Lionel Popkin

Set around an enormous elephant costume, the evening length quartet There Is An Elephant In This Dance looks at issues of how a singular body can house multiple histories and the difficulty of aligning oneself with a single cultural identity.

The elephant is a rich and contradictory image in this work. First it evokes Ganesh, the mythological god of fortune and the remover of obstacles, but it also retains its long-standing relationship to memory; which is, of course, a very difficult obstacle to overcome. Finally, the bulkiness of the elephant's body shifts our perception of the dancing figure and what it should look like. The distinction between the zoologically costumed body of the elephant and the human under layer, serves as an apt metaphor for how external skin as a marker of identity is in contrast to the underlying complexity of the person underneath.

Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.