Pilobolus is a contemporary dance company whose origins are traced to a 1971 Dartmouth College dance class taught by Alison Becker Chase. The group first began performing in October 1971.
The founding artists of the original collective were Robby Barnett, Alison Chase, Martha Clarke, Lee Harris, Moses Pendleton, Jonathan Wolken.
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The founding and early members were Robby Barnett, Alison Becker Chase, Martha Clarke, Lee Harris, Moses Pendleton, Michael Tracy and Jonathan Wolken. Harris departed around 1975, leaving six members: four men and two women.[1][2] This has remained the basic configuration of the troupe. In November 1977, Pilobolus made its Broadway debut in a limited engagement at the St. James Theater, to great acclaim. Arlene Croce, writing in the New Yorker, praised the group as "six of the most extraordinary people now performing."[3]
Martha Clarke left in 1978.[4] Pendleton left in 1983 after having collaborated with Chase in 1980 to form the offshoot group Momix. The four remaining founders (Barnett, Chase, Tracy, and Wolken) continued as artistic directors, choreographing collectively and in various combinations in collaboration with new dancers brought into the company in subsequent years. Chase left in 2006 and has gone on to found her own company. Wolken died in 2010.[5]
Pilobolus performances are characterized by a strong element of physical interaction between the bodies of the performers and exaggerations or contortions of the human form (or other anthropomorphic forms), often verging on gymnastics. From early on, the company "made a specialty of playful topsy-turvy entanglements that defied anatomical logic" and which sometimes "gave rise to bizarre imagery."[6] This approach broke new ground, and soon "even choreographers who did not consciously borrow from the group enjoyed new license in bringing bodies (especially men) into closer physical contact"[7] than previously.
In 1999, Pilobolus collaborated with Maurice Sendak and Arthur Yorinks in the production of "A Selection", a work with the Holocaust as its theme, documented in the film Last Dance. In 2004 the company was the subject of a feature profile on CBS' 60 Minutes.
In 2007 Pilobolus appeared as performers in the television broadcast of the 79th Academy Awards. Their act was done in silhouette behind a white translucent screen, where they formed various figures at intervals during the show: first, the Oscar statue itself; then logos (or scenes) from various films: Happy Feet, Little Miss Sunshine, Snakes on a Plane, The Devil Wears Prada, and The Departed. At one point, they were introduced to the audience, wearing loose-fitting wraps. The act for Snakes on a Plane included host Ellen DeGeneres, who said afterwards, "They're naked!" Whether she was joking or serious was left to the imagination.
Pilobolus has, at present, three branches: Pilobolus Dance Theatre (a touring company); The Pilobolus Institute (educational programming); and Pilobolus Creative Services (movement services for film, advertising, publishing, commercial clients, and corporate events).
Pilobolus Dance Theatre, the group's performance flagship, is based in Washington Depot, Connecticut and possesses a repertory of over 100 works. Its "P7" troupe (so named because it consists of seven dancers) tours continually, performing new and selected works from the repertory. In recent years Pilobolus has added a second troupe to tour an evening-length work, Shadowland.
Pilobolus has received many awards, among them the Berlin Critic's Prize, the Brandeis Award, the Scotsman Award for performances at the Edinburgh Festival, the New England Theatre Conference Prize, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Award for Excellence and, in 1997, a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in cultural programming. In June 2000 Pilobolus received the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement in choreography. In 2010 Pilobolus was the first collective ever to receive a Dance Magazine Award[8]
In 2007, Pilobolus established the International Collaborators Project (ICP), in which the dance company teams up with visiting artists annually to expand its unique collective choreographic process. To celebrate this inaugural event, Pilobolus Artistic Director Robby Barnett invited star Israeli director and choreographer Inbal Pinto and her artistic collaborator, actor and designer Avshalom Pollak, that same year to join the company in its studios in Connecticut.[9] Other ICP collaborators include author Maurice Sendak, puppet master Basil Twist, singer/composer David Poe, SpongeBob SquarePants head writer Steven Banks, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the rock band Ok Go, the MIT Distributed Robotics Lab, and Takuya Murimatsu of Dairakudakan.
Beginning in 2000, Pilobolus has issued an annual wall calendar featuring original photography created to further explore and celebrate the company's artistic sensibility. Rather than attempting to document their live performances, the calendar photo shoots represent an effort to create still images imbued with the Pilobolus aesthetic. Almost all of these have been photographed by John Kane, the company's longtime friend and collaborator on photography projects. A notable exception was the 2009 Pilobolus calendar, created while the company was on tour in Israel in January 2008, in collaboration with the Israeli Consulate in New York.[10] Renowned photographer Robert Whitman captured Pilobolus in a variety of colorful Israeli landscapes, including the Dead Sea, Old Jaffa, markets in Jerusalem, hot springs, and the streets of Haifa, to name a few. As is also the case in their studio photography, in some photos the group is featured with their bodies interwoven and overlapping, or contorted in strikingly artistic poses.[11] Subsequent calendars, again photographed by John Kane, have seen the dancers photographed in settings such as an abandoned factory and various outdoor environs in the vicinity of their rural Connecticut headquarters.
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