Dances With Mountains
Rock-climbing performers celebrate 10 years with performance at Theater Artaud

by Roger Yim
San Francisco Chronicle, May 23, 2001

Dangling on ropes from the side of a Houston skyscraper, Amelia Rudolph and her Project Bandaloop dancers looked down on what may have been the largest audience ever to watch a live dance performance. Robotic cameras swirled around them, sending images of their leaps, spins and dives to huge TV screens. Below, more than 100,000 people, their curiosity piqued by new reports of the previous night's show, craned their necks.

"As far as you could see down every street, there were people," said Rudolph, 37, whose Oakland-based dance company celebrates its 10th anniversary this week with performances at Theater Artaud. "Twenty-three floors up, it was just little us."

Only six years earlier, in 1991, Project Bandaloop had given its first "vertical" dance performance, combining rock-climbing techniques and choreography, at a climbing gym in Emeryville. The audience -- maybe 75 people -- crammed into portable bleachers set up for a sport climbing competition later and watched as dancers entered on ropes and traversed the walls and floors of the gym.

Bandaloop has since moved on to bigger dance spaces. They have performed while suspended from Seattle’s Space Needle and have danced on, around and under structures in Brazil, Portugal, Argentina and all over the United States.

Yesterday, Bandaloop dancers, hired by Sybase, performed inside and on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the Bay Area, the dancers have appeared at the openings of the new Main Library in San Francisco and the airport’s international terminal, where their ropes were fixed to the ceiling trusses.

But the company’s most awe-inspiring works have had the smallest audiences. In 1998, Bandaloop members who were experienced climbers spent six days scaling El Capitan in Yosemite to dance "Peregrine Dreams" on a part of the granite wall called the Shield, 2,500 feet above the valley floor.

Their performance was seen only by a small group of friends and support crew members, a few bewildered tourists with binoculars and a handful of surprised climbers. One of those climbers, on a difficult route below the dancers, was exhausted and at the edge of panic when he looked up to see dancers on ropes alternately soaring out from the rock and disappearing behind an overhang. He finished his ascent and later told the dancers, "‘You were like angels,’" Rudolph recalled. "It completely changed his mental state."

The Yosemite Search and Rescue team might not have been happy with the company’s choice of venues, but climbing the Shield route of El Cap won the company the respect of the climbing community.

Bandaloop staged another mind-blowing work in June of last year, this one near Yosemite Falls. Filmed by the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, the performance will be shown in part at this week's Theater Artaud shows.

For the Yosemite Falls work, dancers who did not have big-wall climbing experience participated. Instead of climbing up, they rappelled down the rock face to about 2,400 feet.

"I’m used to climbing up, but this was freaky," said Mark Stuver, 26, who grew up in Rifle, Colo., a popular climbing spot. "I trusted the safety crew, but I remember thinking, ‘I am scared. I am in-fear-of-God scared.’"

Kimm E. Ward, 41, a dancer who also works as a substitute teacher in Oakland, says she deals with fear by "processing it intellectually," focusing on the technical aspects, such as the rigging. But sometimes instinct takes over. "There’s this physical response that’s saying, ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’"

Ward experienced her first Bandaloop performance on real rock in Tuolumne Meadows. "We wore our harnesses backwards with the rope tied to the back.

The start was to lean forward and start walking (down the cliff). My mind was ready, but my body wouldn't go. It just wouldn't go." Eventually she did it.
Rudolph had her own dicey moves for the falls piece. Suspended on a rope stretched between the cliff edge and a tower of rock called the Lost Arrow Spire, she had to work her way out to the middle of the rope, then switch to another rig so she could be lowered. That meant undoing a knot in the middle of a climb, something that was counter to her training in the sport. "That was a really difficult thing to do. We climbers never untie anything."

Despite the obvious risks involved, Rudolph emphasizes that she is an artist, not a stunt performer. She turned down a lucrative offer from TV’s "Ripley’s Believe It or Not" and carefully considers whether a corporate job will compromise her choreography. "People call me an ‘extreme choreographer.’ Oh, please. I’m not doing this because it’s a thrill, I’m doing this because I’m celebrating the space."

Project Bandaloop’s anniversary shows this week will be more down to earth than its site-specific performances. In addition to "Luminescent Flights," the multimedia work featuring Yosemite footage, the company will present a new work called "Resonate!" and a revised piece, "Bach Wall."

Rudolph describes "Bach Wall" as an exploration of inclusion and exclusion within social groups. Performed to a Bach prelude, the dance takes place on the floor and on six wooden panels studded with climbing holds. As the dancers move across the panels, they often look like figures in ancient Egyptian painting.

"Resonate!," a collaboration with singer David Worm and the a cappella vocal group SoVoSo, uses treelike metal sculptures by Lawrence LaBianca, also a climber, to investigate themes persistent in Rudolph’s work: the relationship between nature and urban living, and threats to the environment.

As an Oakland resident who spends a lot of time in the solitude of mountains, those are issues Rudolph lives and breathes. "It’s possible in my lifetime this could all go away, and it’s my job to say something about it, to celebrate its mystic power.

"It’s not just that nature is pretty; it teaches us who we are."