Stacked vertically, they can be a tower on the Manhattan skyline. A quick dismount, a flurry of tumbles and twisting limbs and, voila, a Kombi is born. And a pistol, a group of chubby penguins and a shoe.
After three decades on the experimental fringe, the US dance troupe Pilobolus charmed the world at the 2007 Oscars with an extraordinary human-shadow-puppet interpretation of the best-film nominations.
Fame finally arrived, on the heel of a giant Prada stiletto.
Pilobolus sprang from the earth in the 1970s, courtesy of three university students, one a scientist, who named their first dance project after a sun-loving fungus that grows in cow manure. A "creative organism", its dancers are simply bipeds in the scheme of nature (sometimes naked as a rock, as can be seen in the shots from the company's 2009 calendar), with a preference, writes The New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay, for "vegetable, flora rather than fauna".
Teetering between esoteric and commercial, the little dance company from Connecticut is the focus of a 30-year "civil war" between US critics. "Pilobolus has always been in a space that's very much its own," says the company's executive director, Itamar Kubovy.
"It was always seen as sort of highbrow within a kind of popular world and too popular to be part of the avant-garde. So there was always this division."
The troupe has danced on ice and appeared in a Marilyn Manson music video. Two dancers, Jenny Mendez and Jeffrey Huang, will perform during the final show of So You Think You Can Dance later this month.
The troupe has collaborated with Maurice Sendak on a haunting work that honoured children from the Holocaust. The world of shadows introduced to the company by puppeteer Basil Twist opened the doors to the Oscars and a lucrative sideline in television commercials; oddly, mostly for cars, which the dancers now call "the Pilobolus garage".
There is, however, a common denominator — muscle. The intense, acrobatic choreography requires tremendous strength and dancers are as likely to be trained in athletics as classical ballet. Of the Sydney-bound piloboli, Andrew Herro played football and wrestled, Jun Kuribayashi swam competitively and kept in form with break dancing and capoeira lessons and Christopher Whitney studied movement at a Shaolin martial arts academy in China. Indeed, the Pilobolus way of dance is not so much taught in class but physically passed on, kung-fu-like, from master to apprentice.
