lightness has a call that’s hard to hear. considers how external interactions shape our internal (self-) perceptions and vice versa. A performer comes out of a closet repeatedly, considering how introductions can be revealing, and simultaneously reveal even more about what is being withheld. How can we utilize the performance space as an ephemeral site for externalizing desires for transformation? Through dance, audience participation, and choral orchestration, the artist sets forth intentions for embodying lightness while demonstrating the certain impossibilities of disentangling lightness from darkness and/or heaviness.

Elle Hong is an antidisciplinary artist currently based in Cheyenne/Ute/Arapaho Territories (Denver, CO). A current resident artist at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (2024-26), she provides dramaturgical support for artists Helanius J. Wilkins and LA Samuelson, and has toured as a performer for Michelle Ellsworth (“Evidence of Labor”; “Post-Verbal Social Network”). 

Elle’s work spans across dance, media arts, text, sound, and pedagogy, often employing queer/diasporic collaging techniques for creating performances that reenvision history and form. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, including the Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival, SPEKTRUM Berlin, Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), ODC Theater (San Francisco, CA), BMoCA (Boulder, CO), among others.

Elle's creative research works to uncover the embedded politics and power structures inherent to viewing and being viewed. She is invested in exposing the complex dialectic between interiority and exteriority, paving way towards new methods of being that actively resist and transcend categorization. Her work uses dance as a primary text for transcending the (representational) limitations of the body.

Elle Hong’s performance is part of Performance Art Week XIII. For more information, click here.