Splitting firewood and running a wildly successful contemporary dance company actually have a lot in common.
This uncanny realization arrives a few days after a conversation with Matt Kent, artistic director of the Connecticut-based Pilobolus—and a chopper of wood when he’s not in the studio or on the road touring with the dance company. Kent, along with executive and co-artistic director René Jaworski, will bring three performances of re:CREATION, a national tour program featuring selections from the company’s vast half-century repertoire, to Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall Sat/30 and Sun/1.
Founded in 1971 and in the earliest years often linked to the words “radical” or “rebellious,” the company was started by three college-age non-dancers with unusual crossover intellectual and athletic interests—an English lit major and cross-country skier, a science philosopher who fenced, and a pre-med student pole vaulter. Their bold physical explorations and imaginative investigations of the human body—sometimes clothed and occasionally, when it served artistic purposes, not—marked the company as something extraordinary.
The Greek word pilobolus translates in English to “hat thrower,” a marvelous visual metaphor for spores that accelerate at tremendous speeds upon being emitted by Pilobolus crystallinus, a phototropic fungus. Along with choreography that seems to originate and burst forth from a primal, earthy, organic source, a vital feature of the company is its making its home for more than 50 years in rural Connecticut.
Which is where chopping wood and leading a dance company fall into sweet harmony. “The benefit of being located outside of New York City or another urban center is that we’ve long been influenced by the movement we see around us,” Kent says. “When I’m in the city, I’m overwhelmed. It’s like I’m a cell in an artery and ‘swoosh,’ I just get sucked along.
“Here, the pace is slower and there are some plants taller than the buildings. The living beings we’re surrounded by are older than us, the two-legged animals that came later. Because our work is so organic, you’d see less emergent qualities if were located in a city’s hustle, bustle environment. It’s good here: I like to split my own firewood and hear from a colleague about a bobcat with her babies just learning to stand that she saw.”
Another activity Kent claims as a favorite is listening to people talk in theater lobbies. “Their conversations are so precious to me. Sometimes I take a piece to California and it just lands there; people love it. It might be received differently in another place, but what strikes me is how much reactions are the same. People laugh at and feel emotion about the same things.
“We’re more alike than different. We’re in a time when everyone has an affiliation and ‘other’ is seen as hostile. And yet, when you sit in a theater and have this shared experience, well, I find it’s the most hopeful thing to gather, laugh together, then talk about why that happened.”
Eavesdropping on conversations, Kent is thrilled that people see an abstract dance and then describe an emotional response. When he’s asked by audience members if they’ve “got it right,” he tells them they just have to bring their minds and bodies to a Pilobolus show. “If they do that and see the human body as a work of art and have an emotional response, it’s everything we hope for.”
Of course, Pilobolus presents not only abstract dances that test and highlight the physics of human bodies and natural forces such as gravity, momentum, and velocity. Highly theatrical works in the repertoire include “Rushes,” a collaborative work on the upcoming program draws from multiple, eclectic musical styles and sources. The dance boasts three acclaimed dance-theater artists as choreographers, the work of film animator Peter Sluszka, and unforgettable costumes, lighting, and props.
“This re:CREATION tour is a play on words: recreating works, but not presenting them like museum pieces. They have to be birthed anew each night. ‘Rushes’ is a piece having to do what happens when a stranger is introduced into a group dynamic. These people are waiting and waiting for something. It’s surreal and takes you on a journey you don’t realize you’re on until almost the end of the piece.”
Kent says “Rushes” is signature Pilobolus in part because “the surrealism creates a sucker punch of emotion.” In the home rehearsal space they call “Piloboland,” there is an atmosphere of collaboration and belonging and, equally, isolation. Because the dancers are humans, there are also in their lives (and the work) moments of desperation, division, cohesion, comedy, and relief. Through the humor of manipulating tiny chairs in the work, the dancers express how form and functionality also represents the poignancy of everyday objects in representing social connection.
The absurdity of adults on diminutive chairs additionally represents commitment to the company’s appreciation and practice of deliberate or spontaneous play and an adept propensity for turning road blocks into opportunities. “We were making the work in a congregational church that had a preschool. There were all these tiny chairs for tiny people to sit in. That worked into the piece simply because they were there. We couldn’t keep our hands off them.”
Another piece, “Bloodlines,” is rare, Kent says, because in the company’s 50-plus years, there are only a handful of women’s duets. He and Jaworski had found themselves in their “sandwich years.” They were raising children while at the same time providing increasing care for their aging parents. They focused on the reciprocal nature of caretaking and kept seeing images of women caring for other women. They brought into their process a Native American storyteller who is a member of the area’s Schaghticoke tribe.
“We were looking for representations of multi-generational caregiving. We heard her stories and later ended up reading poet laureate Joy Hart’s ‘Washing my Mother’s Body.’ She can’t do what she’s supposed to do—washing—because they’ve already taken her mother’s body. She goes to the house and goes on a kind of journey with things in the house where she’s remembering a scar on her mother’s arm and other stuff.”
From that inspiration and working with the creative team he says came beautiful imagery—small textile pieces at one point drop like petals or blood cells from above—and a profound message of generosity in reciprocal caregiving that he says resonates with audiences everywhere.
Two additional works complete the Berkeley program. “The Transformation” is an excerpt from Pilobolus’ enthralling, evening length shadow show, “Shadowland.” A new work created this summer, “Tales from the Underworld,” showcases choreography in which bodies work seamlessly to become like one, the props might be ominous, lethal, protective, or all-of-the-above, and dramatic grandeur rises out of the work’s simplest movements and moments.
Reflecting on the tour and the current state of dance in less-than easy times culturally, socially, politically and economically, Kent says, “It’s very tricky. The rules of engagement have changed. Here in Connecticut, we keep a space for playing around and seeing what emerges. We hold onto a self-correcting mechanism with an obligation to each individual working at Pilobolus to constantly remap. We work more like a lantern than a laser beam. Our fluidity allows for course correction.”
And when the flow stalls or stops entirely, Kent calls time out. Outside in the gorgeous surroundings, a person chopping wood finds energy returning, ideas percolating, and a heat-seeking resolve to make art leading the way to tomorrow, and to more dances.
PILOBOLUS: re:CREATION Sat/30 and Sun/1 at CalPerformances, Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley. More info here.
