PILOBOLUS AT 50

An interview with Renée Jaworski & Matt Kent, as Pilobolus returns to the Joyce Theater to celebrate a half-century of wit and sensuality 

by Robert Pranzatelli

When Pilobolus first rose to prominence in the 1970s, the New Yorker’s Arlene Croce sang its praises as a “brilliant acrobatic-mime troupe” rather than as a dance company. When it reached Broadway in 1977, New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote what seemed to be a rejoinder: “Yes, it is dance if the definition of dance is stretched.” In the decades since, Pilobolus has continued to stretch, remix, rejuvenate, call into question, and blithely ignore the definition of dance, if there still is one, to the delight of multiple generations of audiences. When it returns to the Joyce Theater from July 11 to 30, for a run of more than two dozen shows, the company will bring to conclusion its playfully titled fiftieth anniversary tour: “The Big Five-OH!”

Now led by two of its most extraordinary veteran dancers, Renée Jaworski and Matt Kent, Pilobolus still places its energetic and ebulliently improbable physical vocabulary in the service of wit and humanity, working its dancers hard in a studio space in bucolic Washington, Connecticut. Its two leaders have together accumulated a half-century of Pilobolus experience themselves, having performed, created, and directed works that span the full range of its eclectic sensibility and daring athleticism. Matt Kent joined the company in 1996 as a longhaired ninja, having studied martial arts, music therapy, and theatre; Renée Jaworski joined in 2000, with both a traditional training in dance and a set of untraditional skills and insights garnered from having danced with Momix, the illusion-loving troupe concocted by Moses Pendleton, one of the originators of Pilobolus.

I checked in with Renée and Matt on a Friday afternoon as they prepared for the New York run. The interview took place via video call, with the two interviewees seated together in the Pilobolus office. They are my close friends and also two of the principal subjects of a book about Pilobolus, written by me, to be published next year. Our conversation was casual and punctuated by laughter. It has been edited for clarity.

For people who don’t already know Pilobolus, how would you describe what Pilobolus does and what people will encounter when they see this show? You’ve told me, Renée, that Pilobolus creates miniature worlds onstage.

Matt: You have to get your interdimensional passports ready because you’re going to go to these very different worlds. These programs are going to have a range of emotions to them. When the dancers ran the first half of the Joyce program that has six pieces instead of five, I said “How did that feel?” and Hannah turned to me and said, “I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster.” It wasn’t a bad thing.

Renée: When we’re putting a program together we really are thinking about just that: the ride the audience is going to go on. We want to hit the highs and the lows and the things that you don’t get in touch with on your day-to-day basis, allowing people to experience things that they wouldn’t normally pay attention to outside of the theater. So then when they walk out into their real life, there’s a little bit more of a—I want to say rawness, but that sounds negative— 

Matt: No, I don’t think it’s negative—

Renée: A vulnerability, an openness.

Matt: You’re seeing things anew. You walk outside, it’s the same outside it was before, but somehow the world seems—

Renée: You might have a different perspective somehow.

That’s a good definition of what art is, or what art does. 

You’re sitting in front of this wonderful painting of sunflowers, and I’m thinking about how you’re working in the studio getting ready for this run. Is there a secret ingredient as you create? What are the moments of joy in the studio in terms of camaraderie, laughter, the best moments with the dancers? Take us into some of the happier aspects of life in the studio with Pilobolus as you’re preparing for this.

Matt: That does happen to us, a particularly magical collaborative moment, but to paint the visual picture, we’re not in New York, horns, traffic, blaring. Those days that you feel the sunshine coming through or the beautiful snow falling outside and you’re working on a piece or rehearsing, that feels like we’re in some kind of residency that’s your actual life, like you’re in a retreat. There are moments that—when you said “happy”—I think about the communal, in both senses of the word, moments that we share with the dancers and with each other. I’ve walked outside with them just to get some sunshine. We’ve been trying to take these breaks every ninety minutes or so, and we all step outside and realize that we’re surrounded by this beautiful environment.

Renée: There’s also something that happens between the people. We equate it to jazz. You can tell when everybody is... 

Matt: Gelling...

Renée: Gelling, or on the same vibe, or running at full speed in the same direction. And it gets very... uh...

Matt: Groovy, man?

Renée: Groovy, man.

[Laughter.]

Matt: Renée and I went to this amazing little bar in New York years and years ago. David Poe was playing there. 

Renée: It was called Entwine.

Matt: Yeah, called Entwine. Chris Stills, Stephen Stills’ son, was playing. It just so happened, before we knew them, Béla Fleck and Abigail [Washburn], they performed there.

Renée: It was the first time we heard Abbie sing. We were like, Whoa!

Matt: And a bunch of people. A bunch of musicians. And unlike when somebody has a setlist and they’re planning, they would noodle and you would hear the piano and the room was filled with conversation while you waited for the guys to share with each other what they were about to play. And then the clouds would part—and it was like what I imagine when The Dead were at one of their peaks—

Renée: There’s no 1,2,3,4 boom and then everybody starts. It’s sort of like—

Matt: Yeah, the piano player keeps jamming and then that person catches on, oh I got you,  and—

Renée: And then the room goes quiet and they’re in the beginning of a song and everybody knows it. Every single person in the room, whether they’re playing an instrument or not, knew that the song began.

Matt: As directors, when we’re choreographing, there are moments where the dancers really command my attention like that. When I forget that this is a thing I’m making, and I’m just absorbed in watching. They’re so beautiful, and their creativity—there are moments when you’re fully into that moment.

I think it’s important to say that another moment of joy, just to be clear, some of the times the moments of joy are right after we’ve had the worst fucking disagreement, the dancers aren’t getting something, I can’t figure out what they’re doing wrong, one of them says that’s hurting my back, someone says I don’t know what to do. Put your foot there. That doesn’t work for me. A kind of harmony that comes out of disharmony. It’s worth noting that it’s not all just new age music and flowers blooming and shit. There are real moments of tension and disagreement, and I personally find the days that alternate between disagreement and agreement to be much, much more satisfying and productive. It’s nice to have those perfect days, but in terms of making a piece, I think it’s so gratifying, so joyful, when you identify something that doesn’t work between two people and you work it out. 

I’ve joked with you in the past, that my idea of risk is getting out of bed in the morning. And that this is why I’m so impressed by people who do things like stand on someone else’s shoulders while they’re dancing, or dance on stilts, or swing on silks. Or stand on a stage and flip themselves over and land standing up as in Megawatt. 

Renée, you told me that being able to fall like a cat that always lands on its feet is one of the skills that goes with Pilobolus, something you learned early on. What are the qualities that Pilobolus dancers most need to have?

Renée: I think the most important thing that a Pilobolus dancer needs actually has nothing to do with their physicality but is in their mindset. For lack of a better word, I’ve heard this term used lately and it may be a little trendy, but I think they need to have a “growth mindset.” Just the idea that not only they but everybody in the room has room to grow and expand, and using the term “I don’t know how to do that yet,” the idea that they can learn something new, even if they’re thirty years old, or forty, or fifty. But that you’re always listening and always curious. That leads to so many other things physically and tangibly in the work that we do, including interactions between people because you have to have a growth mindset to really push each other in an honest and healthy way, because if you think somebody can’t do something then they won’t.

Matt: Or you might not see when they’re doing it. I think part of that “growth mindset”—which I haven’t really heard—

Renée: Oh, maybe it’s not as trendy as I thought. [Laughs.]

Matt: Oh, no, I’m sure it is—

It’s not hip until Matt Kent embraces it.

[Laughter.]

Matt: “I guess it’s not that trendy, Renée, because I don’t use it.” Right, I should have just gone with that. I mean, look at the way I’m dressed. I’m clearly styled! You should see these pants, Robert.

Renée: I do wish you could see the whole ensemble.

[Matt stands up and models for a moment.]

Matt: They’re very high. I feel like Gene Kelly.

Renée: It is a little high. But they’re cute. 

Oh, they’re nice!

Renée: They’re nice, right?

Matt: I feel like—oh, you guys will get this. Karyn said to me, “With these clothes you could go to a party at the Glass House.”

So I just want to clarify this. Yesterday Mr. Kent spent the day in New York with a style consultant [Karyn Starr] and put together an exciting new look in terms of clothing and presentation. So you’ve rebooted your personal style with the help of a consultant. 

Renée: That is the truth.

Matt: Yes. A stylist. She does bands and stuff too. But the “growth mindset” that you’re talking about—They are group centered. The dancers can, in a physical way and in a mental way, project their center of thought or mass or weight to a midpoint between multiple individuals, minds, bodies, so that they’re able to land on their feet like a cat because they have this spherical evenness, but that body awareness has to be accompanied by their mind or their outlook or their creative output, or, as great as they may be physically, they’ll run out of tricks. It’s like my brother [a school principal] has been saying about school, that the only essential skill for our children to learn in this era is curiosity and learning, how to learn, how to love learning and how to approach learning. Their group centeredness is part of that. For the choreographers, artistic directors of Pilobolus, we need to work with people who will present to us solutions that might not be obvious at first, which is why we sometimes madden people who don’t know us by giving them tasks that don’t have an answer that we already know.

Let’s talk about comedy. The first time I ever saw Matt he was onstage getting stepped on and walked over by his colleagues, in Walklyndon. You’ve got that piece and Solo from The Empty Suitor, both of which are vaudevillian and slapstick in nature, and which date from 1971 and 1980 respectively. They’ve been making audiences laugh across a half-century, which is quite extraordinary. Both are examples of nonverbal, physical comedy—one with comic encounters between pedestrians and the other with a guy slipping and sliding on PVC pipes—and they have a kind of universality, but what else keeps them clicking? Comedy and dance are both about timing, that’s a common denominator. Or is it just that these are machines that were built right, from the beginning, and they keep working?

Renée: It might be a little bit of a mixture. I think it’s more—I think they change a lot, actually, Rob. The structure of those two particular pieces, the structure is funny, the structure is comedic, but it does change quite a bit in terms of what you’re talking about, timing and rhythm, and all of those other much more personal performer type elements, do change quite a bit. 

Matt: I would say it like this. Both Walklyndon and Suitor are pieces that more than any others will be different every time you see them. You never see it the same way twice. From Looney Tunes back to Punch & Judy to probably way before that, watching two people run head-on into each other for some reason always makes people laugh. It’s like it’s just in our DNA. Watching a guy try and navigate these rollers is inherently funny, but then coupled with that we work a lot on timing and the performers have to approach the piece as a living thing and listen to the audience and change it according to whatever’s going on.

And there is something psychological about that kind of comedy where what is happening is either dangerous or physically harmful but because we’re in the audience and we know it’s comedy, that makes it fun. It’s like power over the things in life that actually are not fun.

Renée: Right.

One of the cool things about this run at the Joyce is that, for an anniversary show, there’s a lot of new stuff. Behind the Shadows is a shadow piece that reveals to the audience how the shadow work is put together. It’s playful and it has a comic element, but it’s not a skit in the same sense as Walklyndon or Suitor.

Matt: There is humor in watching the dancers and their transitions. It’s a “bit” but not a “skit”—and it’s performed to the song “Joy” by David Poe. 

You’ve also created a new quartet with Haitian-born veteran Pilobolus dancer Gaspard Louis.

Matt: The piece with Gaspard, Awaken Heart, is connected to the sense of being at home, returning home, feeling right at home. It is a piece about the sense of bonding and let’s call it love that transcends specific familial or fraternal relationships, the way that souls bump into each other throughout different perhaps multiverses, lifetimes. It’s about nostalgia and reminiscence, and there’s something about connecting through that reminiscence about the fluidity and the changing nature of memory, and being able to in some way access the period of our lives in which we’re so present that it doesn’t feel like it’s being recorded. More like teenager-ness, where you haven’t assessed risk, you’re just with your friends and maybe you’re riding your bikes in the middle of the night because you’re going to spray paint an anarchy sign on your neighbor’s basketball court. 

[Renée & Rob laugh.]

Matt: I never did anything like that.

I was just about to say, you had a different adolescence than I did. 

[Laughter.]

Matt: You know, that kind of thing, like a teenage party that precedes your risk-taking. The poetry we’re looking for is the sense of... you can’t tell these teenagers that it’s going to be gone like that and they’ll be looking back on it as if it was in slow motion. I’ve told this story to the dancers, that when I would come home from Pilobolus when the kids were little and they would go “Daddy’s home!” it was so exciting. When I imagine it now it’s kind of in slow motion, but that’s not what happened.

One of the new pieces is a sextet about dreams, in collaboration with Jad Abumrad, best known for creating Radiolab and, more recently, the award-winning podcast Dolly Parton’s America. How did your connection to Jad come about?

Renée: Pilobolus made a stage show with Radiolab back in 2010 or 2011.

Matt: A live touring performance. We collaborated on a stage show in which Pilobolus dancers performed and interacted with the hosts of Radiolab along with Dave Foley of Kids in the Hall, and Demetri Martin, and Thao & the Get Down Stay Down. We had an affinity with Jad in creating new work together. 

Was there something in particular that prompted you to call on Jad for this piece?

Matt: Because of our personal relationship with him, we knew that he was going to be leaving Radiolab and announcing it in the fairly near future—but it was like an inside scoop, we knew about it before it was announced. Renée said, “Well, what are you going to do, Jad?” And Jad said “Well, I’m not sure. I’m going to try a bunch of different things.” And we said, I have an idea...

 “We know what you’re gonna do...”

Matt: Renée teed it up, and then I went “Well, I have an idea” and then she started giggling, and then we were like, “Why don’t you make a piece?” So we did a workshop together that was a day long, and Jad brought in some sounds and we improvised with him manipulating sounds live in our studio—I would call it electronic or digital manipulation of Chopin nocturnes—playing with sounds that Jad found related to the act of falling asleep. The disintegration of the world around you and then the disturbance, the structure of sleeping.

You’ve also got two other collaborators on that piece, veteran Pilobolus dancer Derion Loman and his choreographic partner Madison Olandt.

Matt: When we started collaborating with Derion and Madison on a phone call to talk about what else we might do with them, Derion said he had been wanting to do something about sleeping and falling asleep and dreams, and I said well, we should bring these things together. 

Two summers ago you created an outdoor show called Bloom: A Journey to provide an innovative, safe, socially distanced series of performances—an “art safari”—during the pandemic. The Ballad, which grew out of Bloom, is another of the New York premieres you’re unveiling at the Joyce. One striking thing about The Ballad is that it’s verbal, it uses language, through your collaboration with a Native American storyteller, Darlene Kascak.

Matt: We met Darlene as a storyteller where she was at first mostly telling Native American stories for children. As we got to know her better and know more of her stories and more about her own life, it wasn’t long before Pilobolus wanted to begin moving to her stories. And as we got to know her personal story, we also found that so inspiring that we wanted to move to that as well.

The Ballad mixes legend and personal history, and like another piece on this season’s program, Branches, it started as an outdoor work. In both cases there was something very logical about the outdoor setting. I haven’t seen Ballad done as an indoor staged performance yet, but I know Branches made the transition beautifully. My question is: What does that do to it, that it starts outdoors? Does that change something?

Renée: Yes, it does change things, quite a bit. Branches though—even though they both started outside—Branches actually was made for a stage, the Inside/Out stage at Jacob’s Pillow. But what we did, was we started in the woods, and came to the stage from the woods, or from behind the stage, and we exited off the back of the stage. We were climbing in trees, and we thought anybody who performs on this stage is going to want to climb in trees. But that’s actually not the case, we learned. [Laughs.]

It’s really you who like to climb trees. People in Pilobolus.

Matt: And for real, we almost didn’t do it because we thought it would be cliché.

Renée: What we were thinking about when we made Branches and also when we made Ballad was the difference that time has on the piece. You have so much more to look at it. You’re outside among the elements with trees and sometimes grass. On that Inside/Out stage you’ve got an entire mountain. The foothills are behind you. The birds are flying overhead. You’re hearing sounds from the birds, the leaves crackling, the wind. There’s so much more in your senses than in a theater where you’re in a sealed-off place. So you do have to keep that in mind. When we created Branches it was there, but we also knew that it would go inside one day. When we created Ballad we didn’t get the idea to bring it onto the stage until after it was done. 

Matt: When, I might say, many of our artistic friends said “You can’t let this end now.”

Renée: “That needs to live on.”

Matt: Which was so cool to hear.

Renée: If you were to look at what The Ballad started as, compared to what it is now, there is so much more movement in it once we put it on a stage.

Matt: Because it came out of Bloom—that show had seventy-eight performances in five days—so we purposefully were economical with certain types of movements that we knew would injure the dancers, or they would not be able to complete the task doing it that many times.

And performing it in a forest! That brings a different set of—

Matt: Oh, yeah. There were tick checks.

Renée: There were tick checks every day, they got poison ivy, they were washing with Tecnu every night, and they were using a tree as a stage element. They held onto a tree and walked in a circle around it, on people’s bodies. So it was very different. Then when we moved inside, we did question: Do we need a tree in the middle of the stage? Do we need to pretend like we’re in the middle of the woods? We started to ask all these questions.

Matt: When we decided to move this not only to the bigger stage but to bring it onto a tour where more than our local community would see it, that’s when we also determined that we wouldn’t do it if we couldn’t get native descendants or native tribal members to be designers. 

It sounds like it has changed quite a bit, that it has grown and morphed. 

Renée: The message hasn’t changed, the meaning of the piece. The fact that it is probably the first time that we as a company have hit a social injustice head-on in our work, verbally and physically, is something that’s very different for us, and also that we’re very conscious of.

Matt: One of the biggest challenges for Ballad... We knew we’d be able to handle a lot of those changes from outdoors to indoors. The other part is that the ending of the piece was all designed around a final communal activity [with the audience] that was both part of a culmination of a whole show, Bloom, and was available to us because the audience weren’t in seats, there was no proscenium, and there were thirty of them at a time instead of a thousand. That was the challenge. How do we take the same beginning and get to the end with the same message? And that’s when we decided we’d kind of trade one magic trick for another. There’s a moment of arresting beauty at the end of this that we would not know how to do were it not for our collaborations with Penn and Teller.

In addition to your new pieces you’ve got some classics like Untitled and Megawatt. As dancers, you both had roles in the co-creation of Megawatt when Jonathan Wolken conceived it. It has long been described by Pilobolus as “an energy circus performed to the hard, driving music of Radiohead, Squarepusher, and Primus” and I know Jonathan really pushed everyone to give it an incredible intensity. What is Megawatt like now?

Renée: The structure has not changed. We did take a hard look at some of the heteronormative roles that existed in the piece and changed that.

Matt: It was about who was manipulating who, power structures, but also some of those things were—We switched some of the sinewy girl moves.

But you’ve maintained the incredible intensity.

Matt: The dancers look back at former casts and they aspire, or they want to one-up each other. They are working as hard as any cast has ever worked. We’ve gotten a little bit better at the science of training them. It is a piece that the dancers must rehearse and perform frequently [to stay in shape for it] or they will be throwing up in the wings.

You’ve also brought back Sweet Purgatory, affectionately known within Pilobolus as Sweet P. It was made in 1991 by four of the original Pilobolus creators, but it has a classical pedigree that in a way sets it apart from other Pilobolus pieces.

Matt: It’s Shostakovich, it’s dedicated to the resistance of fascists everywhere. I think it’s interesting that this is a Russian composer that we’re putting on the stage now, and it seems appropriate.

Renée: The music is very powerful but the fact that it’s all strings, like a human voice that speaks to your heart, in a way that immediately grabs you—

Matt: The strings are the closest instrument to a human voice.

Renée: The music was chosen as the music for a piece that they were going to build, which is not always how it happens in Pilobolus. 

The music was chosen first.

Renée: Yes, because of a grant that they got that had to do with classical music. When you watch the movement that is going along with it, there is a lot of tenderness, a lot of taking care of each other, in these moments where you do feel the pain that this community you’re watching is going through; they’re also being very compassionate with each other. That’s the beauty for me, that we’re using our partnering to show compassion and relation between people who are going through something very deep.

Matt: That’s the thing. They’re going through it together. That’s what makes me think about the war zone part of this, what’s going on in the Ukraine right now. I used to have those kind of images as a performer, that it feels like a group of people confined to some kind of purgatorial state or space. There’s a lot of imagery of almost getting out and coming back down. It’s about tenderness, and the camaraderie that is shared, the compassion that comes out of human suffering together. 

Another piece that uses classical music is the trio On the Nature of Things, which has operatic, intense music derived from Vivaldi, along with a dark, operatic sense of drama and conflict.

Renée: It definitely has a very distinct world. It’s powerful. Like most of our pieces, people see a story in it even if it’s a little different than their neighbor’s story. It can be those three people or you can think of it on a larger scale.

Matt: Like the allegories that it references, it speaks to relations. It’s connected to Milton, it’s the rediscovery of antiquity during the Renaissance.

It adds a kind of gravitas to the program, and I know it’s also an important piece for the two of you personally because it was part of your emergence as artistic directors. From being a dancer to being a director, what do you each now see from your own past that most influences or assists you as you guide Pilobolus forward?

Renée: You know, I think as a dancer I worked really, really hard to see and take the positive things that came out of collaboration and make them bigger and better to drown out the negative things that were happening. And that practice of doing that, with the directors when they were being contentious [with one another] or not trying to work through something together so we had to work through it on our own.

Matt: Yeah, I was going to say something similar, and you’re putting it just perfectly. The perspective that you’re pointing out is that because we were dancers, with Pilobolus directors directing us collaboratively in real time—an experience that the founding directors did not have—it makes us better collaborative directors because there are certain things that you can only see from the outside. And we saw from the outside, like, “Oh, hmm...”

With the gift of this longevity, first of all we have more data, more data points to look at and make decisions. We’re sort of all Pilobolus and yet—We care for this thing like a living thing but we have a different perspective that has helped us. We aren’t trying to copy the founding directors of Pilobolus. There are things we admire and therefore want to emulate but mostly we’re trying to be the best us that we can be. And we’ve danced together. We were partners a lot, and that helps immensely.

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Robert Pranzatelli is the author of Pilobolus: A Story of Dance and Life, published by University Press of Florida in Spring 2024.