By GUILHERME MELETTI YAZBEK
The Byham Theater opened its portion of Pittsburgh Dance Council season on Saturday night with a full house and, before the curtain rose, something relatively rare: dancers already onstage. The company of Pilobolus‘ Trips warmed up in full view of the arriving audience — stretching, rehearsing acrobatic catches — wearing what looked like rehearsal clothes, some with the company’s name across their chests. The atmosphere was casual and alive. Then a figure in black with a radio earpiece (the stage manager, most probably) called the dancers into a huddle; a moment of collective focus followed, and the audience responded with applause. The great green curtain of the Byham descended, instating the theatrical frame. After a couple of minutes, two dancers appeared at the front of the house, performing the safety briefing of flight attendants—exits here, and as for devices: everyone was asked to take out their phones, hold them up, and turn them off. The joke landed. The concept was in place. The promise had been made.
Pilobolus has been redefining what bodies can do together since 1971. More than five decades after a group of Dartmouth undergraduates with no formal dance training founded it, the company remains singular: its language is built on weight, counterweight, and the extraordinary things that happen when bodies trust each other completely. The six dancers who took the Byham stage Saturday night — Alexis Cruz-Castro, Quincy Ellis, Ryan Hayes, Isaac Huerta, Anouk Otsea, and Kalyan Sayre — are magnificently prepared for that language. They possess the kind of strength, precision, and physical intelligence that takes years to build. The question Trips raises is not about its dancers.
The evening’s two most compelling moments arrive early. On the Nature of Things, the opening piece, is the night’s most beautiful: a trio on a small circular platform, slow and sculptural, two men and a woman in movement that feels almost Greco-Roman — bodies composing and decomposing shapes like an ever-changing Rodin sculpture unfolding before our eyes, skin against skin, hair against hair. The music, featuring a mezzo-soprano and violin, earns its place. There is genuine lyricism here, a sense that form and feeling are working together. Later, Lamentation Variation offers something equally striking: a tribute to Martha Graham, with projections of early film footage of Graham dancing Lamentation cast onto the dancers themselves — each wrapped in their own lycra cocoon, echoing the elastic fabric of Graham’s famous solo, their joined surfaces forming a single collective screen. Each dancer then isolated in a saturated pool of colored light. The image is both historically resonant and visually arresting. These are the moments when Trips becomes something more than a display of physical prowess — when the bodies on stage seem to be reaching toward something beyond themselves.
And yet, those moments of genuine resonance only sharpen the frustration with what surrounds them. Trips is built on a concept — the audience as passengers on an intergalactic journey — that proves too loose to hold the evening together. The four pieces feel episodic rather than cumulative, as if a connecting thread had been invented after the fact to justify their coexistence. The company’s language is grounded in form: the extraordinary things bodies can do when they support, carry, and counterbalance each other. That is a legitimate aesthetic choice. The problem is that the choice never develops, never surprises, never points toward other possibilities. Each number arrives, delivers its images of strength and equilibrium, and ends — without accumulation, without risk, without the sense that something is being discovered in real time. The music compounds the issue: individual pieces are not unpleasant, but the program as a whole has no sonic concept, no unifying logic. Songs come and go without building toward anything. The result is a succession of impressive images that never coheres into a work.
The production’s weakest element is its transitions. Between the first and second pieces, the great green curtain descends, and a disembodied female voice addresses the audience from the PA system — no wit, no necessity, just dead air dressed up as concept. The second transition attempts something more theatrical: a dancer descends through the house corridor with a light source glowing inside a lycra cocoon, the curtain still closed. The gesture is not without interest, but it too remains gratuitous — a visual non sequitur that hasn’t earned its place in the evening’s logic. It also met an unexpected obstacle: an elderly couple rising from their seats mid-corridor, apparently headed for the restroom, dissolving whatever atmosphere the luminous figure had been attempting to build. Some laughed. One could hardly blame them.
The second half offers a single, extended piece: Day Two, directed by Moses Pendleton, one of Pilobolus’s co-founders. The uninterrupted format alone gives it something the first act lacked: coherence. The atmosphere is tribal and at times ritualistic — movements alternating between explosive jumps and slow, ceremonial gestures. A black staff serves as both an extension of the body and an apparatus for carries and counterbalances. The duality holds the piece together in a way the earlier numbers never quite managed. The images are often beautiful. But beautiful is not the same as moving. My breathing never changed. Around me, I could hear the audience — genuinely, repeatedly astonished. “Wow,” someone said. And that, in the end, is exactly what Trips delivers: wow. Nothing more, nothing less.
Pilobolus has spent more than fifty years building one of contemporary dance’s most distinctive physical languages. The six dancers who performed Saturday night are extraordinary custodians of that language — strong, precise, and fully committed. Trips, however, is a generic evening built around a remarkable company: a showcase that mistakes impressiveness for artistry. Dance’s power is not merely to impress — it is to move us, to rearrange something inside, to carry us into other times and spaces. On Saturday night, that trip never departed.
Next up in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Pittsburgh Dance Council season is Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at the Byham Theater on January 30, 2027 | https://trustarts.org/production/105814/hubbard-street-dance-chicago
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater and dance critic, practitioner, and scholar whose practice moves between criticism, performance studies, and contemporary artistic practices. He is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
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