Point Toe, Click Mouse

 

THE choreographer Chris Elam makes strange, contorted dances in which people knot themselves into compact sculptural forms, tangling their limbs with another’s in what can look like a fervent attempt at human connection. His company, Misnomer, tends to perform in downtown sites with few frills, and his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is also his office headquarters.

These details would suggest that Mr. Elam is yet another talent pursuing his personal vision on the fringes of the contemporary dance scene. That definition would be far too limiting for Mr. Elam.

Over the last few years, in addition to garnering critical kudos for his choreography, Mr. Elam has become a pioneer in a challenging endeavor for an art form reliant on live performance: enabling dance to use the Internet as effectively as music and film have.

In October, Misnomer received just over $1 million, one of 10 grants of from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, to pursue Mr. Elam’s idea of developing an online model for arts organizations. And in early November, the Rockefeller Foundation gave its annual New York City Cultural Innovation Award to Misnomer, adding $150,000 to the company coffers.

The money will go toward what Mr. Elam calls his Audience Engagement Platform. Borrowing a page from indie-rock bands that have little means for marketing or distribution, he envisions Web sites with streaming video of rehearsals and viewer comments; live video chats with dancers and audiences; and user profiles that are maintained in a database.

The aim is to nurture a following that can view the course of creating a show, virtually, and even help direct it as well as comment on it afterward. Mr. Elam’s embrace of the Internet, even before this project, has made him the public face of contemporary dance within the technology world and beyond. In the past year he has choreographed the music video “Wanderlust” for the Icelandic pop singer Bjork; spoken at the Fortune magazine Brainstorm: Tech conference; been the subject of a short Sundance film and featured in an Apple documentary and a Business Week online interview; and received a $10,000 Ideablob award for inventive business ideas.

But he hasn’t forgone his first love. Somehow he has also found time to choreograph a new full-length work, “Being Together,” for his company’s two-week season, which opens on Dec. 4 at the Joyce SoHo.

Mr. Elam, 32, started dancing in high school and has been interested in the possibilities of the Internet since he formed Misnomer in 1998, while he was studying public policy and computer science at Brown.

“We really started to recognize what a powerful tool the Web could be about three and a half years ago,” said Mr. Elam, who is tall and thin and speaks at high speed with evangelistic intensity. “The live arts share a common challenge here. In music or video it’s completely different because there is a product to sell. Those of us who are selling ourselves on a stage need to invent a new model.”

That’s just what Mr. Elam is attempting to do, with the help of the money from the Duke foundation, awarded specifically to explore new business practices. (Misnomer, which employs six dancers, will still have to raise money for its artistic needs.) He is creating the platform with some 15 “test artists,” arts-service organizations, a software-development company and an advisory board drawn from the arts and technology.

Misnomer is by far the smallest of the 10 organizations that received the Duke award; other recipients include dance luminaries like the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, the Cunningham Foundation and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, as well as theater companies like Steppenwolf and the Wooster Group.

“What was striking for the panel was the degree to which Chris was rigorously thoughtful about technology and audiences,” Ben Cameron, the foundation’s director for the arts, said in a telephone interview. “He was very up front in early proposals about how attracting and engaging audiences was the single biggest challenge that dance companies face. We felt that he was potentially blazing new ground by thinking about a platform for multiple arts organizations, not just his own.”

Mr. Elam’s project has two goals. One is to create a supple online system that performing arts organizations can use to their own ends. The other is nothing less than redefining the role of the audience member.

People spend a great deal of time online, Mr. Elam said, and to some degree that offers an alternative to going to see a live performance. “In the traditional process audiences and artists only interact for one or two moments a year in a theater,” he said. “Perhaps that’s the most important moment, but they don’t get the interaction or participation they can have in other ways now. The key issue right now for dance companies is, where do we start? How do we find features we like? What are the possibilities? It’s a huge time investment for people to figure out how to use the Internet well.”

Mr. Elam said that an Internet-focused approach has worked on his company’s Web site,misnomer.org, which constantly posts links to his projects, offers blogs from dancers, shows rehearsal footage and attempts to engage new audiences by posting videos on social-networking sites. “We get between 300 and 400 messages a month from all sorts of people, a large proportion of whom have never seen our work live,” he said. “It speaks to the fact that there is an inherent value to the Web.”

For his new project he has scores of other ideas: among them, ways for audiences to request bookings in their towns or regions, which will let companies show presenters how many supporters they have in a particular area; a database so that user profiles are continuously updated; easier ways to respond personally to the audience’s e-mail messages; and building in metrics, or accountability tools, so that companies can see where growth — in audience development, online activity and fund raising — is occurring, or not.

The choreographer Doug Elkins he would be interested in Mr. Elam’s system. “I do think it would be a way of extending audience participation. An extended dialogue would be wonderful.”

Mr. Elam posits that his system will primarily benefit the personal, engaged relationship that can develop between artists and the public. And if choreographers or dancers don’t particularly like the idea of outsiders putting in their two cents? No problem, Mr. Elam said, since the system will be flexible, allowing organizations to use only those tools that interest them.

His project is also — perhaps even principally — about innovations in fund-raising and marketing. “Not everyone wants to, or can, donate money,” he said. “But someone might be a lawyer, willing to look at contracts. Someone else might have branding experience or be able to offer rehearsal space. This system will give companies a way to tap into a support base.”

Brian Rogers, the artistic director of the Chocolate Factory, compared the effort to practices serving other mediums. “In many ways it’s following the model of the independent music world,” he said. “A lot of bands are successful without major labels behind them because they have really strong relationships with audiences online. But it has to feel very genuine, and that’s not easy in the dance world. There’s a limited amount of people who want to see a certain kind of contemporary dance, and there is no point in trying to expand that audience in a huge way. That’s a larger question than the Internet can resolve.”

Mr. Elam sees things differently. “Contemporary dance is never going to be as popular as, say, Michael Jackson,” he said. “But we have had huge increases in our audience simply from being featured on the Sundance site (sundancechannel.com/spotlights) and in the Bjork video. Sometimes people simply don’t know that dance can be like this.”

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