KEY POINTS:
The most extraordinary part of a totally extraordinary display of the human body as kinetic sculpture - and more - comes, in this programme, just before the interval, in the fourth movement of a 1997 work entitled Gnomen.
The piece is for four men. They wear plain black
trunks and perform against a plain black backdrop. Their rippling musculature is decoration enough. And the music, by Paul Sullivan, featuring throat singing by Matt Kent, is powerfully captivating.
Gnomen, the programme notes inform us, is dedicated to the memory of a friend and colleague, Jim Blanc. It is a wonderful celebration of masculine grace and the way men relate to each other. Each dancer takes the spotlight in turn, to be bullied, buffooned, contorted, kicked about and cared for, all in Pilobolus' totally unique and intriguing movement style. In the final sequence one dancer is held, propelled, rocked, cocooned, inverted and elevated by the other three in a display of the most inventive physicality, and extreme and touching beauty.
The other three works do not venture into such emotional realms, but pack a powerful punch on the visual and weirdly aesthetic level. The most recently made is Aquatica (2005) featuring four men and the company's two female dancers in an exposition of movement as water, in water, under water, riding water, and becoming, in much of that process, a variety of inventive sea creatures - tentacled squids, tubular worms and hermit crabs hunting, scuttling, spiralling and crushing. The strength, balance, speed and control is amazing, the effect frequently and gorgeously comical.
A solo from The Empty Suitor (1980) is pure clown, performed by Andrew Herro to a droll rendition of Sweet Georgia Brown.
Day Two (1980) occupies the whole of the second half of the programme with the company stripped down to g-strings to cavort unselfconsciously through more of their close contact and explosively powerful routines.
"Just acrobatics" as the woman irritatingly attached to a powerfully illuminating cell phone announced loudly at the end of the first half? What about virtuoso talent, supremely honed? Even if you didn't tear up with Gnomen, Pilobolus is still a dramatic eyeful - and what about that swoosh of a curtain call?