Dance for the Masses
When Robby Barnett and his cofounders started Pilobolus Dance Theatre in 1971, they had virtually no dance experience. But they wanted to create shows that would leave dance aficionados and audience members who couldn’t care less about pas de bourrees equally amazed.
“It’s not esoteric,” Barnett says of his company’s work. Yet in the same breath, he notes that the choreographers’ Ivy League background is significant in that “if you see Hegel in your head, you’re going to see Hegel in the movements” — not exactly a plebian observation. That the group proudly takes its name from a “phototropic zygomycete” only makes the company’s of-the-people credo harder to believe.
But if a university-grown frame of reference characterizes the speech of Pilobolus’ masterminds, the dance they create is fresh and accessible, humorous and athletic — so much so that the group has been asked to perform at the Olympics in Salt Lake City. Pilobolus is still working on choreographing the Olympic dance, so Kansas City audiences will have to tune in to the games with the rest of the world in February to see it.
In the meantime, audiences here can get acquainted with the company’s work at the Lied Center in Lawrence this weekend. One of this show’s pieces is a staple of the Pilobolus repertoire. It’s called “Day Two,” and Lied Center advertisements give fair warning that the selection “contains some nudity.” This admonition was not issued by the company, whose members don’t see their own nakedness as something people should fear. “It’s not us putting out the warnings,” Barnett says, laughing. “We’re the naked ones.” He adds that the group has been “performing with open costuming decisions” since its inception.
A newer selection, “Monkey and the White Bone Demon,” is based on a sixteenth-century Chinese tale and includes soaring heroes pitted against a comical villain on stilts. In the original story, a monkey saves a Buddhist monk and two pilgrims from a character known as the White Bone Demon. The company has reduced its version of the story to “an aesthetic belief in the magic of simplicity.”
Barnett thinks the Pilobolus approach to choreography — based on experimentation and physicality instead of an established set of movements — opens a wide range of possibilities and accounts for the company’s thirty-year reputation as a cutting-edge ensemble. “The problem with [formal dance] training,” he explains, “is that it’s all too easy to let that sense of how it’s supposed to be done subsume the imagination. Since we had done nothing and knew nothing, we were free to invent.”
In keeping with that belief, the Pilobolus dancers offer a workshop on Saturday, February 2.
“People show up with no idea what they might make a dance about, and two hours later they’re performing in front of their peers,” says Barnett. “It should give them a sense not just of how to create dance but also a certain amount of insight into themselves.”
