I is another Chris Elam’s improbable partnering BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

The sixth annual "mini-fest" of the American Dance Legacy Institute, headquartered at Brown University, will take place on March 5, with a full day of workshops and a concert in the evening. One of the show’s highlights will be a solo by Brown alum Chris Elam (’98), who has taken the New York dance scene by storm in the past four years, with critics from the Village Voice to the New York Times bowled over by the originality of his choreography (comparing the excitement of his work to the early days of Mark Morris) and by the precise and evocative technique of his seven-year-old company, Misnomer Dance Theater.

Elam actually formed his company during his senior year at Brown, when he realized that, despite his public policy major, he’d been choreographing (and winning awards for his dances) since his first year in a public high school. Subsequent to Brown, he’s received a master’s degree in dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 1999, he studied for several months with a Balinese dance master; in 2001, his company performed in northern Brazil; in 2002, he did a six-month choreographic residency in Istanbul; and last spring, he accepted a commission in Cuba for two months.

"I’ve chosen to go to places where their traditional dance is still very in tune with the character of the society," Elam explained on the phone from his New York home. "My work is very contemporary and it definitely belongs in the realm of modern dance, but the ideas of transformation and of becoming another type of entity, which you see in a lot of traditional societies, has made a big impression upon me.

"I like to refer to my dancers as sentient beings, almost animalistic in the sense that they’re not dancer-neutral," he went on. "They’re also not pantomiming and projecting character. They’re being very responsive and very earnest in the way that they communicate with each other onstage."

Thus, there might be an all-company number in which the dancers appear in dragon-like red wool headdresses ("Ten Feet"), an overt creature connection. But in other Elam pieces the animal is definitely the human one, as when four female dancers reference Thornton Wilder’s play in "Our Town" or when two of the women humorously play off the conceit of their bodies being hooked together ("Dreams of Your Acceptance") so that one’s head looks as though it’s attached to the other’s body or one dancer’s appendage seems to be the other’s.

"I got delighted right off the bat," Elam recalled of his earliest dance-making, "of putting people into these unusual and improbable shapes, which I found to be very funny, and then to have them locomote."

The solo that Elam will perform at the ADLI concert, "Three Told Tin Man," amazes people as they watch him balance in starkly twisted sculptural forms and then begin to move while still in those poses — at one point, he "walks" on one fist and one foot. It’s a good introduction to the kind of physical transformations with which Elam has shaped his work, pointing as they do to emotional transformations within the characters, such as the journey of the Tin Man to find a heart.

"It really draws on my inter-culture work," Elam reflected. "In Bali, when you see somebody representing a prime minister or an animal or a king, they become it, without affectation. This ability to enter in and become another type of being has impacted me the most. Also from Bali is the physique of the high shoulders, the wide elbows, and sometimes a fierceness that I’ve used but redefined in my own vocabulary."

One other characteristic of Elam’s Misnomer company is its intense and extensive rehearsals, in which Elam repeatedly conveys his ideas of body form to his dancers — "it’s not a pick-up company.

"I like the idea of old clothing — when you’ve worn a shirt so many times that it melds to your body," he stressed. "I’m doing the same thing with the movement — they have history in the work they’re presenting. But it’s also very important to me that the dancers are in the moment so it’s very raw and there’ll be moments of utter delight and tenderness and it’ll get twisted on itself and seem quite nasty and heartless."

"I’m an optimist," he hastened to add, "but what I mostly find beautiful in this world are people’s earnest attempts to communicate, to understand and to be understood. In any conversation, the power shifts back and forth and the nature of it slides and sometimes you don’t even know how it’s shifting. I like to do that on a physical level, creating unusual partnering situations that can lead to remarkable illusions."

This semester, Elam is commuting from New York to teach two days a week at Brown, a course aptly titled "Improbable Partnering and Exceptional Physical Interactions." From the course will come a new work, set on 12 dancers at Brown, for the annual spring concert in May. A third opportunity to see Elam’s work in Rhode Island is at Brown’s Performance Studies International Conference on March 31 and April 1 (go to www.brown.edu/Facilities/ Theatre/psi for more info), when he will reprise the Tin Man solo and perform a duet, "Breakfast with You," to the music of Leonard Cohen and Judy Collins. Travelers to NYC can catch Misnomer Dance Theater’s full spring season April 20 through 24 (more info at www.misnomer.org).

Also at the ADLI concert will be two pieces by local choreographer and former Fusionworks member Laura Bennett and new works by Caedra Scott-Flaherty, Annamaura Silverblatt, Julie Strandberg, and Tina Vasquez.

The Sixth Annual Winter Mini-Fest will take place on Saturday, March 5 from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Brown University’s Ashamu Dance Studio, 77 Waterman Street, Providence. All events are free except the 8 p.m. concert; tickets are $15 ($10 students and seniors). Call 863-7596 (www.adli.us).