Eau Claire will present Pilobolus Dance Theatre Tuesday, March 14. The group was immediately acclaimed for its startling mix of humor and invention. Today Pilobolus is a major American dance company of international influence, a deeply committed collaborative effort with four artistic directors and six dancers contributing to one of the most popular and varied repertoires in the field. Almost three decades of making dances now stand as a testament to the company's position as an artistic collective of remarkable fruitfulness and longevity. Complicated geometric patterns sprout and grow organically.
Wondrous shapes emerge, merge, split and remerge.
The physical vocabularies of Pilobolus works are not drawn from the long traditions of codified dance movement but are invented, emerging from intense periods of improvisation and creative play. This process has been the source of much interest, and in 1991 the company inaugurated the Pilobolus Institute, an educational outreach program that uses the art of choreography as a model for creative thinking in any field. The company has received several prestigious honors, among them the Berlin Critics Prize, the Brandeis Award, the Scotsman Award for performances at the Edinburgh Festival, the New England Theatre Conference Prize, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Award for Excellence, and in 1997 a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in cultural programming. They are also acrobats capable of elevating their physical prowess into a breathtaking art, as well as theatre and mime artists. These abilities they combine in an evening's entertainment, flecked with wit, which literally explodes with imagination and originality, presented with a stunning sense of visual aesthetics.