Intimate Transformation
Chris Elam is trying to define himself
as a dancer and citizen of the world

Chris Elam is not famous... yet. But give him time. At 26, he's already been compared to an early Mark Morris. And like Morris, Elam appears to have been born to move. Although Elam's work does not yet seem as completely ambitious as Morris', it is incredibly fresh, moving, and delicious to watch.

Elam is currently rounding out a three-week run at Chashama, near Times Square, in what used to be porno shop territory. It was there where I saw Elam and his Misnomer Dance Company. So taken by his performance, I sought out a meeting a few days later. When we met at a cafe near Union Square, Elam spoke candidly about his life and work. He talked about traveling and transformations, intimacy between two men, and the interconnectedness -- yet separateness -- of sex and sexuality, all themes evident in Elam's choreography.

On stage, Elam appears several lanky inches taller than his real height, which he says, is “five foot eleven and three quarters.” His dark, bittersweet-chocolate eyes and expressive brows are reminiscent of an intense, young Dean Stockwell. He has a habit of making structures with his fingers while he talks, and he lights up as his long arms, spidery fingers, and T-square shoulders work through the various architectures of dance he uses.

Dark, lean, and constantly animated, Elam moves with the precision of a praying mantis and the grace of an antelope. He whisks the edgy-limbed animal changes of Balinese court dance into an emulsion of smoky flavors from Turkey, throws in a touch of Pilobolus, whose Jonathan Walker was an early supporter, and arrives with a mix all his own. He believes, like all great dancers, in self-invention. “I was choreographing for eight years before I ever took a real modern dance class. I began in a public high school in Larchmont, where my parents moved after they left Manhattan when I was 10. My mother is a Jewish school teacher and my father, a stock trader whose family was devoutly Christian for generations.”

At Larchmont, he took four years of dance classes emphasizing movement and improvisation. “Basically, they taught teens to be comfortable touching each other, something that's hard for teenagers to do.” He choreographed seven pieces there and won an award for choreography upon graduation.

Brown University's dance department was supportive of a kid who, like Martha Graham, bypassed dance gospel (ballet first; modern -- if you're lucky -- second) and went directly into making dances. Elam started Misnomer during his senior year at Brown University. The company's name is from one of his earliest pieces.

His major in public policy allowed him to spend his last semester in Bali, studying cultural anthropology. Dance in Bali is such a part of life that the Balinese language has no word for “dancer” or “choreographer.” He worked with Pak Kantar, a master dancer, and was invited to perform publicly. “Bali was a natural source for my work. Dancers are always transforming themselves into animals, characters, or kings. It's the only Hindu island in Indonesia, which is overwhelmingly Moslem. The people are incredibly friendly. While in Bali, I was accepted into NYU's Tisch School of the Arts dance program. That's where I started to understand modern dance. You know, the history... everything.”

At NYU, Elam went through that transformation dancers speak of, called “the change,” when their bodies become instruments of dance. From all the support he'd had as a kid -- from high school into undergraduate work at Brown -- he never felt the unnerving competition that wracks professional dance in New York. “I never felt a loss that I did not have that background so many other dancers have, when they start programs early and all they can think of is, 'Am I going to make it into a company?'”

Since graduation, whenever he wasn't working on Wall Street to keep himself financially afloat, Elam has been bringing Misnomer Dance Company back into public view. “I've always felt that I had a dance company, and I was the director, even if the only person in the company was me.” He accepted an invitation to appear at a dance festival in Brazil and danced with another choreographer Andros Zins-Browne, doing male duets. “I like playing with the non-sexual components of maleness, with intimacies in non-sexual manners.”

One of his memories of Rio was an afternoon of hang-gliding off the cliffs by the beach with the Backstreet Boys. “They were there doing a concert, and we were all out hang-gliding together. It's one of those memories you don't forget. I thought, 'Wow! Dance got me hang gliding with the Backstreet Boys!'”

In 2001, Elam was invited to spend six months in Istanbul as a choreographer and teacher at the State Conservatory of the Arts. He made six pieces while he was there, traveled extensively, and stayed for a while, alone, in a 17-room Ottoman mansion. Darkly handsome, he was mistaken as Turkish. He fell in love with Istanbul, he says. “People are cooler and more hip than in New York. You'll find more out at 4 a.m. in Istanbul than here.”

I asked him if he found Turkish men “seductive.”

“Seductive? Everyone in Turkey is seductive, but they are even more so in Bali.”

I was afraid I had embarrassed him -- but embarrassment can be a transformation, too.

“I'm straight,” he explained. “But I believe in dealing with intimacy and touching. It's very important to me. Sexuality is a large component of intimacy, but intimacy, I think, is larger than sexuality. Sexual feelings do ebb and flow through Misnomer. Sometimes I have a foot that comes through a crotch. Things are open to interpretation. My dance for two women, 'Dreams of Long Acceptance,' is really about adolescent girls, their competition, and other feelings. But I know eroticism comes into it.”

I found his solo piece Cast Iron Crutches very moving, more poignant than Graham's famous solo Lamentations. He made the dance after a trip to Poland's concentration camps. “Cast iron crutches aren't helpful. Basically, I am talking about injury and not being able to help yourself.”

In the dance, performed almost nude, he uses his long, flexible spine like a calligraphy brush and goes from extended balance on one leg to transforming himself into an ostrich. “Each person has his own awkwardness. I like working with the natural spikiness of people, their strange oddness. There is a pathos and beauty in awkwardness.”

Misnomer refers to one word being taken for another word -- Chris Elam and his strange spiky characters and transformations will perform again on Sunday. Just before leaving, Chris said to me, “What I do is all about self definition. You must say, 'This is what I do,' then become it.”

As a young, very gifted choreographer working against hard odds, Chris Elam has “become it.”