danceview
a quarterly review of dance

Writers' Archive

Alexandra Tomalonis
Reviews

Pilobolus

By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
December 2, 2000

Who but Pilobolus could make art out of prayer and a hairball? “Davenen” (prayer, in Yiddish), which received its world premiere at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater Thursday night, began with six dancers knotted together--dubbed a “hairball,” the dancers confided in a post-performance chat--and rolled, squirmed, bounced and somersaulted its way through a landscape of prayer and temptation that was in turn frightening, funny, and ecstatic.

Inspired by the words of Baal Shem Tov, founder of modern Hasidism, that the “alien thoughts” that descend upon a man at prayer are “holy sparks that have sunken and wish to be raised and redeemed by him,” “Davenen” exposes the soul and its temptations in sharp, kinetic images that bypass words and drive straight to the brain.

The dance concentrates on those “holy sparks” -- passion, loneliness, confusion --in a seamless stream of movement periodically interrupted by passages where the dancers stand, rocking back and forth, like supplicants at an invisible wailing wall. Frank London’s original score, performed live by the Klezmatics, was eminently danceable, and managed to be both sad and joyful, and triumphantly redemptive.

Pilobolus, founded by gymnasts nearly 30 years ago and still attracting dancers with eclectic backgrounds, creates its dances collaboratively. The works are grounded in contact improvisation--experiments with nonstandard partnering and shifts in weight: if a dancer lies across another dancer’s back and the supporting dancer kneels, what happens to the supported dancer?

The line of composition follows that question, which leads to another movement which, when guided by Pilobolus founder-choreographers Robby Barnett and Jonathan Wolken, creates shapes and patterns that are astounding and often profoundly moving. At the end of “Davenen,” demons confronted, wrestled and assimilated, the dancers stand calmly, erect and alone, bathed in a shaft of light.

“A Selection,” the 1999 work created by Barnett, Maurice Sendak (who created sets and costumes that were a cartoon from Hell), Michael Tracy, Jonathan Wolken and Arthur Yorinks which closed the program, suffered a bit in comparison. More demons, here besetting a group of people who miss a train and have to confront each other, and themselves, in a variety of nasty circumstances as war rages unseen around them.

The dancers gave intense performances, but by then, we had seen Rebecca Anderson, a scarlet-clad mermaid with white gold hair, roll and rise and fall and sway in the 1972 “Pseudopodia;” and Anderson and the tiny, determined Josie Coyoc slither around each other’s bodies in the sensual, slow motion 1992 “Duet.” Images and tricks began to repeat themselves, and the magic was diluted.

At its best, however, Pilobolus is still one of the most imaginative companies in dance today. It provokes, and it also delights. The program will be repeated tonight.