Fall Faculty Dance Concert: Doug Elkins and Friends

About this event

Choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and Associate Professor o f the Practice in Dance Doug Elkins will premiere a new evening-length work with his company Doug Elkins and Friends and Wesleyan student artists. Elkins describes the work as a combination of a deconstructed mixtape on the spectrum, a collision of corporeal histories, and a dance version of the 2022 movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once" as a metamodern musical on mushrooms. The work will feature a stellar cast: a highly-esteemed murmuration/flock of special guests from the worlds of contemporary dance and New Vaudeville, and hip hop luminaries. Elkins will bring the heat of laughter and the fire of joy into the precinct of the (sometimes) sedate art form (ant farm?) of dance. "There is a thin semantic line between weird and beautiful and that line is covered in jellyfish." -Night Vale Elkins began his dance life as a dancer in the New York hip hop dance scene. Additionally, as a choreographer in New York's downtown contemporary dance scene, Elkins had thoroughly absorbed and synthesized the hip hop ethos of bricolage and remixing that he was raised in. His dances have been described as "a one man choreographic cyberspace. He assembles his dances in the same way that the web brings us the world today: hyperlinked, simultaneous, and unfiltered." The work will be performed on Friday, November 20 (https://events.wesleyan.edu/cfa/event/18297-fall-faculty-dance-concert-doug-elkins-and-friends) and Saturday, November 21, 2026. re a stellar cast: a highly-esteemed murmuration/flock of special guests from the worlds of contemporary dance and New Vaudeville, and hip hop luminaries. Elkins will bring the heat of laughter and the fire of joy into the precinct of the (sometimes) sedate art form (ant farm?) of dance.

"There is a thin semantic line between weird and beautiful and that line is covered in jellyfish."

-Night Vale

Elkins began his dance life as a dancer in the New York hip hop dance scene. Additionally, as a choreographer in New York's downtown contemporary dance scene, Elkins had thoroughly absorbed and synthesized the hip hop ethos of bricolage and remixing that he was raised in. His dances have been described as "a one man choreographic cyberspace. He assembles his dances in the same way that the web brings us the world today: hyperlinked, simultaneous, and unfiltered."

The work will be performed on

Friday, November 20

and Saturday, November 21, 2026.