Do Jump! Combines Genres in All-for-One Group Ethic

Do Jump! is in town, and members of the Portland, Ore., troupe are climbing the walls of the Geffen Playhouse because, apparently, they just can’t help themselves.

There’s Shirsten Finley, grabbing onto a ceiling beam in the lobby for a spontaneous round of chin-ups. There’s Aaron Wheeler-Kay clawing his way like Spiderman up the theater’s brick wall. And over there, gripping the edge of the Geffen stage 4 feet above the floor, Kelli Wilson vaults herself into a handstand.

Rooted before these lithe spirits stands Robin Lane, a fit, white-haired, barefoot 48-year-old intent on whipping the show into shape for its Wednesday opening.

Lane munches an apple while she tweaks a performer’s curtain bow that involves back flips, cartwheels and a man on stilts. Next, she scrutinizes two members of the troupe as they spin in tandem on a pair of trapezes. It’s not quite synchronized, Lane points out: “Danielle’s leading with her bellybutton and Kelly is leading with the side of her hip.” Adjustments are made, and the run-through continues until the company breaks for a repast of hummus, fruit and vegetables.

Lane is Do Jump!’s founder, artistic director, choreographer, den mother and sole authority. Besides directing her performers, she is overseeing the make-over of the Geffen from theater space to a more circus-like environment.

As stagehands drape blue bunting on the walls, Lane remarks that the whole room needs to be transformed. “The idea is to make that sense of magic happen as soon as you walk in the door.”

Technical limitations for the Geffen, which Lane says is about half the size of Do Jump!’s typical venue, have also required some seat-of-the-pants adjustments. “Normally, we perform with a fly loft where things just disappear into the air on a chain motor,” she says. “Now we have people crouching in spaces in the roof and pulling rope up. We’re adjusting some choreography and rebuilding some mechanics, but then we always do some pieces that are a little bit site-specific, so we’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

Lane declined to discuss the production costs of taking her show on the road but said, “We’re certainly not some huge commercial thing like Cirque du Soleil or something. We’re an arts organization. We’ve got about 19 people on the payroll, and to get our stuff down here, we have to hire a semi. It’s pretty expensive, on our terms. Probably not on Hollywood terms.”

Despite her responsibilities, she says it’s not about ego. “The whole boss thing, that being-in-charge thing, I’ve had to work with it because I’m a little uncomfortable with all that,” she says during the break. “It’s not ‘Oh, goody, I get to control people.’ I’m like, ‘I want to make this thing happen.”’

That “thing” is a hybrid of gymnastics, aerial feats, dance, music, circus tricks and theater that has made Do Jump! a fixture on Portland’s performing arts scene since the late ‘70s. Similarities to Montreal’s better-known Cirque du Soleil are just coincidence, Lane says.

She staged her first what-exactly-is-that brand of theater in 1967, when she was a 14-year-old student with a fervid imagination growing up in Culver City.

“I would go to dance concerts, and they would have these sets, but nobody ever climbed around on them,” Lane recalls. “Because I was a gymnast, I would imagine things. I’d write a lot of poetry and see these pictures [in my head]. I told my teachers I had this idea, and we got the gymnastic club and the modern dance club involved, and the school orchestra did an original composition. They let me put on this thing at the Robert Frost Auditorium, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Compulsively eclectic, Lane studied ceramics at Reed College near Portland, took trapeze classes at a California circus school, then returned to Portland, where she began choreographing for other theaters.

At 23, Lane showcased her first set of original pieces and soon after founded Do Jump! In 1984, the company renovated an abandoned vaudeville house, the Echo Theatre, which now is headquarters for the company and the Do Jump! School of Physical Theater and Aerial Dance.

The school offers children’s and adults’ classes in gymnastics, dance and circus skills to more than 100 students ages 3 to 75. One of the school’s biggest success stories is Do Jump!’s youngest member, 18-year-old Nami Hall, who took classes for four years before joining the company last summer.

Taking a seat beside Lane, the pixie-like Hall speedily recaps her progression from hyper-amateur to polished professional. “See, I was just this manic sort of spontaneity girl, just like jumping all over the place and all bendy, and I looked like Gumby and it wasn’t working, and then I saw Do Jump!” She pauses. “They were so strong and so flexible and so beautiful to look at, and I wanted to be that.

“But I didn’t understand that it wasn’t like throwing your body into it; it was like placing your body into it and knowing every single muscle and knowing that you have to awaken everything up and be like, ‘OK, ribs stay in,’ and let your leg go back.

“So Robin [Lane] just told me my whole body needs to work together to create something beautiful and not just show off how flexible my leg can be or how my head can touch my foot.”

“Which it can,” Lane chuckles.

“Which it can, yeah,” Hall continues. “But Robin taught me a lot of self-control--not even self-control, but self-awareness.”

Lane elaborates: “Do Jump! really has a sense of play and also a sense of working together. And like Nami said, it takes a huge amount of discipline. The work demands that you be really precise because it’s choreographed, but often it doesn’t look like it is. Like the aerial stuff: They’re spinning their bodies in space, and they have to stay exactly together, and that takes a long time. That’s years of performing together.”

Most of the ensemble members have been working together five or six years, Lane says.

Last year, the Do Jump! company, which includes six onstage performers, five alternates and four musicians, performed for the first time in New York, for a limited run at the New Victory Theater.

Says Lane, “It was like a big test, and to pass that test was really wonderful. We try to connect with people regardless of who they are or where they live. We’re trying to go for some basic human thing, whether you’re old, whether you’re intellectual or if you’ve never read a book. Our sensibility is gentle; it’s not glitzy, it’s not in your face, it’s not like a ‘Stomp’ or something.”

Unlike most of her younger acrobatically inclined people in the cast, Robin Woolman trained as an actress, studying at the American Conservatory of Theatre in San Francisco. She was asked to join Do Jump! after playing Puck in a Lane-directed production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Woolman, 45, has been with the Do Jump! troupe for six years and savors the all-for-one group ethic.

“In traditional theater, there’s much more emphasis on the individual. Even in a good ensemble, people are concerned: Is the reviewer going to pick me out as the bad one, or the good one? Who’s got the big role; who’s got the little one? When I joined Do Jump!, all that was gone; it was just like this weight off and such a great feeling to be part of this anonymous ensemble.”

Doesn’t she miss doing dialogue? “As far as words go,” Woolman points to her graying hair and says, laughing, “I don’t even know if I could do words anymore!”

Deploying unicycles, stilts, ropes, ladders and wheelbarrows, along with the occasional grunt, Lane sees Do Jump!’s message coming across clearly through a vocabulary of its own making. “All that stuff is a vehicle to express something, to have a direct communication with an audience.”

She continues, “At Rosh Hashana, I heard a rabbi say, ‘Why bother opening the doors to your heart? Why not take them off?’ And when he said the second line, I realized I’m asking that question in my life more and more. We have a piece in our show about all the doors that people slam into, but those doors are an illusion. We create all those obstacles, all those thresholds. We are more limitless than we think.

“What Do Jump! is about is getting rid of the boundaries of the medium you’re using, and the more flexible that medium can be, the more chance of saying what you want to say.”