STAGE TUBE: Pilobolus Unveils Behind-the-Scenes Look at SKYSCRAPERS, Opening Tonight, 7/16

The groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed dance company Pilobolus today unveiled a behind-the-scenes video of its new work, Skyscrapers. The piece will have its New York premiere as part of Pilobolus' 2012 Joyce Theater engagement, which begins performances tonight, July 16, and runs through August 11. Watch the video!

A product of Pilobolus’s International Collaborators Project, which curates and convenes multi-disciplinary artists to choreograph using Pilobolus’s creative method with the company’s directors and dancers, Skyscrapers represents a unique and complex collaboration with choreographer and filmmaker Trish Sie, and filmmaker and editor Paula Salhany, the duo behind the “Skyscrapers” music video. Skyscrapers is a quick-change duet that explores the melancholy, understated elegance of the tango, drenched in overtones of love, romance and loss.

“Trish and Paula have helped us take their brilliantly executed idea for two dancers on film and transform it into an equally thrilling live dance that uses the video's world to support a sensual quick-change live tango for six. It's both moving and stunning to watch,” said Pilobolus Executive Director, Itamar Kubovy.

“I know how surprisingly difficult tango is; It is quite deceptive. It was so inspiring to watch these talented people with such an immense physical vocabulary basically learn a new language,” said Trish Sie.

In 2007, to expand its collaborative practices, Pilobolus launched the International Collaborators Project, a series of collective choreographic projects with multi-disciplinary artists, such as writer and illustrator, Maurice Sendak; the Israeli choreographic team, Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak; the remarkable American puppeteer, Basil Twist; Pulitzer Prize-winner, comic artist Art Spiegelman; the Grammy-winning American composer and musician Dan Zanes; the band OK Go; the MIT Distributed Robotics Laboratory directed by Professor Daniela Rus; the Japanese butoh choreographer Takuya Muramatsu; the radio program Radiolab; the MacArthur “Genius” Award-winning juggler Michael Moschen; and the Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The interactive video that Pilobolus created with OK Go and Google, “All Is Not Lost”, was nominated for a 2012 Grammy Award.

Trish Sie, with a background in modern dance, ballet, ballroom dancesport, and music, conceptualizes, creates, choreographs, and directs projects for film, television, and the internet. She collaborated with OK Go to conceive and produce several of OK Go’s music videos, including the Grammy-winning “treadmill video”, the “dog video” and the Grammy-nominated Pilobolus/OK Go video and live dance, “All is Not Lost”.

Paula Salhany (Video) is a filmmaker and editor that first worked with Pilobolus, Ok Go, and Trish Sie on last year’s Grammy-nominated music video “All is Not Lost.” Paula has worked on many dance film projects in addition to editing, shooting, and co-producing the most recent Ok Go video, “Skyscrapers” with Trish Sie.

Pilobolus is a modern performance company, founded in 1971, that to this day wears its revolutionary stripes on its sleeves. In keeping with its fundamentally collective creative process, Pilobolus Dance Theatre now curates and convenes groups of diverse artists— including the MIT Distributed Robotics Laboratory, Art Spiegelman, OK Go, Radiolab, and many others—to make inventive, athletic, witty, collaborative performance works on stage and screen using the human body as a medium for expression. Pilobolus makes art to build community. It teaches its group-based creative process to performers and non-dancers alike through popular, unique educational projects and programs. This collection of activities is called the Pilobolus Institute. Pilobolus also applies its method of creative invention to a wide range of movement services for film, advertising, publishing, commercial clients, and corporate events. This division is called Pilobolus Creative Services. The 2012 season marks Pilobolus’s 41st year. In keeping with the energy and spirit of its biological namesake—a phototropic fungus that thrives in farmyards—the company has continued to grow toward the light, expanding and refining its unique methods of collective creative production to assemble a repertoire of over 100 choreographic works. While it has become a stable and influential force in the world of dance, Pilobolus remains as protean as ever, looking forward to the next 40 years of collaborating on the future.