“Chris Elam has fashioned a distinctive, engagingly bizarre choreographic style. His skill and clarity of vision delight the soul.” – The Village Voice
“Wonderfully strange and unpredictable choreography.” – The New Yorker
Misnomer Dance Theater finds tenderness, humor, and absurdity in peoples’ efforts to relate to one another. Whether between adolescent sisters, estranged lovers, business partners, or animalistic creatures, Artistic Director Chris Elam invents characters that work hard to form meaningful exchanges, sometimes producing poignant and awkward tenderness, at other moments yielding fiercely dismal misunderstandings.
Elam uses physical illusions as a tool to investigate personal and group transformation. An arm sprouts out of an ear, a person becomes an ostrich, five dancers appear to share a single head and dance a maudlin jig. Assertive contact partnering in which dancers climb upon each other to form improbable human architectures serves to fuse performers into unusual entities.
Drawing from his extensive training in both traditional Balinese and Modern Dance, Elam establishes the human body as a site for cultural exchange. This is achieved by creating wildly kinetic movement that integrates the tense and sculptural quick-action style of Balinese dance with Chris’ own broken-flow modern movement.
