Philip Elson, 27, is a Chicago-based dancer and choreographer hailing from Fort Worth, Texas"also known as Cowtown … get 'er done!" he said in a conversation with Windy City Times.
Elson began dancing at 3 with the support of his sisters and his parents, who wanted to expose their children to as many activities and experiences as possible. "I was a 'jazzatrina'… I primarily trained in ballet, jazz, tap. A lot of my early training was geared toward going on to do either musical theater or commercial dance," he said. Elson's background brought him to NYU after high school, where he enrolled in the vocal performance program. Although he dated another dancer in high school. "North Central Texas was not a place where you could easily trust people with telling them you're gay," he said.
It was in New York that Elson first encountered queer culture. He said, "I thought New York was going to be the place where I found myself as a gay man. I found lots of 'gayness' in New York, but when I left there I began to realize that that was not the basis of my identity. I'm an artist, I'm a brother, I'm an employee, I'm a driver, I'm a gay man. I'm also a tax payer ... and shouldn't that be the most important?!?"
New York was also the place where Elson discovered his passion was not with musical theater, but with dance, and his program at NYU was not conducive to a career in concert dance. Returning to Texas, Elson enrolled in a community college, where a dance professor would introduce him to Columbia College in Chicago. "My ballet teacher was the artistic director of a modern dance company… she was very much a mentor… she told me that I had to leave Texas. She said, 'you have to experience a place that's not here.'"
Upon finishing his degree, Elson hit the Chicago dance scene quickly. After a brief hiatus to dance professionally in Portland, he returned and landed a coveted spot with The Seldoms. "I will be dancing for The Seldoms until the day that I'm done dancing," he said, but Elson is also breaking out on his own to create his own work. He is clearly a product of The Seldoms, including a collaborative creative process and a commitment to similar themes taken on by Artistic Director Carrie Hanson. Specifically, The Seldoms explore the artist's ability to interact with culture and environment, and this, in part, is the basis of Elson's latest work, "Terms and Conditions," showing this weekend at Links Hall.
What started as an exploration of technology and big data has become a comment on the human condition and the role that technology plays in our interactions with one another. "This show is about people and the fear of losing humanity … of something that breeches and is threatening what we know about the human experience," he said.
One of the opening scenes in the 45-minute work shows six dancers on the sides of the stage engrossed in their smartphones. While at first it seems as though his position is that technology is destroying our ability to interact with one another, Elson proposes that technology is a positive thingso long as we are willing to engage with it. "We can't avoid technology," he said. "This show is about privacy in the digital era. Those who are looking to make changes on any level … you have to know and engage that thing from the inside. There is this thing that is threatening our way of living as we know it, and this is a force that we have to deal with. ... The way we use the Internet now is not the way the Internet was set up to be used years ago."
In a way, "Terms and Conditions" is a logical blending of Elson's double life. In addition to being a professional dancer, sound designer, dance teacher and choreographer, Elson is a longtime employee at an Apple store, where he has gained valuable insight into technology and business. Yet, he said he doesn't know enough to have a sense of where technology could take us. "I have no clue where [technology] could go," he said. "What it meant to be a human 100 years ago is very different that what it means to be a human today. … I think the human experience is continually being redefined. Maybe the experience, as we know it right now, won't be the experience we have 100 years from now. Hopefully, we won't be bionic people!"
Philip Elson Dance presents "Terms and Conditions" runs Friday-Sunday, March 14-16, at Links Hall. All shows start at 7pm, and live streaming of the show will be at www.ustream.tv/channel/terms-and-conditions. Tickets are $10, available at the door, or on ticketfly.com .
Also this weekend in dance:
Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan, Asia's leading contemporary dance company, returns to Chicago March 14 and 16 in an unprecedented co-presentation from three major Chicago institutions: The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University and The Joffrey Ballet. Cloud Gate will perform the celebrated Songs of the Wanderers, in which the stage is transformed by a set of three-and-a-half tons of golden rice. Performances take place at the Auditorium Theatre; visit auditoriumtheatre.org .
At the newly reopened Harris Theater for Music and Dance, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago performs a highly anticipated program of four works by the Netherlands' Jiri Kylian. With Kylian dubbed one of the "greatest choreographers of our age" by the San Francisco Chronicle, Hubbard Street will present Petite Mort ( 1991 ) and 27'52" ( 2001 ) with two company premieres: Falling Angels ( 1989 ), with onstage accompaniment by Third Coast Percussion, and Sarabande ( 1990 ). Performances run Thursday through Sunday; for more information, visit harristheaterchicago.org .