Pilobolus’s Shadowy Netherworld

Pilobolus’s palpably present dancer-acrobats dematerialize into figments of a shadowy netherworld in the company’s “Darkness and Light,” currently on view at the Joyce Theater. This piece, on Program 3 of the company’s nearly monthlong stay at the Joyce, is the result of a collaboration by puppeteer Basil Twist with Pilobolus’s Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken (and the performers themselves, listed as co-choreographers for most of Pilobolus’s works). Mr. Twist’s puppets freely intermingle with the dancers as they prowl backlit behind a screen that separates us from them.“Darkness and Light” recalls the works of Alwin Nikolais in the way that the dancer’s individual identity is completely obscured. When the curtain goes up, the cast is assembled onstage, wearing dark glasses, looking a bit S&M and a bit “We’re with the band.” They could be sound and light technicians working the psychedelic light shows in the heyday of the Fillmore; Pilobolus recalls the flavor of its founding era even as it continuously refreshes itself.“Darkness and Light” might also be Pilobolus’s answer to Asian shadow play behind a shoji screen. It’s an encyclopedic review of the imagistic possibilities of the projected silhouette. Figure-ground relationships are constantly in flux. Your eye seeks out recognizable shapes and identities as if looking for the man in the moon. Sometimes what we see are tiny little votive figures, or pointy-chinned gremlins that belong to the puppet world. And sometimes the images are hypertrophied, so that the screen can contain only a fragment of their enveloping dimensions. Sometimes they are parts standing in for wholes, clues in a biomorphic crossword puzzle.The scale is both cosmic, a matter of cloud cover and astral mapping, and microcosmic, as we sometimes seem to be watching a time-lapse recording of a sea fern or tumbleweed fleece. There are riffs on the way that the constituent parts of a ceramic vase are named for and correspond to elements of the human figure, as well as metaphoric correspondences between human and external landscapes.Toward the end of “Darkness and Light” we seem to revisit the rear-projection tricks of old-time movies as the screen shows clouds racing by overhead, surmounting a dancer sitting in yoga position, moving at a far slower pace. “Darkness and Light,” goes on a bit too long, as if the many cooks involved in its preparation had all insisted on getting in their two cents’ worth. But it is gripping and decorative and as good a workout for the spectator’s imagination as it must have been for that of its creators.Preceding “Darkness and Light,” on the program was “B’zyrk,” a chronicle of the adventures and misadventures of a wild-and-crazy circus troupe. The performers begin by taking bows, their faces stretched taut in stage smiles. To the accompaniment of what might be called Technicolor music, they proceed ritualistically through routines of knockabout absurdism with occasional darker overtones.The second half of the program begins with Michael Tracy’s “Symbiosis,” a duet performed by Jenny Mendez and Manelich Minniefee. The two start out with him piloting her while remaining on all fours. The duet unfolds as an ongoing search for the ideal pivot point, as he is straddled by her, she slides up and down him and clasps herself around him.“Symbiosis” is followed by “Day Two,” a multiauthored work that has been a repertory staple since it was first performed in 1980. Indeed “Symbiosis” could be a preparatory sketch for “Day Two,” although the duet was actually made 20 years later. “Day Two” amplifies the scale of the two-member partnering explorations. To throbbing jungle percussion, the dancers throw themselves headlong into an unabashed and slightly campy invocation of tribalism and evolution of species. They make reference to shamanism and incorporate a lexicon of hand gestures like the madras of Asian Indian dance. Reciprocal partnering between men and women may find a man carried offstage tucked in fetal position between the women’s legs.“Day Two” concludes with a finale-postlude that is the one of the troupe’s most rousing coups de théâtre. A tarpaulin into which we’d just seen the dancers disappear has now been rolled out and wet down and now the six dancers go slip-sliding across it, sloshing and spinning like seals. This episode proclaims itself good, clean, wet fun — the performers could be children sloshing through puddles. It also has an undercurrent of atavistic, return-to-the-lustral or amniotic source. It never fails to bring down the house, and here in a nutshell we experience many of the sustaining themes of Pilobolus.

Pilobolus’s Shadowy Netherworld

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