Being such an influential company, Pilobolus is subject to academic inquiries, concert reviews, and more. Below are two examples of this type of analysis:
Dynamics of Pilobolus Dance Theater Viewed Through Laban Movement Analysis
Billie Lepczyk, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VAThe Pilobolus Dance Theatre established in 1971 was immediately acclaimed for its originality, wit, and freshness. The group introduced a new approach to choreography called collective creativity or choreography by consensus and a new weight sharing approach of group partnering. This involved gymnastics with a tangling of bodies, convoluted group shapes, and sculptures of linked and connected bodies that did not quite resemble human beings. Much has been written about the innovations of the physics of body weight sharing and leverages and the relationship of the dancers' bodies to each other in creating sculpture, respectively the body and space aspects of Laban Movement Analysis. However, the innovations of the effort aspect, the movement dynamics, have not been fully identified. Dance critic Arlene Croce (1978) came closest to it when she described the movement as smooth with a lack of “what dancers call dynamics.” Dynamics concern four motion factors: flow with dynamic qualities of bound and free effort; weight, strong and light; time, quick and sustained; and space, direct and flexible. The movement analysis focused on two early works, Ocellus and Ciona, presented in the Pilobolus Dance Theatre video produced by Dance in America in 1977. The research procedure entailed multiple viewings of the video. The findings indicate that the baseline of the movement style is a combination of the motion factors of flow and weight, called the dreamlike state in Laban theory. The predominance of these dynamics presents the smoothness that Croce attributes to the Pilobolus style. The flow is usually medium to bound intensity and the weight, medium to strong intensity. The time factor serves as a contrast moving from the even flow into sustained effort or a more infrequent contrast, quick effort as in the wavelike progressions in Ocellus. The space effort is not pronounced but is used as an unexpected contrast as in the burst of direct/sudden/strong effort in Ciona where the dancers free themselves from each other. In summary, the innovative features of Pilobolus' movement dynamics include the predominance of an evenness of effort qualities of the flow and weight factors with the absence of the space factor's significance and the limited use of effort contrasts, which contribute to creating images of creatures and nonhumans.
-Review
A 36-Year Conversation Between Art and Athletics
These and many other permutations of the somersault throughout the repertory introduce us to a transformed image of the dancer. Most forms of dance involve some kind of rhythmic footwork (and the Pilobolus performers show in some works that they are perfectly capable of this), but most of the company’s works return to the age-old notion of dancers as tumblers, as acrobatic clowns. Often Pilobolus goes further back than that: Its performers look as much animal as human. Further yet: Much of its imagery is vegetable, flora rather than fauna. Sometimes we find we’re watching amoebas; changing organisms; explosions of seed heads.
I know of no dance company that so divides viewers. Since Pilobolus was new, in the 1970s, critics who sit on the same side of the fence regarding choreographers as controversial as Merce Cunningham, and Kenneth MacMillan have found themselves in civil war over Pilobolus. And that the troupe has been popular at the box office from the first has only loaded its detractors with a greater degree of scorn. Then there has been the claim that the original Pilobolus experiment had passed its sell-by date in the mid-1980s. Or the claim that all Pilobolus works are the same, and sophomoric to boot.
Well, here Pilobolus still is, in its 36th year. Its current season includes two works, “B’zyrk” and “Persistence of Memory,” both new to New York.
In “B’zyrk,” choreographed by Jonathan Wolken in collaboration with his performers, you can see why this company seems too obvious, too cute, for some tastes. But then this starts and ends by being a joke about the desperateness of clowning; in between, it takes us into the most seductive aspect of Pilobolus theater, the illogical dreamlike continuity of its imagery. Suddenly these clowns are caught up in a different kind of time, as if floating: We see them in a new dimension.
Dreaming is the stuff that “Persistence of Memory” is made of. Choreographed by Michael Tracy with his dancers, it begins with a woman (Annika Sheaff) running backward into the light around a sleeping man, and ends with the man (Manelich Minniefee) running backward out of that light around the now-sleeping woman.
What happens between — dreamlike in its defiance of narrative logic, lyrically acrobatic in many different ways, both relaxedly and intensely erotic — is a striking image of complex, two-way support between the sexes. She wears a knee-length summer dress, and at first she seems to belong to a world apart from this bare-chested man. But as the situation develops, she’s no-nonsense and practical in the way she at one point (standing upright on his back) peels the dress up her legs to prepare herself for the upended intimacies that are to come.
Later he’s upended too: one of the duet’s most eloquent passages is in the ways he hangs suspended down her back, his legs tucked over her shoulders, she calm and steady in carrying his full weight. It’s a sign of Pilobolus’s art that such moments count for more than the duet’s most startling acrobatic feats (as when the extended bodies of the man and the woman form an outstretched T, with only his arms and hands as support).
In “Megawatt” (2004, a Wolken composition), six dancers are constantly convulsed. The jolts that pass through their bodies often suggest electric-shock treatment, but the patterns they are sent into are formally geometric.
At its most remarkable, this begins to be an Orwellian horror drama — the group shakes and shudders through the same formations — but doesn’t take off as such. An element of grim ingratiation starts to become part of the horror but is never resolved. Even so, the piece’s sheer physical excitement is hard to resist.
When Pilobolus was young, it seemed the kind of passing miracle that would never survive the generation that created it. Many years have passed since I last watched the company, and certainly it has changed. (Musical phrasing seems more evident than before, while some of the stunning illusory effects of the first-generation performances have been diluted.)
Yet Pilobolus retains its identity more than many dance companies. The five works mentioned here were shown together on a special season-opening program on Monday: They will be distributed across the three programs that occupy the company’s four-week season at the Joyce, along with older works I am keen to see again, like “Walklyndon” and “Day Two.”
The continuity of changing imagery, the easy sensuousness and the wonderful push-me-pull-you surprises of the physicality: These still seem to come right out of their makers’ dreams and into ours.
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