Intimacy in Transition
December 11 - 21 at P.S. 122

"Chris Elam’s Misnomer Dance Theater hit town with a force I haven’t seen since the early days of Mark Morris" -- Elizabeth Zimmer, The Village Voice

"a true original" -- Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

P.S. 122 presents the World Premiere of Chris Elam and Misnomer Dance Theater’s Intimacy in Transition, a full evening of six "dance-situations." Featuring a company of ten dancers and original music by renowned composers Jesse Manno, Andy Teirstein (appearing live, via a grant from Meet The Composer), and Mike Vargas, performances begin December 11.

Intimacy in Transition uses quick-paced movement and improbable partnering to investigate uncommon intimacies between adolescent sisters, estranged lovers, business partners, and animalistic creatures. Elam fuses traditional Balinese dance and his unique style of broken-flow modern movement. Using 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 human architectures serves to fuse performers into unusual entities.

Misnomer Dance Theater finds tenderness, humor, and absurdity in peoples’ efforts to relate to one another. Elam invents characters that work hard to form meaningful exchanges, sometimes producing poignant and awkward tenderness, at other moments yielding fiercely dismal misunderstandings. He creates wildly kinetic movement that integrates the tense and sculptural quick-action style of Balinese dance with his own broken-flow modern movement. As The Village Voice’s Elizabeth Zimmer wrote, "Fusion doesn't begin to describe what's going on here; Elam is annealing his influences, creating a taut, intense movement language quite remote from the ‘released’ style so common downtown."

With a BA from Brown University, an MFA in Dance from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and a year of study with a traditional Balinese dance master in Indonesia, Chris Elam has presented his choreography at over fifty theaters internationally in places including New York, Indonesia, Brazil, and Turkey. In 2002 he completed a six-month choreographic residency at the State Conservatory for the Arts in Istanbul, Turkey.

Intimacy in Transition runs December 11-21, Thursday - Saturday at 7:30pm & Sunday at 5pm. Tickets are $15. P.S. 122 is located at 150 First Avenue at 9th St. (accessible from the #6 at Astor Place or the L at First Avenue). For reservations or more information, call 212-477-5288 or visit ps122.org.

Funding for Meet The Composer, Inc. is provided with the support of NY State Council on the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, ASCAP, Virgil Thomson Foundation, Jerome Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, The Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust, The Greenwall Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.