Doug Elkins: plunderer or new-age choreographer?

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.'"

The childhood activity that Elkins cherishes most was the keeping of endless journals. "My sketch journals basically have become my choregraphy," he says. When he graduated from high school, he enterd Parsons as a design major but remained there for only a year and a half before transfering to the State University of New York at Purchase.

There Elkins encountered studio dance for the first time. He numbers among his most influential teachers Mel Wong and Marcus Schulkind. "The first concert dance I saw was Marcus Schulkind performing his solo, Job. I thought it was real cool. I enjoy falling a lot, so watching Job fall was interesting to me," he says. He took technique classes with Schulkind and enrolled in Wong's class in experimental forms. "Mel's class was concerned with how one constructs something. It was open to anyone, regardless of training. Mel later told me he was always braced for what I would do," he recalls.

Elkins's entrance into dance classes coincided with his entry into the New York City clubs--" bouncing back and forth between Purchase and the world of the clubs," as he puts it. At the clubs he met the Rock Steady Crew, one of the first of the well-known break-dance groups, and dancers from the Magificent Force. They became his friends and dance partners, and by 1982 Elkins was performing with them. Two years later he was featured in the Levi's 501 ad for the 1984 Olmpics, and he toured China with American Break Company (ABC) three months also performed with choreographers Elizabeth Streb, Dany Ezralow, and Marta Renzi, and as an apprentice to Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane.

While at Purchase Elkins met two future members of his company, Allan M. Tibbetts and Jane Weiner, now his associate director. Company member David Neumann was an acting student at Purchase who also danced at the clubs. Elkins met Lisa Nicks while performing with Jody Oberfelder-Reiehm, and Lisa Heijn when he and Heijn were students at Harvard Summer Dance Center. Longtime company member Bob Bellamy has studied mime and clowing, Susan Moran was a later graduate of Purchase, and Ben Harris, the company's newest member, is a graduate of North Carolina School of the Arts and a former member of the Jose Limon company.

The staying power of the company is one of its strenghts, although many of the members have outside interests. Neumann recently won wide recognition for his work with Jane Comfort. "Whatever resistance I have for dancers to work with others comes from my anxieties about separation," Elkins says. "I enjoy it when I dance with others and do other things. But I want first priority."

Elkins has a contemporary view of working together. "I do an end-of-month review. Everyone has a choice to be in it. I have my share of jealousies," he says. He has instituted a weekly forum to allow everybody to speak out about problems or issues, and every few months they work with a therapist who acts as a mediator. "For me, it's a mandatory part of the process," Elkins says. "It's just as important as the workshopping to develop new movement phrases. When I switched over from being best friend and choreographer to artistic director, I insisted on [the therapy sessions]. There's been resistance, power struggles. Some people really like it, some people get nervous about it, but they accept it as part of the company, especially for a long tour."

Elkins admits to being pleased with the progress the company has made. It is well loved in France, where it has appeared at a number of venues, including Montpellier-Danse. "For myself, I'm in the process of asking questions," Elkins says. "I'm doing a post-graduate study for myself. I'm trying to allow myself the time to make work. I need to take a few weeks here, a few weeks there to carry the germ of an idea, to make a work over the period of a year and show it in process.

"I'm at a place now where I'm starting to learn again. I'm going to cotra dances. I was at Lincoln Center to look at films of baroque dance. I've been starting to dance with friends again, than the company. It's helpful for me to do capoeira work, to do Scottish dancing. It's interesting to m, these little worlds. I was at the Caledonian Club, then down on Broadway, doing capoeria. They both have their pride.

"One of the hardest things to ignore is other people's explanations of who you are, to paraphrase Yvonne Rainier. A composer once asked me, 'How do you deal with the elephant in the room?' For the composer, it's Wagner. For the choreographer, it's Tharp and Balanchine. Some people choose to live with it; some don't recognize it as the elephant in the room."

Elkins relates an accident about a woman who told him how she felt during a discussion period after a company concert. "This woman said. 'I think Twyla Tharp does this sort of thing better than you. I like Twyla Tharp. I like Sinatra Songs. I think of choreography and structure and I don't think Escuelita is as good as Sinatra Songs. What are you going to do about it?"

"I said, 'You're tellig me you're using Tharp as a measuring stick. I don't use tharp as a measuring stick. If I did, I'd always think I was second best. There's enough critic in a person to kill the artist in them. I acknowledge what Twyla's done, but I have enough faith in my work.'"