When Amelia Rudolph creates a performance, her stage is the mountains or the impervious walls of buildings, her décor the immense blue of the sky and, instead of the ground, which has become a vague memory, her 'reference' is the void.
Artistic director of the company Project Bandaloop founded in 1991 in Oakland, California, Amelia Rudolph is a choreographer and dancer trained in Chicago by Ellis Duboulet and Lou Conte, at the Hubbard Street Dance Company, with Mark Morris and Sarah Elgart who, in 1989, added to her passion for Tersicore the fascination of climbing and conquering peaks. His art is the product of contamination between dance, sport, ritual and awareness of the environment and is inspired by the multiple possibilities linked to climbing, verticality and free vaulting in the void. The performance realised with seven of his dancer-free climbers in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada in 2001 is legendary: a three-week journey from Twin Lakes to Hetch Hetchy (East-West) at an altitude of 1,200 feet, done while dancing. The result of this rigorous work in progress was called Stories of Gravity and Transformation, later adapted to different natural realities and even to the stage, where a multimedia video and soundtrack accompany the performers' aerial evolutions. This is the show that Oriente Occidente is hosting in its European premiere this year and that will leave audiences with their noses in the air and breathless.
Vertical dance and the combination of athletic gesture with choreographic movement is certainly not a new genre, but unlike the experiments of the 1970s and 1980s by Trisha Brown, who in Walking on the Wall (1974) opposed natural movement to the laws of gravity by forcing her youngsters to dance parallel to the floor while harnessed and hanging from columns, or Sankai Juku, who in the early 1980s professed a return to the primitive and inspiration from prehistoric painting, leading dancers to stand upside down suspended in the air for hours (Homage to Pre-History, 1984) or, in more recent times, to Elizabeth Streb - another guest of this edition of the Festival - who works on the 'endangering' of the dancer, Amelia Rudolph adds to the work on movement the sporting sense of climbing and the awareness of the natural environment in which it is placed. The result, as the San Francisco Chronicle writes, 'is a new definition of freedom' in which dance, the harmonious and technically perfect movement, does not lose its specificity but rather gains value in the absence of gravity.
