Pilobolus. - Joyce Theater, New York, NY - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Nov, 1996 by Molly McQuade

REVIEWED BY MOLLY MCQUADE

Imagery is like an alphabet, susceptible to endless rearrangement of small parts in the creation of a moving picture. All dances are concerned somehow or other with imagery, yet not all troupes seem to be searching for it with zest. Pilobolus nearly always does. In the twenty-five years of the company's life, Pilobolus has rearranged the alphabet of danced imagery many and curious times. Its quarter-century-anniversary season at the Joyce continued that quest.

The season saw a revival of the company's very first piece, Pilobolus 11971), and the debut of a new dance, Aeros. For people who weren't around to observe Pilobolus's beginnings at Dartmouth College in a dance class taught by Alison Chase, currently coartistic director, the revival may have come as a surprise. This collaborative troupe's signature is inventively acrobatic play, and yet Pilobolus, where it all got started, is a relatively static dance for four men (Kent Lindemer, Mark Santillano, John-Mario Sevilla, and Darryl Thomasl who build a series of images with their bodies based on linked balances. It almost seems as if the men are trying to avoid action, and trying to avoid dancing. Instead' the stillness of the images they create is all-important. The process of image-building is so phlegmatic as to seem oddly out of character. The funny little fungus that gave the company and this particular piece their enduring names is not smiling or even squirming in Pilobolus. Dancers often do both in other pieces of the Pilobolus repertory.

If Pilobolus was an early sketch for the company's style and aims, then Aeros could be looked on as a recent updating, though not a major one. A light send-up of erotic science fiction fantasies in the heat of summer escapism, Aeros (please note the pun) sends multicolored aliens onstage and finagles a love interest between an apparently human male pilot ISantillano) and a female alien (Rebecca Anderson). All very fetching, but the piece lacks visual ingenuity and a real stake in motion.

The company's brilliance was all there, though, in Duet (1992), Land's Edge (1986), and other dances. Performed by Anderson and Rebecca Jung, Duet misses the presence of Jude Woodcock, who gave it a subtly punklike, disingenuous quality; the new version is more sisterly and sweeter. But the dance, set to Norwegian medieval vocal music that sounds distinctly Asian and wholly ethereal, remains a marvel of imaginative collaboration, as the two women seem to sink their roots into the ground while wahing up toward celestial space, like Sufis gone mountaineering. When you watch a dance like this, visual illusion can snare you like a fact.

The fineness of detail in the dancing on all three programs raised the standard for the dances. Every particle of the imagery seemed to maHer, so that even a shifting of the eyebrows added something to the ongoing drama of emergent graphic clarity.