Pilobolus Opens FirstWorks Festival September 25
Thursday, September 16, 2010
When Pilobolus opens this year's FirstWorks Festival on Saturday, September 25, it signifies one of dance's long-standing and dominant forces taking a Rhode Island stage. Founded nearly 40 years ago, this intensely corporeal, innovative collaborative ensemble created a physical vocabulary that is now associated with Cirque du Soleil, but truly pioneered a new aspect of modern dance.
The program being presented next week includes a new work, "Hapless Hooligan in 'Still Moving,'" created in collaboration with graphic novelist Art Speigelman, creator of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus, as well as his newest work, The Book of Genesis. It's merely another example of Pilobolus's devotion to innovation and exploration. GoLocalProv caught up with Pilobolus's artistic director (and founding member) Michael Tracy, who spoke with GLP from the company's studios in rural Connecticut.
It's thrilling to have Pilobolus return to a Rhode Island stage, and this new collaborative work with Art Speigelman is so exciting. How did Pilobolus seek to work with an artist who is so two-dimensional?
As a company, you want to try to work with different people. Ten years ago we did a wonderful collaboration with Maurice Sendak, and we were able to work in ways that we didn't work by ourselves. This has emboldened us to try new collaborations of different sorts - composers, directors, and now, a graphic novelist.
Who found whom?
We contacted him. We've loved his work forever, but didn't know if he was at all interested in working with us. He wasn't a fan of dance, didn't know much about us, and couldn't imagine what we would do together. But he was
intrigued by our energy. We talked last summer. He said, "There can't be any mice." (Laughs.)
How did this piece come into being?
We brainstormed for a few months. Then we set up a huge screen that filled our studio. Speigelman would draw cartoons that projected on it, and we would improvise. The name of the piece is a tribute to Happy Hooligan, a character from the early era of comics. Speigelman and I came from two very different backgrounds. Mine was in the beauty of the human body, the passage of movement, of human emotion, through real time. And that's quite in opposition to art's experience of taking a blank page, and some story, and parsing that into small individual panels that break time into discrete moments. It's become a very interesting interplay, one you don't see anywhere else on the stage.
People may not realize that Pilobolus pioneered a creative, athletic approach to movement before anyone had heard of Cirque du Soleil.
Pilobolus was born of its time. It came of age in the 60s and 70s, when the world was different. One of those things was a sense of experimentation, a changing of the old methods. We believed that we could create movement that was interesting, and not derived from ballet or choreographers. We invented our vocabulary. We never expected to survive this long!
Pilobolus performs one night only, September 25, at 8pm, at the Providence Performing Arts Center, Westminster St, Providence. Tickets $28-$48. For more information, go to FirstWorks's Web site, here.
Photos John Kane, Joseph Mehling
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