Ayano Elson Will Bring CONTROL to the Chocolate Factory Theater
Performances run April 23-25, 2026.
The Chocolate Factory Theater will continue its Spring 2026 season with the premiere of Control, a new evening length dance performance by Ayano Elson.
Choreographer and dancer Ayano Elson returns to The Chocolate Factory Theater (following an early stage creative residency in 2025) with the premiere of Control, a deeply physical, formally minimal dance created in collaboration with performers Cayleen Del Rosario, Amelia Heintzelman, Owen Prum, and evan ray suzuki, with music by Matt Evans and performed by Evans, isa crespo pardo, and David Leon, lighting by Madeline Best, and costumes by Kate Williams.
The piece treats the dancer as a conduit into an internal psychic space shaped by accumulated desire and eroticism; inviting the viewer into a site of longing, waiting, and devastation.
Drawing on American postmodern dance, postwar slow cinema from East Asia, and Ayano's inheritance of Okinawan performance lineages, Control unfolds through imitation, rupture, and transformation.
About Ayano Elson
Ayano Elson is an Okinawan-American dancer and choreographer based in New York City. Her work draws on improvisation, archival materials, and interdisciplinary collaboration to create performance-based practices that examine power, authorship, and interpretation in contemporary Western dance.
Her dances have premiered at the Kitchen, Danspace Project, PAGEANT, Center for Performance Research (CPR), ISSUE Project Room, and Roulette, among others. She has held artist residencies at the Chocolate Factory Theater (2025), the Kitchen (2025), CPR (2022), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and ArtCake (2021), was a Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow (2018), and a Gibney Dance Work Up artist (2015). Elson has been awarded grants through the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, NYSCA, and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. She is currently dancing for Melinda Ring and Kim Brandt, and has performed and toured in works by Jesi Cook, Milka Djordjevich, Simone Forti, Gwendolyn Knapp, Juli Brandano, Ella Dawn W-S, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy + Niall Jones, and Alexa West at museums, galleries, and theaters in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.
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