Photo: John Kanebug

Pilobolus
Cobb Great Hall, Wharton Center, East Lansing
Feb. 24, 7:30 p.m.
$15-35
whartoncenter.com,(517)353-1982

Pilobolus is a fungus. It is also the name of a dance group.

"It's not a random choice," said Robby Barrett, an artistic director of the dance group Pilobolus. He had just explained the small fungus of the same name "that hurls spore bags about eight feet."

Barrett continued. "It's an interesting fungus...it seemed like something worthy of emulation."

The unique name and properties of the fungus are matched by the distinctive dance group. Pilobolus has steadily been gaining national attention, having appeared in multiple commercials as well as the 2007 Academy Awards. They have performed across the country and around the world.

Once described as outsider dance, Pilobolus was started in 1971 by four men who were inspired by a class at Dartmouth.

"None of us had any background in dance," Barrett, one of the founding four, explained. "We took a class together and enjoyed the process of making dances. Our teacher proposed that we should make our own dances, and we decided to start a dance company."

Pilobolus quickly gained a reputation for its creativity, humor and what Barrett says is the "most obvious signature...our interest in the way bodies move when in physical contact together. In dance terms its called partnering. We have simply taken the idea of complex partnering to an extreme degree."

The creative process for Pilobolus is not top down. Instead, the artistic directors and dancers have something akin to a brainstorming session.

"It's bodystorming, really, in our world," said Barrett. "We get a group of people together to develop a body of physical material that we can dance to. It's an arts collective with no single choreographer. The material out of which our dance is built is different; we bounce ideas off each other, extracting enough interesting information from everyone we work with...we have our own kind of insider position."

"We need physical material which is almost like an object." continued Barrett. "You can name it, hold it, and build dance out of it. We're talking about...people moving together interlocked in a certain way...it's something very difficult to explain at the early stages.

We'll take three or four dancers and link them and ask them to move through space together. It's always surprising what they will do."

What Pilobolus does has intrigued audiences for almost four decades.

"We have 40 years under our belts that have proven to us that the world we live in is interesting to other people," said Barrett.