This is what is.
Leslie Elkins utters these words, quietly and with a sense of calm. She sits on a small leather bench, next to pianist Agustin Muriago. Warmth radiates between them, and they begin.
This is disregard.
As Muriago’s fingers press on the keys, his eyes track Elkins’s improvisational movements like a laser. A body rich in experience and archival knowledge, Elkins’s dancing often repeats until it sheds its skin into something else.
This is a hidden agenda.
Elkins shows a pivoted foot, a spoked arm, then tells us what “this is.” The moments unfold, words tie and untie to Elkins’s body.
This is do less.
The twinkling piano keys settle to stillness. Another collaborator picks up the proverbial baton and begins “this is” speak. More dancers—Leslie Bush, Paule Turner, and Dawn McCall—join the stage, and the pianist exits, passing the instrument to a wonderfully expressive Alexander Timofeev.
“Do less” morphs from explanation to request. A curiosity: have Elkins and collaborators pre-selected words, or are they also plucked from the present?
This is—
Dancers fill in the blanks. The world sinks into a subterranean place. The ensemble dons flowing black costumes, a beige top the only deviant. Words come back—a pointed “disregard”—and so does the accompanying movement, muscle memory from moments before.
The foursome reveal dreary gray masks, pulled over eyes and noses. With a long beak, they appear to be a murder of crows. Elkins changes clothes while slowly murmuring a well-known Eurythmics song, as though our surroundings are melting and blurred at the edges. With faces obscured in masks, sweet dreams are made of—
sporadic gasps
and hip wiggles
settings change when the veil is thrown over
waking,
a wilting pelvis,
a swiveling thought:
pound the air!
rustling audience chuckles and
sweeping keys, a pulled off
suitjacket, a stoppage and a start,
interweaving thoughts with one
another, a communal release, a meaningful glance,
a reveal, and—
then the masks come off.
Light pools in again, and with it naked faces (why so serious? remorseful? intense?). With only their bare skin, they’ve reluctantly put another mask on. Have they woken from a nightmare to something else?
Three sweet regrounding moments with audience members: an air kiss, a hand on heart, a fidget. Elkins knows and cares about these people in the real world; this much seeps up and through.
And everything, unlike a dream, is sealed with a musical note of resolution. There. Elkins’s head rests on the pianist’s shoulder, and
This is waking up.
A Dream Within a Dream, Leslie Elkins and Foursome Performance, Philadelphia Fringe Festival 2026, Icebox Performance Space, Sept. 18-20, 2026
