January 9, 2001 Summary Facts:
Renowned and beloved for its playful athleticism, startling mix of humor and singular invention, Pilobolus Dance Theatre returns to Santa Barbara in two performances on Tuesday and Wednesday, February 13 and 14 at 8 p.m. in UCSB Campbell Hall. Among the pieces to be performed is A Selection, a recent work Pilobolus artistic directors Robby Barnett, Michael Tracy and Jonathan Wolken and company members created in collaboration with famed children’s author-illustrator Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), who designed the sets and costumes and contributed conceptually to the work, and Arthur Yorinks, author and co-director with Sendak of Night Kitchen, a children’s theater company. New York Newsday notes that “amazingly, the dynamic, athletic choreographic elements that buoy most Pilobolus works have been transferred intact into this dramatic piece.” Dedicated to Primo Levi, the Italian physicist whose writings about his time in the Nazi concentration camps are milestones of Holocaust literature, A Selection has been called by The Boston Globe “one of the most disturbing and ambitious Pilobolus works ever mounted.” It is a wordless fable in one act, part dance and part mime, about a troupe of traveling players who find themselves swept up in the Holocaust. They miss the last train to safety out of an unnamed European city and are accosted by a pernicious man with deadly intentions. The score for A Selection is made up of String Quartet No. 2 by Pavel Haas and chamber music by Hans Krasa, a pair of Czech composers who were interned at Theresienstadt, the Nazi “model community” where Jewish artists were allowed to perform before being sent to death camps, and then killed in 1944 at Auschwitz. Opening the company’s program on both nights is Apoplexy, a startling work set to a percussive score by Paul Sullivan that features the sounds of bullets shifting to the roars of a crowd and the push of a disco beat, that finds the dancers falling down as if shot, then rising up sometimes into high lifts and falling down again. Suggestive of the fluid connections between combat and love, Apoplexy has been described by The New York Times as “an easy introduction to the company’s spirited and often unexpectedly nuanced acrobatic dance.” Called “as chic as an Irving Penn photo shoot” by The Boston Globe, Femme Noire is choreographed by Pilobolus muse and artistic director Alison Chase. Also danced to music by Sullivan, it is an elegant, funny female solo for a dancer wearing fancy dress and an enormous black hat who attempts to contort her body into stereotypical model-like poses. Closing the first half of the program is the all-male piece Gnomen, which has what the Globe considers “that classic Pilobolus ’just a bunch of jocks dancing’ look.” An exploration of male multiplicity, it is by turns lovely, lyrical and funny featuring movement from competitive, head-knocking to such expressions of gentleness as a sleeping man being lifted by one foot of each of his fellow dancers, cradled and gently rocked. Named for a plucky rural fungus that can shoot its spores eight feet over a barnyard cow, Pilobolus began at a Dartmouth College dance class in 1971. What emerged from that fertile environment was a collaborative choreographic process and a unique weight-sharing approach to partnering that gave the young company a non-traditional, but powerful set of skills with which to make dances. Its vocabulary is not drawn from the long traditions of codified dance movement, but was, and still is, invented, emerging from intense periods of improvisation and creative play. Immediately acclaimed for its innovation, humor and virtuosity, Pilobolus was soon a self-sufficient organization with members sharing choreographic, performance, management and publicity duties. Today a major American dance company of international influence, “the Pils” remain deeply committed to their original philosophy with six dancers and four artistic directors collaborating on the creation of most new pieces. Based in rural Connecticut, the company performs throughout the world. Its works are in the repertoires of other major dance companies including the Joffrey, Feld, Ohio, Hartford and Arizona Ballets in the United States, the Ballet National Nancy et de Lorraine and the Ballet du Rhin in France and Italy’s Verona Ballet. Among the company’s numerous honors are the Berlin Critic’s Prize, the Brandeis Award, the Scotsman Award for performances at the Edinburgh Festival, a prime time Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in cultural programming, and a June 2000 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement in performance and choreography. Among Pilobolus’ collaborations with other organizations are Men Dancers, a traveling program celebrating the centennial of the birth of modern dance legend Ted Shawn which Pilobolus directed for the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the choreography for National Theater of the Deaf’s Lewis Carroll adaptation Curiouser and Curiouser and co-direction of NTD’s production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Pilobolus has also choreographed a European production of Mozart’s Magic Flute with John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists. The company has just completed the nationally recognized production An Urban Nutcracker for the Cleveland School of the Arts. It appeared in the September 2000 edition of National Geographic and will perform in an original production at the 2002 Olympics. This is the sixth visit of Pilobolus to UCSB; previous appearances occurred in February 1974, April 1979, October 1981, November 1986 and November 1995. Presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, this residency is supported, in part, with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the California Arts Council, a state agency. For tickets or more information, Editor: For photos, please call |