Staged Heat: The dancers of Pilobolus strike a pose.

Pilobolean Logic

Dance company finds order in apparent chaos

By Marina Wolf

Even if you’ve never watched Pilobolus, you’ve probably seen Pilobolus, if only in one of those calendars or posters celebrating the dancer’s body. You can’t miss ’em, though you might not be able to count them in the tangle of arms, heads, and legs that form some of the group’s more dramatic poses.

“Yes, well, we show off a bit for those,” admits Jonathan Wolken, cofounder and one of Pilobolus’ artistic directors.

But actually the poses aren’t that much of a stretch from the dance company’s norm, as North Bay audiences will see when the group performs in San Rafael on March 16.

Onstage, the six-member company dances along an ever shifting edge between balance and glorious free fall. And Pilobolus, named after a barnyard fungus with equally vigorous habits, has become best known for works that propel the dancers along insane trajectories that intersect in the most unlikely of configurations.

To the viewer, these extraordinary meetings of bodies in time and space might seem impossible. To the dancers, claims Wolken, the positions make perfect sense.

“It’s more about balance than strength,” he says, speaking by phone from Pilobolus’ home base in Connecticut.

“You just learn how to use your weight and strength and balance in an intuitive way,” he continues, “so that when you get in a Pilobolean grapple of any sort, there is an internal logic that appears immediately.”

In another sense, this internal logic is far from immediate; it’s evolved considerably over the group’s 31 years of existence. New dancers must not only learn the repertoire–when to leap, where to catch–they also have to merge with the organic logic of the collective body.

“There is a steeping process, like tea, and you become more of Pilobolus as you do this,” Wolken says.

As Pilobolus has grown in stature in the dance world, its works have been performed by ballet companies around the country. But Wolken and the other artistic directors prefer to work with dancers who have their own movement logic.

“A really useful term is ‘movement intelligence,'” says Wolken. “It’s not really a quotient of anything, but it describes how people choose to move when they’re inventing on the spot. We want to know what they do with what they have.”

The current dancers have, among other things, experience in break dancing and martial arts, as well as traditional stints in modern companies.

In other words, they have dance training that the original Pilobolus dancers did not. The group was founded in 1971, when Wolken and other soon-to-graduate seniors took a beginning-level modern dance class at Dartmouth. The proto-Pilobolus made up for its lack of experience with a lot of excitement, strong bodies, and not a jot of technique to get in the way of creative processes.

“Technique for us was not something we were physically capable of,” recalls Wolken about those first works. “There wasn’t really much we could do that was traditional, so we began moving nontraditionally. We found ways of combining our individual bodies into an agglomerated whole of some kind or another. It wasn’t really a matter of choice. We just did what we could do.”

Then as now the group relied on improv for inspiration. You can see it when you watch them in action, in the startling rushes of their throws, leaps, and catches, in acrobatics that spring from the molten core of pure movement. At the same time, you will also notice a certain dreamlike narrative framework that has emerged with time and which Wolken considers one of the group’s more significant artistic developments.

“There are two poles–we think of them as poles in our style,” he says. “One of them is obviously abstract, and the other is very theatrical. We’ve touched on the abstract, especially in our earlier works, and the real breakthrough for us was finding a way over to the theatrical side.”

In their newest commission, a piece that debuted at the Winter Olympics last month, Pilobolus returned to its abstract origins. “The conceit of the piece was sport and art, which is of interest to us, not so much in terms of sport but the general exuberance of movement and athleticism,” Wolken says. “It taps into one of the early roots of Pilobolus, as we were more physically adept than we were artistically knowing. That has changed, of course, over 31 years, and now to go back and touch on the roots of sport and art is an interesting philosophical subject.”

The audience posed another challenge. The group was warned that the Mormon crowd would require a certain modesty, which could have been a little restrictive for a group whose physicality in pairings and groupings can be as fiery as it is fast.

“Our natural tendency when you see a man and a woman together is to take the situation sexually,” Wolken says. “That’s the direction one is pulled. That’s great, because dance works on that basis as well. There’s heat, there’s real heat. We use that sexuality and play on it.

“But at the Olympics, I think people bring a sort of chaste mind to the audience that helps us a lot.”

And if the viewers come ready to see hot stuff, that’s OK too, Wolken says. “We want the audience to bring something active with it. We don’t want a passive audience.”

Pilobolus Dance Theatre perform Saturday, March 16, at 8pm at the Marin Center, Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. Tickets are $22-$35 for adults and $18 for kids 18 and under. For details, call 415.472.3500.

From the March 7-13, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Water Works: David Yearsley of the Petaluma River Maintenance and Enhancement Committee surveys the site of a proposed environmental art project.

Art in the Marsh

Renowned nature artist has big plans for Petaluma

The glistening mud flats of Gray’s Field at low tide are a slick, mucky wonderland. Slit open here and there by narrow channels, the flats are illuminated by intermittent shafts of yellow sunlight seeping in through breaks in the gloomy, gathering clouds. The surface of the mud is stamped with crisscrossed hieroglyphics created by bird feet.

Just beyond the flotsam-littered levee, the Petaluma River moves slowly back in from San Pablo Bay, meandering past the riotous bird sanctuary of Shollenberger Park, which spreads out to the north, immediately adjoining the bird-covered marsh at the edge of which I now stand.

Glancing in the direction of Shollenberger–Petaluma’s most frequently used and probably most ecologically important public park–I can see joggers, dog walkers, and bird watchers making their way along the gravel pathways that lead to the river.

From where I stand, a softball’s toss from a mob of shrieking seagulls feeding on the flats, I can trace my deep bootprints through the mud back to the trail I descended to get here. As the tide begins to return, those indentations will fill up with the water trickling in through a 30-foot breach in the levee.

A pair of ultralights swoop low over the marsh, emitting an insectlike buzz and casting shadows that startle the birds, stirring them into a cyclone of winged pandemonium.

Other than the planes and the noise of the gulls, the only sound is the eerie roar of the wind in my ears. What seemed to be a relatively small expanse when spied from the Shollenberger trail now seems immense, remote, dangerously wild.

It’s the perfect place for an art show.

“I like very physical experiences,” says artist Patricia Johanson. “I like experiences that put you right in the middle of nature, rather than leaving you standing on the edge as an outsider looking down on nature.”

An internationally renowned environmental artist, Johanson lives in upstate New York but travels the world creating and implementing vast, one-of-a-kind installations.

Mainly interested in environmentally sensitive areas, Johanson crafts projects that combine nature trails and freeform sculpture, weaving together the familiar experiences of being at a public park or attending an art exhibition with the thrill of having landed in the midst of messy, unpredictable wilderness.

Johanson’s creations dot the globe, ranging from the “sculptural playgrounds” of The Rocky Marciano Trail in Brockton, Mass., to the Millennium Park in Seoul, South Korea, which turned the world’s largest landfill into a vast figure of a nature guardian, interlaced with terraced areas for recreation and meditation.

Johanson’s other projects include the linear Endangered Garden in San Francisco and Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas, Texas, a hard-to-describe ecological artwork that includes paths, bridges, seats, and animal islands, all designed to resemble the curves and entanglements of indigenous plants and insects.

She has also created such enormous projects as the Park for the Amazon Rainforest and Kenya’s Nairobi River Park. The latter, built on what was once among the most polluted rivers on the planet, employs specially selected vegetation and ingenious sculptural installations to filter and purify the river water.

As part of the historic agreement reached by the Petaluma City Council in January, Johanson will be designing a wetlands experience for the tidal lands and pastures of Gray’s Field.

That’s presuming, of course, that enough money can be raised through grants and private donations to purchase the land and build the park.

The effort is connected to the city’s proposed $88 million wastewater treatment plant, which will include an environmentally friendly wetlands filtration process of filtering and removing algae.

The proposed marshland park is tentatively titled The Trail of Tides and will eventually link the Petaluma Marina to Shollenberger Park, continuing out to the bay and playing a vital role in the city’s treatment and purification of water.

It will also be fun.

Or so says David Yearsley, chairman of the Petaluma River Maintenance and Enhancement Committee, one of the project’s most committed advocates.

“It will be an interactive park with interactive experiences,” Yearsley explains. “The changes in the tide will determine what kind of interaction you have with the park at different times.”

But don’t slip on your mud shoes just yet.

“It’s not a done deal,” says Petaluma City Council Member Janice Cader-Thompson. “The property has to be acquired [the land is currently owned by Petaluma Poultry Processing], but the city is moving forward to work with PPP and I feel comfortable and confident that this will happen.”

Estimates put the price tag for the park, which includes the cost of the land, at a minimum of $3 million. Under the terms of the agreement reached by the city council, that money must come from sources outside the city’s coffers.

According to Cader-Thompson, if fundraising is successful, the remarkable art trail through the wetlands should be at least half finished by the time the new treatment plant goes on line in 2006. If the funds have not been locked down within a year, however, the city could choose to allow development on the land instead. And Cader-Thompson would hate to see that happen.

“We have a rare opportunity to do something that most communities would leap at,” she says. “We can create a park that people will travel from across the world to see, while also creating a wastewater facility that will be a model for future communities around the country. It’s clearly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

What isn’t clear, however, is exactly what the finished park will look like.

“I have my own vision,” says Yearsley. “But like most people, I don’t have a clue what this art installation will look like.” Earlier reports suggested a layout that, when viewed from the sky, would resemble a giant chicken head.

Describing one design she’s considered, Johanson envisions walkways and staircases that lead through the marsh during low tide and then become cascading waterfalls, transforming the park as the water rises.

“I want to design a way for people to walk out along the levee,” she says, “which is really an amazing experience, because you are so close to the river. When you walk Shollenberger, you are on a raised path, and you’re really quite far from the wetlands; you are removed from it, you are above it, in a God-like stance, looking down on all the activities of nature.

“I want to put you right down into nature,” she adds, “to give you a different sense of how you are connected to all of these birds, to the water, to the land. So you see the power of nature up close and personal.”

Despite living on the other side of the country, Johanson has come to love the tidal plains of the Petaluma Marsh. She’s pained by the thought that the park might not happen, that the rare experience of walking among the tides might be lost beneath end-to-end industrial complexes.

But Johanson has reason to be optimistic.

“One thing you can say about Petaluma,” she says. “It’s got the smartest people in the world. Petalumans are so well-educated, so well-versed in the issues, so aware of all the importance of sustainability issues, they just blow me away.

“They’re smart enough, most of them, to understand what they’re going to lose if they don’t do this.”

From the February 28-March 6, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.