Pilobolus Revives Its Tumbling Act

As its four week season winds down, Pilobolus remains hale and hearty. Saturday night, when the company’s performed its Program 3, its dancers slyly explored the emotional and physical linchpins of load-bearing and weight distribution in works created by the company’s charter members.Michael Tracy’s “Prism” proved something of a free play exercise to a garage rock soundtrack assemblage.Three men were blown laterally across the stage, while Jenny Mendez made a contrasting entrance, jogging back and forth from one wing to the other. But soon she and the three men fell into a rhythm that enabled them to team up for some extraordinary partnering collaborations, such as when two standing performers inched across the stage while straddling and being supported by two other dancers lying on the ground.Movement paths of unicellular organisms are the departure point for Jonathan Wolken’s “Pseudopodia,” a solo that dates back to the company’s early years in the 1970s and to its longstanding interest in botanical and biological phenomena.Renee Jaworski performed nearly the entire piece on the ground, unfurling across the stage in waves of somersaults or tied up in double-jointed invertebrate contortion. Sometimes she propped herself up on bent knees, standing on three-quarter pointe like a Central Asian folk dancer, and it seemed she rose at times only to give herself a better leverage on the ground.Next, Andrew Herro, Jun Kuribayashi, Manelich Minnifree, and Edwin Olivera performed Robby Barnett and Mr. Wolken’s “Gnomen.”As the piece begins, the four men steamroll on stage in a group somersault. Soon the constituent parts separate and sociological commentary takes over, as each member of the group is expulsed from the aggregate and subjected to the manipulations of his fellow dancers. Mr. Herro was forced to drag himself along the ground, or the group swung him like a human hammock. Mr. Olivera was turned upside down, placed on his head, and swiveled like a turnstile. He knotted himself into a ball, an instinctively defensive response.When it was Mr. Kuribayashi’s turn on the receiving end of the antics, his three interlocutors lifted him from the floor with their feet and swung him back and forth at trundle height.Mr. Tracy’s “Solo From the Empty Suitor”provided an episode of demented slapstick.A beret-clad Eve offered a bite of her apple to a knot of top-hatted men. Each one in turn fell under some sort of a spell.Fancying himself the wiser for his friend’s misadventures, Mr. Herro declined when she approached him, but his fate became precarious nevertheless as the ground shifted under his feet and the stage turned into a booby-trapped obstacle course. His legs splayed as he scrabbled for purchase across a series of rollers spread on the ground. A bench somehow affixed itself to his shoulders and proved resistant to removal. Finally Mr. Herro extricated himself and settled onto the bench, a smile of relief spread across his face.Saturday night’s closing piece,”Sweet Purgatory,” featured choreography by Messrs. Barnett, Wolken, and Tracy, together with Alison Chase. Six performers rippled over each other to moody Shostakovich. Pilobolus often features same-sex partnering, but it usually doesn’t register as dance partnering as much as it does reciprocal support in the manner of a tumbling act. In “Sweet Purgatory,” the same-sex duets more closely re-created the ambiance of a classic pas de deux, mostly due to the direct contrast of two men lifting two women, alongside a third male-male duo. Saturday night’s program closed on a visual and emotional note that was interesting and ambiguous. Once again, Pilobolus demonstrated that it is a law unto itself, a singular theatrical universe.Until August 12 (175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-691-9740).

Pilobolus Revives Its Tumbling Act

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