Valley Weekend : CENTERPIECE : All the Right Moves : Troupe Pilobolus Takes Its Rogue Dance Form to New Heights

Pilobolus is a dance troupe. It is also proof, yet again, that art is a miracle.

Founded almost 25 years ago, Pilobolus Dance Theatre will appear Wednesday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Today Pilobolus is widely regarded as one of the most startling, most innovative, most physical, most amusing groups in the history of modern dance. But, as Michael Tracy, one of its four artistic directors, explained recently, the group should never have made it.

Its origins lie, not in years of plies or studying the techniques of such modern giants as Martha Graham or Ted Shawn, but in a 1970s dance class at Dartmouth College attended by a bunch of jocks. The class was taught by modern dancer Alison Chase. She encouraged her students, all men, to find ways to express their ideas about movement despite the fact that they had no training in either modern dance or classical ballet.

Tracy, who played soccer and was a wrestler and diver, recalls taking Chase’s course out of curiosity. The result was a new world.

“For me, dance was a kind of revelation,” he says. “Dance at Dartmouth was an unusual pursuit at an otherwise jock school, but I loved doing something physical that wasn’t goal-oriented and was non-competitive.” Chase encouraged her talented but untrained students to pursue their vision and forget about their utter lack of training.

“It wasn’t that she was against the traditional forms,” Tracy recalls. “These guys had no background; we had zero training.” The troupe tells a now hoary joke: “We couldn’t stand on our own feet so we stood on each other’s.”

Anybody who has ever seen Pilobolus knows how true that statement is. The four men and two women who make up the current troupe use one another, as Tracy says, “as platforms and jungle gyms.” Unable to perform the steps of trained dancers, the young men who founded Pilobolus discovered their own way to say what they wanted with movement.

What they created was gymnastic and abstract, humorous, erotic and utterly new. It was also wildly successful. The three original dancers were a hit in New York City while they were still undergraduates.

Since its founding in 1971, the group has functioned as a collective. In the early years, the six dancers who choreographed and performed their growing repertoire acted out the hippie dream. They lived in a farmhouse in Vermont and shared responsibility for stage-managing the group, balancing the books and dealing with the press, as well as shooting across the stage and stacking themselves up in forms both known and unknown to nature.

Now the founders choreograph and teach but don’t perform. Families have added their pressures, pleasures and distractions to the mix, but the group’s commitment to collaboration is still strong. The four artistic directors work with the troupe’s six dancers to expand the repertoire. Working in collaboration, they try to add at least one new piece a year.

The Alex program will include their newest work, called “Pyramid of the Sun,” a duet for two men, as well as such earlier works as “The Particle Zoo,” “Duet,” “Walklyndon” and “Sweet Purgatory.” Some feature nudity, of which Tracy says: “We’ve been around so long, it goes in waves. There are decades when it’s a hot item, and there are decades when it’s not much of an issue.”

Because it’s a collective, a reporter who calls Pilobolus gets whichever of the artistic directors is fielding calls that day, on the road or at the group’s modest headquarters in rural Washington, Conn. After almost 25 years, 43-year-old Tracy is still delighted and slightly stunned that he has managed to make a life for himself in the arts. And he is a little sad, he admits, that he finally felt eight years ago that he should hang up, if not his dance shoes, his bare feet, and give up performing.

The reasons were psychological, not physical, Tracy says. The endless grind of the road got to him before the inevitable effect of time on his legs. Unlike painters or sculptors, dancers know time will take its toll. “It’s one of the sadder parts of dance,” he says.

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Today, Tracy takes his pleasure in choreography. As dance pioneers, Pilobolus found a new vocabulary of movement by climbing all over one another and discovering ways to move their audiences as they explored what their bodies could do. They rolled and tumbled and piled up and took off their clothes and flung themselves into space. As teachers of Pilobolus-style dance, they face a new challenge. “We’ve had to take the work we invented on our own bodies and learn how to communicate it.”

The group takes its odd name, pronounced Pil-OB-o-lus, from “a macroscopic fungus or mushroom that grows in the barnyard,” Tracy says. It was the name they chose for their first successful dance, a trio for male dancers--one of whose fathers was a biologist who knew about such things.

The name means “throw your hat” in Greek, Tracy says, and refers to the dung-loving fungus’s ability to throw its spore a great distance at great speed in the course of reproducing. “It’s the second fastest thing in nature, we’ve heard,” Tracy says. “I haven’t actually seen one live, but this is what I believe.”

Success is something they never expected, he says. “We started out as rogues, even in the dance world. We were outsiders--we weren’t traditionally trained, we didn’t live in New York. We weren’t sure when we started if it was even possible.”

It was possible.

And, Tracy believes, it was important. Like other artists, he is distressed at the notion of living in a nation in which the arts are not valued and supported. “Artists are part of the culture and an important one,” he says. As a child, he was exposed to the visual arts, music, dance and theater, he says, “and I don’t consider those esoteric studies for a few kids at private schools.”

If we as a nation don’t support the arts, he opines, “we run the risk of a generation of children who are only exposed to combative video games and television. We run the risk of having a whole generation of kids who have never had the experience of playing an instrument.”

Or children who have never seen dancers shoot across a stage, let alone shoot across one themselves, at the speed of a macro fungus.

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DETAILS

* WHAT: Performance by Pilobolus Dance Theatre at the Alex Theatre.

* WHERE: 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesday.

* HOW MUCH: $32.50 and $27.50.

* FYI: (818) 243-2611 or Tele-Charge at (800) 233-3123.