alfapg Making Dancers Fly, Hooked to a Tree or Soaring Off a Cliff

In 1990, Amelia Rudolph was hiking through Tuolumne Meadows, a stunning mountain pass in Yosemite National Parkalfapg, when she had an epiphany on a shiny granite bluff: “Could you make a performance here?” she wondered. “Could you dance on a cliff?”

Rudolph, a dancer in the Bay Area who trained with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, had just written her college thesis on dance and ritual and recently become an avid climber. Those experiences converged in her mountaintop revelation — and inspired her to make a dance while dangling from the climbing wall at the gym where she worked.

Also shot was Gregory Delpeche, a 49-year-old hospital administrator who was on his way to work and in an adjacent car when officers firing struck him in the head. He was in critical condition. A 26-year-old woman was grazed by a bullet, the police said. The Brooklyn district attorney’s office is investigating the actions of the officers.

The day after the tsunami hit, Hiroko Tabuchi, then a reporter for the Business desk of The New York Times, pleaded with her editor. “I remember crying on the phone with her, saying ‘Please let me go to the tsunami zone,’” Ms. Tabuchi said in an interview.

That dance, though unrefined, was enthusiastically received. “I realized I tapped into some part of our human imagination that loves to fly,66br casino” Rudolph, 61, said in a phone interview.

From that seed grew Project Bandaloop, now just Bandaloop, 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’s 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.

“The spirit of the company,” Rudolph said, celebrates “the power and vulnerability of natural spaces.”

Now Bandaloop’s gravity-defying movement and ecological DNA have come to Broadway in the musical “Redwood,” starring Idina Menzel, which opened on Feb. 13.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

161bet2

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.alfapg