An hour-long cabaret-style work, Pilobolust, places dancers, as they move freely through the space, in direct relation to the audience. Performed by Pilobolus, the dance theater company returns on Saturday, May 16, to the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center’s intimate Indigo Room in Great Barrington, Mass. The performance - sold out twice last November - combines humor, nudity, and moments that verge on burlesque within a setting of mischief and theatrical play.
Athletes and scholars, rather than trained dancers, founded the award-winning, internationally recognized Pilobolus at Dartmouth College in 1971. The group studied with Alison Becker Chase, then an assistant dance professor and founding artistic director. Together, they developed a movement language rooted in physical partnering that tests how bodies support, stack, and give way to one another. Dancers formed precarious human structures that shifted unexpectedly. Humor was central. Falls, near-misses, and sudden reversals were carefully timed, and short, often absurd episodes played out in quick succession across the stage.
In a recent conversation with WAMC, Matt Kent, the artistic director of Pilobolus and former company dancer noted, “failure is our insurance against mediocrity.”
That spirit appears in Pilobolust on an intimate scale. Kent said, “The dancers come out walking around the audience, and they disrobe in the audience,” accompanied by a voice “singing the praises of the nude form, what it means to have this body and skin.” The action establishes the terms of the evening: a shared space in which performers and viewers are no longer clearly separated. He added, “you could reach out and touch them. They’re that close.” Some sections take shape as short vignettes, with performers entering and exiting the space, while others build toward more sustained encounters.
The choreography moves quickly between comic, teasing, and more physically entangled exchanges. In one scene, a performer in an apron, bra, and rubber gloves interacts with a male dancer, riding him like a small horse and tapping him on his bottom with her foot. The timing makes it funny. Elsewhere, as Kent describes, movement unfolds through “ducking behind… leaping towards someone to grab them… they slip out of the way, trying to ensnare each other,” at times resolving into bodies “wrapped up together” in shifting knots. The physical play is direct, tactile, and often precarious.
Kent recalled a moment in which a dancer “had a piece of gauze in her mouth - 12 feet of it… I proceed to eat the entire 12 feet until it’s completely in my mouth,” culminating in a kiss and “the old switcheroo.”
For Pilobolus, the move into a cabaret environment is less a departure than a continuation. As Kent observed, the company has long worked outside conventional theatrical settings, including outdoor performance spaces. And, while moments suggest affinities with burlesque and cabaret, the work moves in and out of those forms. It draws on those elements selectively, using them to heighten attention and complicate expectation. The body is not reduced to display; it remains an active thinking presence within the choreography. Kent spoke of the room as “charged with a kind of primal energy… it’s in the air like heat.”
Catherine Tharin is a choreographer, writer, curator, and educator. Her writing on dance has appeared in The Dance Enthusiast, Interlocutor, Side of Culture, and the Boston Globe. Tharin currently curates The Dance Series at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY, and dance film at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY.
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