''Mozart Dances,'' a Mostly Mozart Festival commission at the New York State Theater in August, and -- to violate my self-imposed geographical strictures -- his dance version of Purcell's ''King Arthur,'' which I caught up with in Berkeley, Calif., in October and which will come to the New York City Opera in 2008. The Mozart was delicious musical abstraction, full of Mr. Morris's warm humanism; ''King Arthur'' was a loony, delightful farce.

10. Bill T. Jones presented his ''Blind Date,'' first seen in 2005, in July at the Lincoln Center Festival. But his winner was ''Chapel/Chapter,'' which had its premiere this month at the Gatehouse in Harlem. An impassioned, compassionate meditation on murder and justice, Mr. Jones's new dance made an enormous moral impression, in large part through its very sublimation of politics into art.

If you’re looking for lithe bodies moving in space, you will find them. If you’re looking for expressions of joy, grief, love, rock ‘n roll, and childlike imagination, you will find them, too. And if you’re looking for new choreographic voices emerging in young, practiced, and well-established dance makers, you will find them all at Dancenow/NYC, the homegrown fall dance festival of local companies and performers.

“Breakfast With You” might not have been the closer, but it stole the show, and rightfully so. Choreographed by Chris Elam and performed with Jocelyn Tobias to music by Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen, this duet displays the awkward coupling of two loving klutzes. What makes it work is the absolute realness that both performers bring to their roles; they’re not pretending to be nerds, they really are. In the array of off-kilter interactions, mothering and not-so-mothering lifts, private motifs, and unison dancing that goes in and out of synch along with the voices of Collins and Cohen, precious fleeting moments of elegant beauty emerge; two ugly ducklings can make golden eggs.

Dancenow/NYC continues at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater September 14 – 16 at 9:30 p.m. with the DancemOpolitan series, featuring 30 dancemakers in three different cabaret performance events, hosted by choreographer Leigh Garrett.

If you think you know every way two people can intertwine their bodies – think again. Chris Elam’s “Throw People,” playing through Sunday at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 Fourth Avenue, employs what seems to be an endless array of interpersonal movement. Dancers interlock arms and legs, make loopholes that are both literal and figurative, lunge into walking carousels, diving boards, and become swings, as well as expressing personified versions of raw gut emotion.

“Throw People” was developed under an artist-in-residence grant from the Joyce Theater. This work first premiered in May at Performance Space 122 with live music by composer Andy Tierstein and evocative lighting by Stacey Boggs. An enthusiastic and positive response led to a second run here in Brooklyn.

The physical beauty of the dancers and their extensive training were in themselves a good enough reason to see a performance. Fortunately there is much more.

The piece consists of two parts. First comes “Land Flat,” a quartet for women dancers who start out perched in the corner like four birds about to take flight. With their arms winged back and on the verge of a flutter, they take off, at first dancing in unison, but eventually swirling around until they discover one another. The power of being part of a foursome leads to some beautiful movement, including instances when they break into counterpoint, where two dancers on the floor spiral and lunge in sequence with the two standing women.

In addition to all the group work, each performer has her own story to tell; the fact that the audience can see their facial expressions keeps the piece charged with human emotion. The action transpiring between them seems to mean any number of things: see what you come up with.

Part two is the companion piece, “Throw People.” This is where the scenario warms up, and the two lead men get into some pretty hairy moments. One second they are ensnarled in a tug of war; the very next we see one of them hanging upside down in his partner’s arms, moaning like a monkey. Just moments later they are leaning on one another and entwined in a circling form that resembles a carousel. The ride is brief, though, and the next thing you know one dancer is on a mountain climbing expedition on his counterpart’s shoulders. Adding to the intrigue, a third party wanders on stage an starts nosing around. Humor. Grief. Love. A light touch followed by impact of epic proportions. You get it all here, though often the meaning is left up to the viewer.
Perhaps throwing his viewers for a loop each time they think they can figure it all out is part of Chris Elam’s style. The gifted Brown University graduate mixes high concept with raw emotions in combinations that range from startling to just plain funny.

Unlike many other contemporary choreographers, Elam did not study classical dance as a youngster. Instead he underwent six years of Laban Movement Analysis – a system based on the theories of Rudolph Laban — where students learn to discover their own form of movement using components such as space, weight, time and flow. As an undergraduate at Brown, Elam started out as a public policy major, but, lo and behold, the day came during sophomore year when he realized he needed to take what he loved the most and run with it.

Since graduating in 1998, Elam has spent a great deal of time traveling and studying the dance traditions of other cultures, including Turkey, Brazil, Cuba and the Netherlands. But, by far, the nation that influenced him the most was Indonesia. There he immersed himself in an 8-month intensive course of traditional Balinese dance, and the experience opened the door to an entirely new level of movement. “In Balinese dance,” he says, “what’s interesting is the way movement transforms people. The dancers literally embody and become other things while they are on stage.” Thus, a king might morph into a dog, or a bird, all while performing to traditional music.

Elam’s next work, set to start development this fall, will be developed under the auspices of New York University’s Skirball Performing Arts Center.

A digital motion sample that Elam’s company has created in tandem with Apple Computers is a recent departure. Clips from the project, in addition to snippets of live interviews with Chris Elam, can be found at his company Web site, www.misnomer.org.

Though there is no plot behind “Throw People,” plenty of discoveries and truths are being told. “Each person has a story to tell,” says Elam, “and we see them live it. The piece works with intimacy and the multiplicity of how people relate to one another.” He says it’s an attempt to communicate the importance of human effort, and to let the audience see the earnest struggle between people as they go about trying to achieve their ends. He emphasizes that ultimately it is the human effort that counts; it is more important than actual achievement.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2006

Bizarre and comical, Chris Elam's Misnomer Dance Theater blurs the line between humans behaving weirdly and animals at play. "Throw People," a two-part concert that premiered in May at P.S. 122, will run August 17-27 at The Brooklyn Lyceum. There is plenty of throwing, along with climbing, contorting, balancing, and twisting - all on the surfaces of their bodies. Dancers with elastic limbs lurk in releve and slap at each other's elongated bodies. Elam choreographs from his background of traditional Balinese as well as modern dance, and his six-member Misnomer Dance Theater has performed in places such as Indonesia and Turkey. This summer extends their travels to virtual space when Apple Computers launched a documentary featuring the company on their homepage, www.apple.com. See www.misnomer.org. - Emily Macel

During the second of two world premieres by Chris Elam/Misnomer Dance Theater, I finally got a handle on the show’s title–"Throw People." I was watching Throw People, the dance, and thinking about how Elam views his performers and how they partner one another. Suddenly, I thought of throw rugs and throw pillows. Some might find Elam’s style an acquired taste but its exceptional imagery has won him and his performers a heap of critical praise.

Land Flat presents a quartet of beings--Brynne Billingsley, Jennifer Harmer, Coco Karol, and Dorian Nuskind-Oder–who are so strange in carriage, propulsion, and interaction that they could represent the first sightings of an as yet unidentified species. They certainly do not behave as humans or as recognizable animals or insects do. What looks awkward, abrupt, or even painful to us might be, as they understand things, quite beautiful. Now imagine these creatures putting on what they might consider a ballet–an excerpt from an alien Swan Lake, perhaps--and you’ve got some idea of Land Flat. Or if that’s too hard to wrap your mind around, try this: Ask a German shepherd to dance a ballet. How about a dolphin? A scorpion? I think Elam sets himself and his dancers these kinds of challenges, crafting the kind of works you don’t see every day. Some observers have likened Misnomer’s style to Momix and Pilobolus, but by comparison those troupes look airbrushed, sanitized, and tarted up with high-tech lighting effects. They might be thrilling to some, but they don’t make you chuckle and recoil at the same time.

Throw People--set to a mellifluous, mysterious score by Andy Teirstein, played live by Teirstein, Peck Allmond, and Diana Herold–is the wilder and woolier of the two works. Elam, Karol, and Luke Wiley remain recognizably human throughout but behave even wackier, if possible, than the creatures in Land Flat. (In fact, Wiley not only is recognizably human, but if he had not dyed his copious dark hair copper-red, he’d look exactly like my sister-in-law!) Elam and Karol start out by delicately molding their stretchy bodies to each other, regarding one another as physical puzzles to be solved. The distortions and contortions, the bizarre partnering choices and risks go on and on–a seemingly endless but never tiring stream of childlike curiosity and creativity from the brightest, and scariest, kids on the block. If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, don’t expect Elam to walk it. (Visit Chris Elam/Misnomer Dance Theater at www.misnomer.org.)

©2006, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

It was a strange, oddly absorbing world that Chris Elam established in the course of this program of two intimately scaled dances. Dancers nuzzled, butted heads, walked on delicate tiptoe that made their legs resemble those of deer, and generally met up with a degree of intimacy that was both deeply sensual and ferocious. It’s not that the four women in Land Flat,” the opening work, or the trio that performed the concluding “Throw People” were indulging in specific imitations of animals. But last year, Elam’s troupe performed an outdoor work in Battery Park in which he scattered birdseed to invite the participation of nearby birds, and during the course of “Land Flat,” the wonderfully serene and alert women did sometimes evoke bird imagery, with their inquisitively bobbing heads and oddly hyper-extended arms jutting out from sharp angles at the shoulder and elbow.

While his background includes study of Balinese dance forms and time spent in Cuba, Elam’s work here evoked not so much specific cultural associations as a quirkily inquisitive spirit — and a fascination with the degree to which bodies can wrap and twist around each other, often with extreme, nearly disconcerting, results. He subjects the dancers’ knees — his own more than any others, in the often dangerous-looking entanglements of “Throw People” — to significant weight bearing and near-distortion.

In “Land Flat,” Brynne Billingsley, Jennifer Harmer, Coco Karol and Dorian Nuskind-Oder were barelegged and wore varied, mostly pale, dresses that could have come from a thrift shop. They began their calm, exploratory maneuvers in silence, initially in unison but then separating, though they sustained a strong mutual awareness, with wide-eyed expressions that gave them a look of being ready for anything. As various, mostly understated, musical selections came and went, there were moments of suspension and stillness. Their bare legs and elegant relevé positions at times evoked the movement of storks, and they frequently clasped their arms behind their backs or through their legs, holding a balance with an air of quizzical expectancy. Towards the end of the 25-minute piece, as faintly Indian-sounding music was heard in intermittent, spare segments, the focus narrowed to a more intense exploration between Coco Karol and the one woman, whose flowing dress had a distinctly romantic sweep. The quartet then reassembled as the first few measures of a Donizetti aria were heard, clustering together and clutching one another. Just as it seemed something new was about to begin, the lights faded out and the piece ended, leaving an intriguing, but not unsatisfying, sense of incompleteness.

Things were much rougher and less decorous in “Throw People,” a trio for Elam, Karol and Luke Wiley. Accompanied by live musicians (placed at opposite walls) performing Andy Teirstein’s score for sax, marimba, accordion and mandolin, they enacted a scenario that by the end reverberated with echoes of Jerome Robbins’ “The Cage.” For a considerable time, all the focus was on Elam and the amazing Karol — a tremulously delicate yet ready-for-anything dancer as they entwined and rough-housed in a demanding duet that ranged from the provocative to the grotesque, often testing the limits of their bodies’ strength and pliability. Wearing beinge leotards with stripes of thick ruffles attached, they were fearless and daring, and demonstrated an amazing degree of trust. Meanwhile, Wiley, in a grey-blue jumpsuit, strode around and kept his distance, seemingly not part of the scenario.

Eventually, he peeled off his jumpsuit to reveal a similar tank suit, with orange ruffles that matched those on Karol’s, and soon they became a mutual fascinated pair, exploring and testing one another’s bodies with creaturely spontaneity. Elam soon returned, fierce and seemingly betrayed, to briefly grapple with the other tow before facing off with Wiley, whom he tossed to the ground on his back with an alarming thud. From the way Karol soon re-allied herself with Elam, one began to feel she (with her blend of waif-like innocence and minxish slyness) had been doing his bidding — perhaps softening Wiley up for the kill. The lights went down on the two of them hovering over Wiley’s prone body.

Both these works sustained one’s interest and revealed Elam as a choreographer who knows how to allow space and calm into his works. His mysterious investigations hovered at the edge of violence, and there may be a limit to how far his hyper-intense extremes of yoga flexibility and Pilobolus-like body entanglements can be taken. But he seems to be well in control of his material and confident in the ability of movement and music to express something unique and persuasive, without the addition of a lot of bells and whistles — and there’s certainly something to be said for that.

Photos by Mark Sadan.

Volume 4, No. 19
May 15, 2006
copyright ©2006 Susan Reiter
www.danceviewtimes.com

If you had to publish a book called “101 Ways to Succeed on the Downtown Dance Scene,” you’d probably want Christopher Elam to write it. The 30-year-old Brown graduate’s schedule fancies a harried to-do list of an in-demand choreographer. Judging by his resume, Elam must spend half his life in rehearsals and the other half writing grant applications. His performances have been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, The Joyce and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. It makes you wonder just how many gifted young choreographers with less intestinal fortitude for self-promotion have fallen by the wayside in this crazy city.

Elam’s innovative technique draws inspiration from a myriad of terpsichorean traditions such as Balinese dance, Cuban salsa and contemporary idioms that result in an angular, distinct style; an imprimatur all his own that some simply qualify as “weird.” Though labeled a late starter (he took his first formal classes at age 20), he had already choreographed 15 dances by the time he learned his first proper tendu. One performance by his Misnomer Dance Theater this year showcased dancers slithering about like alien reptilia, followed by an almost Hopperesque two-person composition about the inability to connect, which took place on a bucolic rural window sill.

Fast-forward to Elam’s current show, Throw People, inspired by (of all things!) Indonesian chicken fights, those terrifyingly implausible events in which chickens are thrown into rings and tear each other apart with razor blades. There’s a lot of rough and tumble partnering in the pieces, but no razors or cutting, so don’t be frightened away. The evening just might unfold as one of your most interesting.

Throw People,” the title of Chris Elam’s new two-part dance, can be read partly as an imperative. People are thrown and twisted into human origami and tied into three-person pretzels with only two feet on the ground. Elam’s wonderfully strange and unpredictable choreography, however, makes his dancers seem less like people than anthropomorphized beasts. The first section, filled with mock-balletic gestures, suggests the preening animals of “Fantasia.” The second, for which Andy Teirstein’s score is performed live on eclectic instruments, is rougher; its pas de deux could be between a giraffe and an orangutan. (P.S. 122, at 150 First Ave. 212-352-3101. May 11-12 at 8, May 13 at 5 and 8, and May 14 at 5.)
CLOSE WINDOW

Mingling elements of Balinese dance with a propensity for tying himself in knots, Chris Elam interprets inner quandaries and drives as muscular tangles. Yet the body shapes in his choreography are precisely designed and assumed, and little in his short, highly original works seems fraught. Although he and his dancers may occasionally look worried or excited as they cope with their own recalcitrant limbs, step onto a colleague to get a better view, or try to fit their angled arms into some composite shape, they behave as if all these implausible things were commonplace. As a result, as with the Simpsons, they look like an alien race that resembles our own in often witty or touching ways.

The three premieres on his recent program show how he is working to develop character and narrative. There's a competition afoot in Ta ta ta among Brynne Billingsley, Dorian Nuskind-Oder, and Adam Scher—all clad in red shorts and singlets. Their goals and the nature of their collaboration are enigmas; we might as well try to figure out the habits of rare mammals by watching them for 10 minutes. To robust songs by the Italian pop composer and singer Paolo Conte, they bustle around, race slo-mo, sit in a circle and bounce on their butts. Aloft on Scher's shoulder, Nuskind-Oder looks as thrilled as if she were looking out into a glorious new world. The most peculiar gesture: people suddenly sticking both arms straight up as if hanging them out to dry,

Elam's movement style is admirably suited to copeless duets. At the beginning of Fill in the Blank, when he jumps onto the stage in a spraddled stance, he's clearly fascinated by Jennifer Harmer, who advances on him in a stiff position that mimics his own (at this point, composer Rob Erickson, who's mixing his score in real time, provides complementary buzzing, humming, and high voices). Elam tries to fence this accommodating woman in with arms that don't seem to bend; anyway, how do you contain a partner who keeps changing her shape? She's strong, though; when he kneels pensively on her bent-over back, she slowly lowers herself to the floor. No wonder he plucks an invisible something for her out of the air.

Toes of a Snail is Elam's most ambitious piece to date in terms of narrative and, although it wanders a little—not fully clarifying its protagonists' goals and problems—it's fascinating. The opening image is clear as a bell and delicious in its weirdness. Abbey Dehnert makes winging arms over a heap composed of Billingsley, Harmer, Nuskind-Oder, and Scher. Erickson, again live-mixing his score, gives us a soothing woman's voice altered so that her song sounds like a bizarre lullaby. When the four sit up suddenly, we hear the squawk of baby birds. Given that feathers here and there deck Sarah McMillian's costumes, we're prepared for a postmodern nest-leaving scenario. Which is sort of what we get. Wonderfully odd visions abound: Scher toddles about stiff-legged, inclined forward, mouth open wide. He looks like the baby of the family, watching while the girls take off, but it's Nuskind-Oder (dressed just like Dehnert) who often clings to Dehnert's leg. There are many departing and arriving flights.Harmer moves seductively with Scher, standing on him to scan the horizon, clutching his upraised leg as if it were a mast, and joining with him to form a composite "snail" (he's not entirely sure he likes all this). In the end, it seems Dehnert will be left alone. She's not happy. Nuskind-Oder reluctantly returns and tips her over into an awkward pose, chin on the ground; it's the same position Dehnert earlier forced Nuskind-Oder into. It doesn't really bode well despite the tenderness.

Because those who populate Elam's dances are so strange, it's important that the work be performed "straight" and not commented on. Playing a character is different from performing an attitude (Billingsley does a bit of the latter and so—very rarely—does Elam). For the most part, the vigorously athletic, fully invested dancers do convey the idea that their curious shenanigans are both spontaneous and a meaningful part of tribal life.

Misnomer Presents Toes of a Snail

While "dance" isn't exactly a misnomer for this young company's work, it doesn't quite capture the full range of what they accomplish. Choreographer Chris Elam spent years abroad on various teaching fellowships and commissions, and his culture-soaking nature infuses Misnomer's work with movement idiosyncrasies from those distant lands. Everything from pedestrian motions to native dance techniques work their way into the pieces, yet none of these myriad influences ever overshadow Elam's distinct contortionistic tendencies. Often pushing traditional dance boundaries, he wraps and unravels moving bodies to reveal occasionally humorous emotional abstractions. Experience this fresh voice in modern dance with the Cuba-inspired Toes of a Snail. (CEH)

Note: Toes of a Snail is accompanied by live music from Rob Erickson.

During the second of two world premieres by Chris Elam/Misnomer Dance Theater, I finally got a handle on the show’s title–"Throw People." I was watching Throw People, the dance, and thinking about how Elam views his performers and how they partner one another. Suddenly, I thought of throw rugs and throw pillows. Some might find Elam’s style an acquired taste but its exceptional imagery has won him and his performers a heap of critical praise.

Land Flat presents a quartet of beings--Brynne Billingsley, Jennifer Harmer, Coco Karol, and Dorian Nuskind-Oder–who are so strange in carriage, propulsion, and interaction that they could represent the first sightings of an as yet unidentified species. They certainly do not behave as humans or as recognizable animals or insects do. What looks awkward, abrupt, or even painful to us might be, as they understand things, quite beautiful. Now imagine these creatures putting on what they might consider a ballet–an excerpt from an alien Swan Lake, perhaps--and you’ve got some idea of Land Flat. Or if that’s too hard to wrap your mind around, try this: Ask a German shepherd to dance a ballet. How about a dolphin? A scorpion? I think Elam sets himself and his dancers these kinds of challenges, crafting the kind of works you don’t see every day. Some observers have likened Misnomer’s style to Momix and Pilobolus, but by comparison those troupes look airbrushed, sanitized, and tarted up with high-tech lighting effects. They might be thrilling to some, but they don’t make you chuckle and recoil at the same time.

Throw People--set to a mellifluous, mysterious score by Andy Teirstein, played live by Teirstein, Peck Allmond, and Diana Herold–is the wilder and woolier of the two works. Elam, Karol, and Luke Wiley remain recognizably human throughout but behave even wackier, if possible, than the creatures in Land Flat. (In fact, Wiley not only is recognizably human, but if he had not dyed his copious dark hair copper-red, he’d look exactly like my sister-in-law!) Elam and Karol start out by delicately molding their stretchy bodies to each other, regarding one another as physical puzzles to be solved. The distortions and contortions, the bizarre partnering choices and risks go on and on–a seemingly endless but never tiring stream of childlike curiosity and creativity from the brightest, and scariest, kids on the block. If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, don’t expect Elam to walk it. (Visit Chris Elam/Misnomer Dance Theater at www.misnomer.org.)

©2006, Eva Yaa Asantewaa