Pilobolus, whose month-long season at the Joyce Theater begins this evening, has never been a typical modern dance company. Formed in 1971 by a group of non-dancers who met in a dance class at Dartmouth, the company has always stretched the limits of what dance is and how it is created. Recently, they’ve also been pushing against another boundary: the one that divides high art from commercial work and popular entertainment.

The company has done commercial work for some time, but in the last year, that work has attracted considerably more attention. AdWeek named a commercial Pilobolus appeared in for the Hyundai Sante Fe the “best spot” of the month in its October 2006 issue. The company also appeared at the Academy Awards, making shadows behind a screen that evoked various hit movies of the year — “Happy Feet,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Snakes on a Plane” — and on “Oprah” a few months later, doing outtakes from the Oscars performance. And in addition to the company’s television appearances, it has also branched out into publishing, producing a children’s book called “The Human Alphabet,” and has begun teaching workshops in how to work collaboratively for business school students and executives.

In this context, one might expect to hear mutterings in the dance world about the company “selling out” or losing its focus. But while there have always been critics of Pilobolus’s populist approach, the dance community has, for the most part, applauded its efforts to support itself and to broaden the audience for dance.

The outgoing executive director of Danspace Project, and new artistic director of the International Dance Festival Ireland, Laurie Uprichard, said in an e-mail message that “many people in the dance field have groaned” about Pilobolus’s Oscars appearance, but she was enthusiastic. Things like the Oscars and “Dancing With the Stars” are points of entry for people, she said, just as “American Bandstand,” the dance/music television show hosted by Dick Clark, was for her when she was a child growing up in Cleveland.

The director of the service organization Dance/NYC, Robert Yesselman, also praised Pilobolus’s recent activity. But he said he wasn’t sure its business model was necessarily adaptable to other companies. “That work they’re doing has more of a commercial appeal” than many other companies’ work, Mr. Yesselman said, “but I applaud them for breaking out of the 501(c)3 box.”

The company’s executive director, Itamar Kubovy, said he’s found the dance community to be very supportive of Pilobolus’s recent ventures. “There was always a little bit of an attitude about Pilobolus in the dance world,” he said, “because it doesn’t follow fromaspecifictraditionlike[Martha] Graham or [Merce] Cunningham.” But “there has been tremendous support and respect” for the company’s efforts to attract new audiences to dance.

Financially, things are going very well. Mr. Kubovy said the company has doubled its operating budget, to around $2.5 million, since he was hired in 2004. With those resources, it has added a seventh dancer to its touring company and has also hired around 20 other part-time dancers — most of them former members of the full-time company — so that it can do commercial and television projects at the same time that it tours.

Before Mr. Kubovy was hired, the company’s members had always made decisions collaboratively — a process one of the founders and artistic directors, Robby Barnett, acknowledged was less than efficient, and which prevented the company from taking full advantage of its commercial opportunities. “Occasionally these things would come our way,” he said, but “it always occurred to us that this was something that would be able to fund our regular choreographic enterprise in a muchmore efficient fashion.” He added: “Itamar has allowed us to handle this material in a much more effective way.”

Every penny the company earns commercially, Mr. Barnett said, goes directly into its educational programs and toward making new dances. The company recently started an international commissioning program. The first commission, a collaboration between Mr. Barnett and the Israeli choreographers Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollack, will have its New York premiere at the Joyce next week.

The business school and corporate workshops — which Pilobolus has conducted at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest, and at companies including Wachovia and United Technologies Corporation — are not yet a significant source of revenue, Mr. Kubovy said, but the company expects they may become one in the future. In the workshops, a member of Pilobolus, usually another artistic director, Jonathan Wolken, breaks the students or executives into small groups and tells them to create a dance. In the process, the participants experience conflict and frustration, but also learn to appreciate their shortcomings, to play, and to benefit from their mistakes.

“In any field that values creativity—and certainly business does— to have a belief in your own power of imagination, to believe that you can harness your will and create something, is a good thing,” Mr. Barnett said.

In addition to these workshops, Mr. Barnett recently put together a proposal for a full performing arts degree program, based on Pilobolus’s collaborative method, for California State University Channel Islands.

Mr. Barnett expressed confidence that other companies would someday reap the benefits of commercial work. “The world of advertising and marketing [will discover] that we are not the only brilliant resource out there for moving people through space,” he said. “I hope they will discover that the dance world has much to offer in this regard.”