Doug Elkins: plunderer or new-age choreographer?

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1994 by Iris M. Fanger

Doug Elkins Dance Company opens the Joyce Theater's "Altogether Different" series on January 4 with a new work, Scott, Queen of Marys.

It's a sunny, fall afternoon at the Sutton Gymnastics & Fitness Center, seven stores above the downtown New York City streets. In a corner marked off by a rectangle of parallel bars, a boom box is blaring out a song with Hispanic beat while seven dancers gyrate through a series of hip-hop motions cut by daredevil slides to the floor. Seated on a stack of mats is an eight dancer, Dough Elkins, the choreographer and artistic director of the company that bears his name.

Dough Elkins Dance Company was in residence at its longtime home at Sutton Gym in September before taking off on a monthlong October tour to England under the auspicies of London Dance Umbrella. Except for an appearance in Chicago before Christmas, the dancers planned to spend November and December rehearsing at the gym in preparation for their New York City concerts in early January, which open the Joyce Theater's "Altogether Different" series. The company has not been seen in Manhattan for nearly two years, despite its extensive touring schedule in the United States and Europe.

The work in rehearsal, A Cerca de la Escuelita, is a hybrid, like all of Elkins's pieces. Last seen in New York at its 1991 premiere, Escuelita, set to a salsa rhythm, combines the feel of the Latino club dances with suggestions of the high school passions of West Side Story. Elkins has mixed movements from Brazilian capoeira, ballroom dancind--notably a hot tango duet--martial arts, and a low-down shimmy and spliced them all together with the streetwise phrases that inform so much of his choreography.

The works that Elkins has choreographed since 1987, when he founded his company, are part and parcel of the postmodern canon in their indifference to conventional gender behavior, their athletic basis, and their out-and-out theatricality. What makes them different from the works of other postmodernists is Elkins's electicism. You can tell it right from the top by reading the titles of his works: The patrooka Variations (1988), Danforth & Multiply (The Rituals of Democracy) (1990), Where Was Yvonne Rainier When I Had Saturday Night Fever? (1991), and The Stuff of Recoiling (1992), among others. He's calling his newest work Scot, Queen of Marys. Unlike the others, which have scores stitched together from a variety of sources, the new piece will have a score by Mio Morales.

His ability to include every type of popular style, sprinkle it with humor and a to-hell-with-the-danger performance motto, then build a structure with the skill of a serious choreographer and the techniques of a studio dancer has brought Elkins access to audiences seldom seen at concert dance performances. But it has brought the criticism of thievery, as well. The comments about appropriation have come so frequently that Elkins include John Cage's statement about the past in the program for his last New York City outing at Dance Theater Workshop: "The past is not a fact. The past is simply a big field that has a great deal of activity in it."

Choreographer Bill T. Jones is one who has raised the issue of appropriation in Elkins's work. "[Jones] was concerned that I used the single Michael Bolton's version of Percy Sledge's 'When a Man Loves a Woman' and I made no recognition of it," Elkins says. "I thought that was interesting, because he had just finished a piece of Jewish klezmer music. I think maybe his fear was about a lack of integrity about what I was doing. I only get upset about these things when I think I need to put people at ease with the stuff.

"I recently saw a film with martial-arts choreography. It's terrific--half fairy tale, half historical reference. I like those collisions of languages. The movement languages and symbolic languages dovetail," he says.

The issue of mergers is in his genes. Adopted as a baby by a Jewish-American family who moved to Long Island, his birth mother is half-Chinese. He recalls a hyperactive childhood as the oldest of three brothers: "I remember waiting for my parent to come back from a trip. My grandmother says I would stand by the door, rocking back and forth for about three hours--a ritualistic, Piaget thing. When I became anxious I'd go down to our basement, put on a record, and dance." He also played sports--track, soccer, wrestling, swimming, and ice hockey. "Something to deal with my hyperactivity," he says. He was small throughout adolescence, standing only five feet five inches until he hit a late growth period in college.

Elkins also remembers being sexually abused as a twelve-year-old by an older boy at summer camp. "I confronted him and beat him up. I was afraid to tell my parents. That's when I started running, to run that feeling behind me, to get that runner's high and bliss out," he says.

Elkins holds within himself what he describes as "an interesting tension" from his childhood, between the teachings of his grandparents and the businessman's viewpoint of his father. "My grandfather loved intellectual pursuit. My grandmother, too. They were important people to me. Whereas my father, being their son, rejected that. My father used to say, 'Plan your work, but work your plan' and 'The greatest throught in the world is nothing unless you take action.'"