Fungus, Fantasy and Fun

By John Skow

Pilobolus is a word so fine and fat as it rolls off the tongue that, like a kitten or a May morning, it needs no meaning, but in fact it has two. It is the name of a light-sensitive fungus that grows on horse dung-"a rather bawdy little fungus," according to Jonathan Wolken, who met the word and the fungus while studying biology at Dartmouth a few years ago. Wolken also studied modern dance, in an unserious way, in the class of a young teacher named Alison Chase. When he and Classmate Moses Pendleton found, to their total astonishment, that the strange gymnastic writhings they were inventing led to coherent routines, and then to the formation of a small dance troupe, the carefully unserious name for the new enterprise was at hand. Calling their troupe Pilobolus was, it seems now, an ironical reminder to themselves not to expect too much. Perhaps it was also a wry announcement to the ski racers and white-water canoeists of the Hanover, N.H., campus that, dancers or not, they considered themselves more jocks than aesthetes.

A few frowning dance traditionalists would have agreed, had this statement ever been made aloud. No one, including the Piloboli themselves, could say exactly what it was that the troupe was doing when it began experimenting in 1971. It certainly was not dance, say the purists, meaning that it was not classical ballet or any recognizable modern dance. Was it acrobatic slapstick, abstract-expressionist mime, some kind of muscular, head-over-heels tableau vivant? The startling truth was that Pilobolus entangled human bodies in ways that no one had ever seen before. When the group performed on Broadway last year for four weeks of near sold-out performances, Critic Arlene Croce admitted that the Pilobolus Dance Theater, to give the group its first, last and middle names, had gone beyond mere ingenuity: "We are shaken out of admiration into awe."

The credible dancing fungus is still spreading. They are now on a tour in India. Trying to explain how it all happened, Wolken offers: "None of us had the dance background, and we didn't feel secure alone, so we developed a kind of linked moment." He thinks this over: "Or is that just an explanation that sounds right?"

There are four men and two women in the troupe, and they slip with disconcerting ease from dance patterns in which they are sexually distinct figures, to movements in which they are asexual hominoids, and then further, to strange massings in which we see not figures but a wholly unfamiliar tree of elbows and buttocks, then a viscous fluidity of flesh that breaks like a wave, then a great, undifferentiated lump that slams itself about on the sculptor's table, startling us with its momentary resemblances to beasts remembered from dreams.

Dancers of classical ballet disguise their great strength and athleticism with infinite refinements of grace. The Piloboli are utterly different; they glory, women and men, in chunks of muscle and spasms of energy, and their grace, like their abundant humor, is the careless result of motion. A body hurtles headfirst through the air, strikes another body--clay thrown at clay--and somehow sticks there, funny and graceful. Music is not danced to, but danced in, as space is danced in. Stories are not acted out, and when an arrangement of figures begins to suggest some coherent narrative line, the apparition melts and reforms.

The dreamlike dance called Untitled is as explicit as Pilobolus numbers are allowed to be. In it the two women, dressed in long, full gowns, circulate gravely, as if at a garden party, then abruptly and astonishingly gain 3 ft. in height. Their long skirts are now knee-length dresses, and the knees are those of two bare-legged men, on whose shoulders they ride. The two huge women dance a flirtation with the two remaining men, who wear top hats and frock coats. The dream then shifts unaccountably, and the women settle back to normal height, giving violent birth to the two naked men who have been carrying them. The mood of the onlooker is simple wonder.

Performances of this kind are exhausting and so is the process of Pilobolesque creation, which is generally a free-for-all heckling session. The troupe's humor remains, but more often now a serious mood is noticeable. Composers are collaborating more actively in the evolution of new dance pieces. Pilobolus is beginning to be imitated, but Wolken doesn't think that the troupe has created a mainstream dance movement. No one really knows. In the meantime, "we're still finding moments we haven't seen before," he says, thinking it over. "Movement's pretty good stuff."

John Skow

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