Dance: Fungus, Fantasy and Fun

Pilobolus is a word so fine and fat as it rolls off the tongue that, like a kitten or a May morning, it needs no meaning, but in fact it has two. It is the name of a light-sensitive fungus that grows on horse dung-"a rather bawdy little fungus," according to Jonathan Wolken, who met the word and the fungus while studying biology at Dartmouth a few years ago. Wolken also studied modern dance, in an unserious way, in the class of a young teacher named Alison Chase. When he and Classmate Moses Pendleton found, to their total astonishment, that the strange gymnastic writhings they were inventing led to coherent routines, and then to the formation of a small dance troupe, the carefully unserious name for the new enterprise was at hand. Calling their troupe Pilobolus was, it seems now, an ironical reminder to themselves not to expect too much. Perhaps it was also a wry announcement to the ski racers and white-water canoeists of the Hanover, N.H., campus that, dancers or not, they considered themselves more jocks than aesthetes.

A few frowning dance traditionalists would have agreed, had this statement ever been made aloud. No one, including the Piloboli themselves, could say exactly what it was that the troupe was doing when it began experimenting in 1971. It certainly was not dance, say the purists, meaning that it was not classical ballet or any recognizable modern dance. Was it acrobatic slapstick, abstract-expressionist mime, some kind of muscular, head-over-heels tableau vivant? The startling truth was that Pilobolus entangled human bodies in ways that no one had ever seen before. When the group performed on Broadway last year for four weeks of near sold-out performances, Critic Arlene Croce admitted that the Pilobolus Dance Theater, to give the group its first, last and middle names, had gone beyond mere ingenuity: "We are shaken out of admiration into awe."

The credible dancing fungus is still spreading. They are now on a tour in India. Trying to explain how it all happened, Wolken offers: "None of us had the dance background, and we didn't feel secure alone, so we developed a kind of linked moment." He thinks this over: "Or is that just an explanation that sounds right?"

There are four men and two women in the troupe, and they slip with disconcerting ease from dance patterns in which they are sexually distinct figures, to movements in which they are asexual hominoids, and then further, to strange massings in which we see not figures but a wholly unfamiliar tree of elbows and buttocks, then a viscous fluidity of flesh that breaks like a wave, then a great, undifferentiated lump that slams itself about on the sculptor's table, startling us with its momentary resemblances to beasts remembered from dreams.