thewinger.com » Reading in Future Perfect

Reading in Future Perfect

April 13, 2007 at 8:27 pm · Filed under misnomer dance theater, chris elam

Last night I went to see Chris Elam’s Misnomer Dance Theater and Keigwin + Company at NYU’s Skirball Center with our friend Tonya Plank. The two companies were well paired and together made an inspired presentation.

I met Chris Elam back in November of 2006 at a rehearsal of Dancing with Robots at Lemurplex. The details of this project, directed by fellow dance technologist Marlon Barios Solano, can be seen here on Marlon’s blog unstablelandscape.net/blog. I was impressed by Chris’ strength and vocabulary of movement. While talking, Chris communicated his interest in using blogs to interact with audiences. I told Chris about the gospel of Doug Fox and urged him to contact Doug.

Last night was the first time I have seen Misnomer perform. I must admit, I am partial to strangeness and Chris Elam is clearly adept in its manifestation. Future Perfect was danced by Brynne Billingsley, Jen Hasmer, Coco Karol and Luke Wiley with occasional appearances by Chris Elam. The lighting was designed by Burke Wilmore while Sarah McMillan and Lesley Wolf fashioned the costumes. The dance includes some clear landmarks that sketch a narrative structure: a floating ball, a repeated leg extension with foot-in-hand, the intermittent sound of a whirling breeze, etc. Despite the presence of these sign posts the dance is sufficiently abstract that it requires active participation on part of the viewer to aid in the structuring the dance’s reading. To use the language of Roland Barthes (care of Randy Martin), the reader is made into “a producer of the text”. I enjoy this responsibility and am happy to write it into the record. I recommend seeing the Saturday performance to anyone else who enjoys this type of active viewership.
I wonder what curiosities Chris Elam will have produced in the future.

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tonya said,

April 15, 2007 @ 3:20 pm

Okay, I blogged on this now too. Thanks again, I really enjoyed it!

Oh, I am going to have to read up on my Barthes; grad school days are such a distant memory now and I vaguely remember that “death of the author” stuff. So, death of the author = death of the choreographer, in the context of dance… Interesting… I really like what you said about dance being an active dialog among the writers / critics / interpreters, the general audience, and the choreographers and dancers and others involved in the production process. Everyone brings something different to it, whether you have a dance background, theory background (Jowitt?), literary background (Acocella), other art background, or a long history of viewing every ballet under the sun (’Oberon’!! )