Legstand is Kris Elgstrand. It’s a production company that grew out of a funny misspelling of the last name “Elgstrand” which, for what it’s worth, apparently means Moose Beach in Swedish. Go ahead. Say it to a Swede. They will laugh at you like you’ve just said the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard. There is something about the name that invokes derisive laughter in Swedes. Could this be why the Elgstrands fled to Canada several generations ago? Though his last name is Swedish, Kris himself is not Swedish. At the time of this writing, he knows no Swedish people.
Kris “Moose Beach” Elgstrand was born in Vancouver in 1973. Twenty years later, he co-founded Ah Um Theatre, a theatre and production company based in Vancouver where he premiered his first play, Dead Man’s Shoes, in 1994. Since then he has written and produced several other plays including Black Codes, which had a successful Fringe tour in Canada and the US, Life With A Hole In It, and The Boys, which premiered in Philadelphia in February 2006 and received its Canadian premier at the Guild Hall in Whitehorse, YT in September 2010. Kris has several more plays awaiting production and Ah Um has long since been replaced by Legstand.
Kris also wrote and directed the short films, Love Seat (TIFF 2006, Best Short at the Whistler Film Festival) and In Her Ear, which premiered at VIFF in 2007.
As a partner in The Whatever Institute with Dylan Akio Smith, Kris’ work as a screenwriter and producer includes The Cabin Movie (TIFF 2005), Man Feel Pain (Winner BravoFACT Short Cuts Canada Award, TIFF 2004), and Big Head (TIFF 2009). Kris and Dylan directed the feature, Doppelganger Paul, which premiered at TIFF in 2011. In 2014, Kris wrote and directed the feature film Songs She Wrote About People She Knows, which also premiered at TIFF and went on to screen at several festivals including the Nashville Film Festival where it won the New Directors Prize and San Francisco IndieFest where it won the prize for Best Narrative Feature.
Kris has also taken to writing and performing songs from his long-gestating cabaret show, Songs of the Sad Sack. A CD, Songs of the Sad Sack, Volume 1: I’m so disappointed, is available now at kriselgstrand.bandcamp.com and on iTunes. Additional volumes will appear in odd intervals in the coming years.