Flight in Pilobolus’ Trips (Photo: Emily Denaro)
Pilobolus: Trips
By Deirdre Donovan
With Trips: Program A, Pilobolus once again demonstrates why it remains one of America’s most inventive dance companies. Through a series of visually arresting works that blend athleticism, illusion, humor, and poetry, the troupe transforms the stage into a realm where the human body seems capable of infinite reinvention.
Perhaps to remind the audience that they are human beings rather than shape-shifting marvels, the members of Pilobolus begin the evening with a series of warm-up exercises performed in plain view. One dancer executes a cartwheel, another balances a colleague on his shoulders, while a third launches into a succession of turbocharged somersaults. Yet the ritual seems to involve more than preparing muscles for the demands ahead. It reveals the trust and camaraderie that underpin the company’s work, culminating in a brief huddle that, on this evening, appeared to serve as both a final consultation and a reaffirmation of the collective spirit that animates the performance.
Program A comprises five distinct works—Bloodlines, Walklyndon, Flight, Pseudopodia, and Particle Zoo. While each piece offers its own imaginative journey, together they showcase the qualities that have long distinguished Pilobolus: fearless athleticism, seamless collaboration, visual invention, and an uncanny ability to create their own world. Throughout the evening, bodies continuously transform into shifting shapes, landscapes, and living sculptures, making reinvention itself feel like the program’s unifying theme.
Bloodlines in Pilobolus’ Trips (Photo: Jason Hudson)
The evening opens with Bloodlines, a searingly beautiful duet that reveals Pilobolus’ capacity for emotional storytelling as readily as its celebrated athleticism. Performed with exquisite sensitivity by Hannah Klinkman and Anouk Otsea, who wear flesh-toned unitards traced with blood-red lines suggesting exposed veins and ancestral bonds, the work draws inspiration from Joy Harjo’s poem “Washing My Mother’s Body.” Beginning in a tight, face-to-face embrace, the dancers gradually unfold into a series of lifts, cantilevered leans, and exquisitely balanced weight-sharing that speak to the physical and emotional demands of caregiving across generations. Their intertwined bodies evoke both the tenderness of motherhood and the burden of caring for an aging parent, while the work’s haunting score deepens its emotional resonance. When red confetti and rose petals descend at the climax, the image suggests an ancestral inheritance passed from one generation of women to the next.
If Bloodlines reveals Pilobolus’ emotional depth, Walklyndon returns the evening to the company’s trademark physical comedy. Performed by Connor Chaparro, Alexis Cruz-Castro, Ryan Hayes, Isaac Huerta, Klinkman, and Otsea, this classic work from the troupe’s repertoire sends the six dancers careening across the stage in a series of absurd walks, off-kilter encounters, and perfectly timed tumbles. Created by the company’s founders in 1971, Walklyndon has long been celebrated as one of Pilobolus’ signature comic pieces, and it loses none of its charm here. The delighted squeals of a young girl in the audience, echoed by laughter and smiles throughout the theater, testified that its playful spirit continues to captivate audiences more than five decades later.
Flight, created by artistic directors Renée Jaworski and Matt Kent in collaboration with original Pilobolus co-founder and pilot Lee Harris, playfully explores the kinship between dancing and flying. Performed by Chaparro, Huerta, Klinkman, and Otsea, the work transforms a stage strewn with cloud-like mounds into an airborne playground. Set to Paul Sullivan’s expansive score, the dancers launch paper airplanes, trace sweeping arcs through space, and ultimately entwine their bodies into improbable flying machines. Equal parts whimsical and awe-inspiring, Flight captures the enduring human desire to leave the ground behind.
Any notion that Pilobolus simply repeats itself is dispelled by Pseudopodia. Choreographed by company co-founder Robby Barnett and Alison Chase in 1973, this mesmerizing solo—performed with astonishing agility by Klinkman—distills the company’s fascination with metamorphosis into its purest form. Named after the temporary extensions used by amoebae for movement, the work blurs the line between human and organism as Klinkman tumbles, folds, and unfurls across the stage with hypnotic precision.
Particle Zoo in Pilobolus’ Trips (Photo: Emily Denaro)
The evening concludes with Particle Zoo, an exuberant celebration of Pilobolus’ extraordinary ensemble chemistry. Performed by Chaparro, Cruz-Castro, Hayes, and Huerta, the quartet hurtles through a dazzling succession of flips, rolls, and airborne lifts that make the dancers resemble particles in perpetual motion. More than a display of athletic prowess, the work brings the review’s recurring themes of trust, collaboration, and transformation to an exhilarating close.
More than five decades after its founding, Pilobolus continues to redefine what dance can communicate through the expressive possibilities of the human body. Trips: Program A celebrates not only astonishing physical prowess but also the trust, imagination, and collaborative spirit that transform movement into something at once deeply human and delightfully unexpected. It is a joyful reminder that some of the most compelling stories can be told without uttering a single word.
Through July 12
At the Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at W. 19th St.
Running time: 90 minutes, one intermission
