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Chris Elam at Concord Academy
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL
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Chris Elam’s dances — his Misnomer Dance Theater opened the Summer Stages series at Concord Academy last Thursday — tend to begin with amorphous shapes that only gradually and only partially resolve into dancing humans. By the time you can identify the protuberances as arms or knees and the sloping lumps as rounded backs or necks and you start figuring out how these items are attached to one another, the whole configuration will have rearranged itself into another riddle. Elam doesn’t seem concerned about clearing up the anatomical uncertainty he’s created. His dances don’t show us how perfection can grow out of chaos, as a more conventional choreographic rule would require. With him, chaos gropes around in search of logic but rises only to a more predictable chaos. In his solo Cast-Iron Crutches, a naked figure in a dance belt curls around itself, arms prying themselves open from a lock through the legs to grapple with the air in twisted gestures. Standing, he arches his body backward, then recoils into a step. As if to gain momentum, he flings both arms across his body in one direction, but his stiff, crossed legs block him from traveling sideways. He ends the dance standing on one leg, once again curled in a complicated embrace with his other leg in his arms. At times Elam’s work looks like merely a million ways to fracture the body or glue it to another body. But there’s a rudimentary gleam in the eyes of the dancers that makes you think of human behavior. The women in Trying All Ends, a work in progress, attempt with childlike concentration to clamp their bodies together, but once they succeed, there’s nothing to do but hang on. One who’s sprawled on the floor reaches out to another who’s circling around her. The circler grabs the outstretched hand and drags her strangely inert comrade with her. Later a third woman enters, and after some contorted head butts and torqued nuzzlings, two of them team up to bounce on the hands and feet of the woman on the floor. The piece ends with one woman piggybacked on another and the third bellied up to them, so that they’re plastered together in a single shape with no front or back. One step at a time, they achieve locomotion, just as their fused shape starts to melt. A woman’s voice sings a sublime Henry Purcell aria. Musical contradiction loads more irony onto the dancers’ ineffectual strivings. Intimacy in Transition is accompanied by lush arrangements of three Gershwin songs. Instead of swooping off in a romantic dream, the two parties to a potential pas de deux (Elam and Abbey Dehnert) fumble it entirely. Framed both by the music and by two empty picture frames, the bumpkin boyfriend and the willing but clueless girl know there’s an idea about dancing, and they try a few smooth steps. But they can’t fit themselves and the frames together to manage a real partnership. They try the frames in different relationships, like abstract art, but nothing leads to love or even a foxtrot. At the end he’s still fixated on her like a hunting dog, and she’s holding both frames in front of herself, smiling and looking around hopefully, but not at him. Elam has studied in Turkey and Bali, but his dance has no obvious multi-cultural overtones. Dehnert and Amber Sloan in Dreams of Your Acceptance might be engaging in a hapless game of follow the leader as they curl up together head to foot, stalk around with clutching hands and stomping feet like monsters. Parts of the piece are accompanied by treble voices and a piano performing folksongs. The clarity and innocence of these children made a shocking contrast with the elaborately contrived playfulness of the dancers. But I don’t think parody was intended. The hour-long performance ended with Dehnert, Sloan, Jennifer Harmer, and Laura Pocius as a pair of bimorphic beings in Misnomer. David Darling’s romantic music for piano, harmonica, and bass could have accompanied the soupiest scenes of a TV movie. But the entangled women took it all seriously, rolling their knotted-together bodies from side to side, inspecting the extra legs that appeared between their legs with a certain amount of sexual interest. When they separated for a few moments, they formed two new pairs, and at the end a permanent partner switch seemed to be under consideration.
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