Pilobolus: Energetic Dance-Theater
Hampshire College is an unusual kind of place; it was created by four other institutions nearby for the purpose of experimenting in new forms of education. It was not unusual, therefore, to have one of its student reviewers talk about a new and highly original dance performance which took place there last fall: "Three men moved as one sculpture through space, exploring delicate balances through extremely difficult and skillfully executed acrobatics. The fourth member of the company followed with a leaping twisting, and searching solo dance, which in turn flowed into a number . . . where the dancers walked, crawled, skipped, and limped away, around, and on top of each other."
The dancers share the name of the dance they performed: Pilobolus. Originally it referred to a peculiar species of fungus which grew naturally in the direction of light. In the hands of Jonathan Wolken '71, Rob Pendleton '71, Rob Barnett '72, and Lee Harris '73, all members of the Dartmouth community, it has become the code word for a whole new type of theater based on dance, North Country music, and "positive energy." Their performance at Hampshire was but one more step in the group's current rise, at remarkable speed, from the level of student amateurs to that of a professionally committed company.
Wolken and Pendleton, the originators of the group, both liken the show they have evolved to an "energy circus," a continuous flow of music and dance in which the emphasis is on "charging" the audience, affirmatively raising the excitement and consciousness in the interplay between stage and spectators. "The dancers," wrote the Hampshire reviewer, "regard it as their mission to create, through a symphonic sequence, a positive feeling for life which, coupled with a driving energy, guides members of an audience to new emotional terrain, and then leaves them profoundly altered." This view is shared by the four performers themselves. Wolken calls "the energy we give and get from performing" an "incredible thing." Pendleton adds, "Ours is an energy which is very aggressive, but very life affirming."
The originators of Pilobolus first came together in the winter term of last year, in the dance class taught by Allison Becker Chase. According to them, it was her method of bringing students to dance, not through rigorous formalizations of training, but rather by having students choreograph and execute their own material, which was at least partially responsible for the germination and development of their interest. Pendleton and Wolken participated in that term's first edition of Allison Chase's "Choreographic Collections"—a show made up of student performances which has become a regular feature of the Hop's 12:30 Rep series. Their dance that term was entitled, prophetically enough, Pilobolus.
The two continued to work together on their own into the spring, joined by classmate Steve Johnson. They found it an outlet which "incorporated both physical and aesthetic aspects" and a refreshing alternative to academics. After working through most of the spring and appearing in "Choreographic Collections II," the three were selected by Allison Chase to participate in a Student Workshop in Dance at New York Univerity. There they were seen by professional dancer and choreographer Murray Louis, who was then serving as guest artist at N.Y.U. He invited the three Dartmouth students to come and perform at "The Space," a workshop and theater lab which he runs jointly with dance master Alwin Nikolais in Manhattan. Pilobolus was performed once, videotaped, and generally praised by the students there.
Later in the spring the trio were invited to perform at the University of Massachusetts as part of another student dance workshop. About that time Pendleton and Wolken began to seriously consider the possibility of pursuing their dance work professionally. As Pendleton put it, "The inventiveness, and the ability to draw on each others energy was creating something bigger than all of us." After beginning the summer dancing with Allison Chase at the Cape Cod Community College, the group settled down at Pendleton's farm in Lyndonville, Vt., to rehearse and work out new material. The highlight of their efforts emerged as a unique public performance which they termed the "Vermont Natural Theater." Using the farm itself as a backdrop, the three performers led their audiences—made up mostly of local people from the surrounding countryside—on what Jon Wolken describes as "an aware hike."
wanted to bring the heightened way of experiencing which conventionally goes on in the theater to a natural outdoor setting."
The major impetus in the formation of the group as it now exists came at the end of the summer at Goddard College in Northfield, Vt. Attending their performance there was Mark Amitin, an agent for avant-garde theater groups and the head of the Universal Movement Repertory Company. Impressed by their dance, he immediately made contact with the group and offered to arrange a series of bookings around the Northeast. It was with this in mind, that Pilobolus was formed as a company. Steve Johnson left to go to medical school, and Rob Barnett '72 and Lee Harris '73 were asked to join. The reason for holding the company to four, explained Pendleton, lay in the decision to pursue a tight, constantly innovative company which could maintain the cohesiveness which their kind of work required. A larger team would inevitably mean a weakening of the dance in terms of its projection of a unified art and life style.
Pilobolus' first show under Amitin's aegis was a performance at a rock concert last October at Smith College. The dance served as a warm-up piece for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, a group famous for its excellent musicianship as well as for highly original lyrics. The show represented a totally new mixture of forms — rock concerts do not normally feature modern dance as a part of the repertoire. Nevertheless the Smith audience was on its feet, thoroughly charged up, within ten minutes after the dancers began.
It was after their second such concert that the group began to round out and complete their "energy circus" by introducing music into the act. In addition to sessions with former artist-addition Don Cherry and frequent latenight improvisations in the living room of Foley House, both Wolken and Pendleton had had experience with what they term "natural music." They Pendletion to wind this around their dance, in the form of barrels, drums, a musical saw, and a "water tabla"—actually a peanut butter jar with water in it. The result was impressive, at least to the Hampshire College reviewer.
"The two of them confronted each other across a conga drum. They began tentatively, feeling each other's mood, and slowly built a crescendo of intensity until the sound sprouted up around them like a double helix. They even got upset at each other for playing too long, and promptly maneuvered each other into a crashing end."
On December 29 of last year, Pilobolus returned to New York for its first public performance there, once again using the Louis-Nikolais "Space." New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff described the scene: "The three men created witty and theatrical shapes through various linked groupings of their bodies. Was this gymnastics disguised as dance? Perhaps. But it worked." Although cautious in her praise, the Times critic cited the group's "amazing physical fearlessness, humor, inventiveness and unselfconsciousness."
Winter Carnival featured a return of Pilobolus to Hanover, this time solo on the stage of Spaulding Auditorium. Their expanded act included pieces entitled Geode, Walklyndon, Spyrogyra, and a musical number called Night Window on saw and honey jar. Following that appearance, the group planned to travel to colleges around New England and eastern Canada, and to make a tour with Mark Amitin to the West Coast in April.
