Auckland dance group brings vertical choreography to Broadway

In 1990, Ameridorf was hiking through Tuolumne Meadows, a stunning mountain pass in Yosemite National Park. She wondered. “Can you dance on the cliff?”

Hubbard Street Dance Rudolph, a Bay Area dancer who trained in Chicago, had just written a university thesis on dance and rituals and recently became an avid climber. Those experiences gathered at the revelation of her peak – and encouraged her to make a dance while hanging from the climbing walls of the gym where she worked.

The dance, although unsleek, was received enthusiastically. “I've noticed that I tapped a part of the imagination of a human who loves to fly,” Rudolph, 61, said in a phone interview.

I grew the project from that species. Now we are Bandaloop, a vertical dance company that combines modern dance, climbing techniques and technology. Banda Loops use equipment such as harnesses, ropes and belay devices to extremely deprive the etheric qualities of dance to the extreme and bring them to vertical surfaces like Elpitan rock faces in California and Cheonan Mountain in China. You can do it.

“The spirit of the company” and Rudolf praise “the power and vulnerability of the space of nature.”

Now, Bandaloop's gravity-defying movement and ecological DNA have come to Broadway in the musical “Redwood,” starring Idina Menzel, which opened on February 13th.

In a rehearsal a few weeks ago, Menzel was on the platform at the Nederland Theatre, a platform dozen feet from the ground in front of a giant tree trunk – the dramatic visual center of the set – is in the air during the song I'm ready to step into the release.

“Try to move away from the platform with a float feeling,” said Merecio Estrella, artistic director of Bandaloop.

Menzel leaned forward and suddenly wagged freely. She hugged the trunk and was pushed out into a gentle spin. Estrella encouraged her to find more buoyancy by landing back on the quintessential dance note, the Prie Tree, except that she was singing sideways. (Estrella is credited with the show's vertical choreography, with other bandaloop members contributing to rigging design, risk management and wellness.)

Previously, Estrella talked about her vertical choreography learning tasks. “That's not a form you can force,” he said. He cites uneven surfaces and fluctuations in momentum, which can cause troublesome landings and over-rotation in the air. “It's a form you have to learn to ride.”

Initially, Menzel said he had a headache from the collapsed movement. “I use muscles that I never use,” she said in an email. But the combination of risk and freedom helped her “return to the innocence and playfulness I long for,” she added.

In the rehearsal, she once again propelled herself out of the tree, now backflip, achieving suspended zero gravity, what Estrella calls “loft.” (Whether it's a fake redwood or a skyscraper, the taller the dance surface, the more loft the more.)

Loft was one of the core movement principles that Rudolf established a company in Berkeley in the 1990s and identified as his goal of bringing together sports, art, nature and dance.

“We spent a lot of time innovating and building techniques,” she said. In particular, she pulled out of “a climbing mentality where you move around the terrain quickly, safely and in a light way.”

Without a permanent studio until 2003, Bandaloop would rehearse everywhere. We climbed the gym and rented the walls of a nearby university.

She replied, “I'm developing a dance form.”

There were several precedents. In 1970, pioneering postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown introduced the now-famous work, “The Man Walking the Side of a Building.” And Northern California, where Rudolf lived and worked, was also home to other dance artists working on earth, such as Joanna Heigood and Joe Kreiter.

But the bandaroom stood out for its size, drama and sense of artistry, which attracted the well-known committee. A dance at Seattle's Space Needle for the 1996 Bamber Shoot Festival increased the visibility of the group. The group then collaborated with Pink in her performance at the American Music Awards in 2017 and danced in St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 2023.

“Bandaloop had an incredible opportunity that most dance companies don't have,” Rudolph said. “Because there's a “amazing” factor. ”

But the incredible factor, the whimsical thing she likes to avoid, means that bandaloops are not always accepted by traditional dance presenters who tend to program proscenium stage programs. .

That's why the company has embraced non-traditional collaborations, such as municipal partnerships and corporate activities that come with greater pay. “We go through that world and learn from it,” Rudolph said. “We then make financial profits and bring it back to art.”

That money helped to drop its roots in Auckland in 2007. There, he recently signed a 20-year lease in an expanded, 8,000-square-foot bright studio, increasing education offerings and clearly presents more aspiring performers. style. (In 2020, Rudolf handed the band-arrow reins to Estrella, an environmental activist and longtime dancer. She remains an executive and leads an ad hoc project.)

In the early days, Bandaloop was made up of about half a dancer and half climber. Currently, all the members of the company have professional dance experiences, but many also come from an athletic background.

“Divers really work,” Estrella said, citing their spatial perceptions. He added, “To want this kind of adventure, you need some kind of dancer.”

When Estrella joined the bandahloop from the modern world of dance in 2002, he was not on the walls of climbing. “I really didn't know what I was walking,” he said.

However, he was drawn to the group's thrilling physicality and the blending of art, nature and politics. He grew up in the trees in Sonoma County. His aunt's front yard had three giant redwoods. “These are the forests I played as a kid,” he said.

As a teenager, he was involved in environmentalism, learning how to directly act and support tree sitters. This was when Julia Butterfly Hill lived in Redwood for more than two years to protest the logging. (Her story is partially inspiration for “Redwood” and gives the show a simple grasp of it.)

Along with Bandaroop, Estrella finds a company where dance and activism have long been intertwined. Bandaloop has created many works and community events that promote environmental management, partnered with national parks, and recently worked as a consultant to assess its climate footprint. The company also shares technical and artistic expertise with organizations such as climate activists and Greenpeace and Redwoods League saves, provides safety protocols, and wears and talent to attract media attention. We advise on styles including climbing.

“Let's talk about costumes, let's talk about colours, let's talk about dance moves,” says Thomas Cavanagh, an environmental activist who began as a bandaloop rigger in 1998, and is the business and technology director, and has been in business since 2012. , Managing Director.

Bandaloop's ecological values ​​and showmanship were clearly fitted with “Redwood.” This is about a sad woman who finds connections in the woods and finds comfort in the towering trees. But Tina Landau, the show's director, didn't know the roots of the company's activist when she first reached out. She was simply drawn to the poetry of the group's works.

“They really realized and captured me in the flying ratio phors,” she said. She then realized that they were also “kind spirits” in their worldview.

During his pre-introduction excursion with Menzel into the Redwood Forest, Landau noticed the compassionate ways that the bandaloop team relates to trees. “A lot of what we learned came from looking at them,” she said.

In addition to sensitivity to nature, bandaloops bring “our culture of safety,” Kabana said. The company has never experienced any serious injuries or incidents, he said, accompanied by working in rare places where only “breasts, bumps, scuffs” are the only things.

Bandaloop's spoken pre-closure safety checklist, which all climbers use in one way or another, even went on to the “Redwood's” script.

Cavanagh described the inherent part of Bandaloop's work in the automotive phor: fear: “It's not in the driver's seat, but it's very in the car.” In other words, when you're bringing your fears closer, it can't surprise you.

When the “Redwood” actor felt scared in the air, Landau said he learned from the bandaloop how to navigate those moments by slowing down. As Estrella explained, “We move as fast as their fears allow.”

Since the premiere of “Redwood,” the company has developed a site-specific job called “Flock,” the final part of a trilogy dealing with the climate crisis. “Part of what we have to deal with now with the climate is our sadness,” Estrella said of the job.

Considering such existential issues, he often wonders why it is important to bring together an audience around the arts. “For me, it's a big purpose to have a place to feel.”

This has been the case for Banda Loop for decades, whether the group is performing in Auckland parks or at the prestigious Broadway theatre.

Being part of a project like “Redwood” feels like Rudolph in a moment with Furthercal. “The relationship with the human body, the human spirit, the natural space,” she said. “It's so beautiful, because the bandaloop started.”