Entangled Bodies, Gymnastic Feats Highlight Pilobolus NYC Dance

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on July 17, 2007.

July 17 (Bloomberg) -- Dressed in rakish, mismatched bits of theatrical costume, six feisty dancers evoke a ragtag traveling circus onstage and off. They're down on their luck yet plucky, lacking the talent to match their big dreams.

This is ``B'zyrk,'' one of the new-to-New York pieces in the opening-night program of Pilobolus, the company that will be cavorting at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea through Aug. 11.

As is typical of a Pilobolus creation, the collaborative choreography by Jonathan Wolken and six others features gymnastics, feats of balance and timing, horsing around and the merging of bodies into strange shape-shifting organisms. One three-body combination whirls along the floor like tumbleweed.

Wolken and his crew try hard to evoke both the bitter weariness of second-rate performers worn down by endless one- night stands and their vision of themselves as beautiful and strong, altogether worthy of applause and fame. But the results are more trite than unique and genuine, and the physical marvels are too crude to express the poignant atmosphere the choreographers mean to create.

While the music is compiled from five sources, the costumes are from a single hand, that of the ever-ebullient Liz Prince. The performers, like most Piloboli, are endearing, especially Manelich Minniefee and Renee Jaworski.

Memorial Dance

A second piece receiving its local premiere was ``Persistence of Memory'' by Michael Tracy, with assistance from Minniefee, Annika Sheaff and Edwin Olvera. As performed by Minniefee and Sheaff, it's a light, sweet duet that was commissioned as a memorial to a woman who died too young. It shows the woman in a variety of moods, as if she were a real personality, not an object of veneration simply because her life was cut short.

As with ``B'zyrk,'' the feelings the dance attempts to evoke are essentially at odds with the typical Pilobolus vocabulary. Here, though, there are a few moments that gel. Early on, for example, the lithe woman, dressed in pale chiffon with her auburn hair unbound, does a backbend all the way to the floor, and the man crawls into the cave her body has shaped.

Most impressively, the woman is quietly but constantly shown to equal the man in physical strength, bearing his body just as calmly and beautifully as he does hers. I could imagine the dance being done to great acclaim at a feminist rally. Though it's too simplistic to be worth seeing twice, it's worth seeing once.

Honed Bodies

Pilobolus is one of the most popular dance troupes around. Its current monthlong engagement at the Joyce has become an annual affair, and the group tours worldwide. The highbrow dance audience turns up its nose at Pilobolus -- ``You call that dancing?'' -- but the general public loves it.

Why?

It's nonthreatening like Cirque du Soleil, and it's immediately accessible; there are none of the half-hidden meanings of Balanchine's ``Serenade'' or Graham's ``Errand Into the Maze.'' It can also be funny, though the fun is usually sophomoric.

Pilobolus can be sensuous, too. The dancers' magnificently honed bodies are sheathed in bright, high-sheen unitards or cannily designed rags that advertise every gorgeous contour -- or just left as close to nude as the police permit. And the Kama Sutra-style intertwining of the bodies is something even people who can live without dance will appreciate mightily.

Some of Pilobolus's early pieces had more ambiguity and sophistication, plus provocative investigations of the grotesque. Perhaps today's public prefers simply to be entertained.

Pilobolus is at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. (at 19th Street), through Aug. 11. Information: +1-212-242-0800 or http://www.joyce.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.