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In 1990, Amelia Rudolph was hiking through Tuolumne Meadows, a stunning mountain pass in Yosemite National Park, when she had an epiphany on a shiny granite bluff: \u201cCould you make a performance here?\u201d she wondered. \u201cCould you dance on a cliff?\u201d<\/p>\n
Rudolph, a dancer in the Bay Area who trained with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, had just written a college thesis on dance and ritual and recently become an avid climber. Those experiences converged in her mountaintop revelation \u2014 and inspired her to make a dance while dangling from the climbing wall at the gym where she worked.<\/p>\n
That dance, though unrefined, was enthusiastically received. \u201cI realized I tapped into some part of our human imagination that loves to fly,\u201d Rudolph, 61, said in a phone interview.<\/p>\n
From that seed grew Project Bandaloop, now just Bandaloop<\/a>, a vertical dance company that fuses contemporary dance with climbing technique and technology. Using equipment, like harnesses, ropes and belay devices, Bandaloop can take dance\u2019s soaring, ethereal qualities to extremes and bring them to unlikely perpendicular surfaces like the rock face of El Capitan in California or Tianmen Mountain in China.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe spirit of the company,\u201d Rudolph said, celebrates \u201cthe power and vulnerability of natural spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n Now Bandaloop\u2019s gravity-defying movement and ecological DNA have come to Broadway in the musical \u201cRedwood,\u201d starring Idina Menzel<\/a>, which opened on Feb. 13.<\/p>\n At a rehearsal a few weeks earlier at the Nederlander Theater Menzel was on a platform, in a harness, a dozen feet off the ground in front of an enormous tree trunk \u2014 the set\u2019s dramatic visual centerpiece \u2014 preparing to step into the air during a song about release.<\/p>\n \u201cTry coming off the platform with a sense of float,\u201d said Melecio Estrella, Bandaloop\u2019s artistic director, from below.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Menzel leaned forward and was suddenly swinging freely. She hugged the trunk then pushed off into a gentle spin. Estrella encouraged her to find more buoyancy by landing back on the tree in pli\u00e9 \u2014 a typical dance note, except she was sideways, and singing. (Estrella and Bandaloop are credited with the show\u2019s vertical choreography.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Earlier, Estrella spoke about the challenges of learning vertical choreography. \u201cIt\u2019s not a form you can force,\u201d he said, citing uneven surfaces and variations in momentum that can cause awkward landings or over-rotation in the air. \u201cIt\u2019s a form you have to learn to ride.\u201d<\/p>\n Initially, Menzel said she got headaches from the upended motion. \u201cI\u2019m using muscles I never use,\u201d she said in an email. But the mix of risk and freedom, she added, has helped her \u201creturn to an innocence and a playfulness that I yearn for.\u201d<\/p>\n In rehearsal, she again propelled herself from the tree, now into a backflip, achieving a suspended weightlessness that Estrella called \u201cloft\u201d \u2014 a central ingredient in vertical choreography that\u2019s enhanced by the distance of a dancer from her anchor. (So the taller the dance surface, whether fake redwood or skyscraper<\/a>, the more loft.)<\/p>\n Loft was one of the core movement principles that Rudolph identified as she was establishing her company in Berkeley the 1990s with the goal of bringing together sport, art, nature and dance.<\/p>\n \u201cWe spent a lot of time innovating and building technique,\u201d she said. In particular, she drew from the \u201cmentality of climbing, where you\u2019re moving through terrain quickly and safely and in a light way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Without a permanent studio until 2003, Bandaloop rehearsed wherever it could \u2014 climbing gyms, rented walls at the nearby university, even the side of a highway, where a police officer once asked Rudolph what she was doing.<\/p>\n She replied, \u201cI\u2019m developing a dance form.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There was some precedent. In 1970, Trisha Brown, the pioneering postmodern choreographer, presented the now celebrated piece \u201cMan Walking Down the Side of a Building<\/a>.\u201d And Northern California, where Rudolph lived and worked, was also home to other dance artists working above the ground, like Joanna Haigood<\/a> and Jo Kreiter.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But Bandaloop stood out because of its sense of scale, drama and artistry, and it attracted high-profile commissions. A dance on the Space Needle in Seattle for the Bumbershoot Festival in 1996 raised the troupe\u2019s visibility. Later, the group worked with Pink on her performance<\/a> at the American Music Awards in 2017 and danced on St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral<\/a> in London, in 2023.<\/p>\n \u201cBandaloop has had incredible opportunities that most dance companies don\u2019t have,\u201d Rudolph said, \u201cbecause we have the \u2018wow\u2019 factor.\u201d<\/p>\n But that wow factor, its whiff of spectacle (a word she likes to avoid), means Bandaloop hasn\u2019t always been embraced by traditional dance presenters who tend to program for proscenium stages.<\/p>\n So the company embraced nontraditional collaborations, like municipal partnerships and corporate work that came with bigger paychecks. \u201cWe will cross into that world and learn from it,\u201d Rudolph said. \u201cWe gain from it economically and then feed it back into the art.\u201d<\/p>\n That money has helped the company put down roots in Oakland, where it recently signed a 20-year lease on an 8,000 square-foot, light-filled studio<\/a>, allowing it to increase its educational offerings and introduce more aspiring performers to its distinct style. (In 2020, Rudolph handed the Bandaloop reins to Estrella, an environmental activist and longtime dancer in the troupe. She remains an adviser.)<\/p>\n In the early days, Bandaloop was composed of roughly half dancers and half climbers. Now, all company members have professional dance experience, though many also come from athletic backgrounds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDivers do really well,\u201d Estrella said, citing their spatial awareness. He added, \u201cIt takes a certain kind of dancer to want this kind of adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n When Estrella joined Bandaloop in 2002 from the contemporary dance world, he had never been on a climbing wall. \u201cI didn\u2019t really know what I was walking into,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But he was attracted to the group\u2019s thrilling physicality, as well as its melding of art, nature and politics. He grew up in Sonoma County among trees \u2014 his aunt\u2019s front yard had three giant redwoods. \u201cThose are the forests that I played in as a kid,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As a teenager, he became involved in environmentalism, learning about direct action and how to support tree sitters. This was around the time when Julia Butterfly Hill<\/a> lived in a redwood for more than two years to protest logging. (Her story partly inspired \u201cRedwood,\u201d and it briefly figures into the show.)<\/p>\n With Bandaloop, Estrella found a company in which dance and activism have long been intertwined. Bandaloop has created many works<\/a> and community events promoting environmental stewardship, partnered with national parks, and recently engaged a consultant to evaluate its climate footprint. The company has also shared its technical and artistic expertise with climate activists and organizations like Greenpeace and Save the Redwoods League<\/a>, imparting its safety protocols and advising on style, including what to wear and how to climb with flair to attract media attention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cLet\u2019s talk about costuming, let\u2019s talk about color, let\u2019s talk about the movement of dance,\u201d said Thomas Cavanagh, an environmental activist who began as Bandaloop\u2019s operations manager in 1998 and now serves as its executive director.<\/p>\n Bandaloop\u2019s ecological values and showmanship made it an obvious fit for \u201cRedwood,\u201d about a grieving woman who finds connection in a forest and solace high in a towering tree. But the show\u2019s director, Tina Landau, was unaware of the company\u2019s activist roots when she first reached out. She was simply drawn to the poetry of the group\u2019s work.<\/p>\n \u201cThey really understood and captured what I\u2019m attracted to in the metaphor of flight,\u201d she said. Later, she realized they were \u201ckindred spirits\u201d in their worldview as well.<\/p>\n During a preproduction excursion to redwood forests with Menzel, Landau noticed the caring way that the Bandaloop team related to the trees. \u201cA lot of what we learned came from watching them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n