{"id":179593,"date":"2026-02-16T00:43:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T00:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/179593\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T00:43:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T00:43:13","slug":"the-vertical-dancers-who-performed-with-pink-and-at-yosemite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/179593\/","title":{"rendered":"The vertical dancers who performed with Pink and at Yosemite"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being a professional dancer<\/a> requires skill, determination and core strength. And when you\u2019re dancing hundreds of feet in the air \u2014 with no safety net \u2014 it requires fear.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m opposed to the culture of \u2018no fear,\u2019 because fear reminds you of what\u2019s important,\u201d says Amelia Rudolph. \u201cWe like to say that we love our fear because our fear keeps us alive, our fear keeps us vigilant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rudolph is the founder of the longtime West Oakland-based dance group Bandaloop<\/a> and more recently of A.R.M.A.<\/a>, both of which practice a style called vertical dance. Using her training as a contemporary dancer and a rock climber, she and other performers ascend and interact with towering structures<\/a>, whether it be an Oakland skyscraper, Seattle\u2019s Space Needle or the Yosemite National Park monolith, El Capitan.<\/p>\n

It turns out the Bay Area is a hotbed of vertical dancing. Some of the biggest influencers and pioneers in the art form made their careers here. Aside from Rudolph and Bandaloop, there\u2019s Jo Kreiter\u2019s Flyaway Productions<\/a> in San Francisco with its \u201capparatus-based dance\u201d and Zaccho Dance Theatre<\/a>, which holds a biannual Aerial Arts Festival taking place in 2026 at the Fort Mason Center. There is choreographer Terry Sendgraff, credited with introducing the single-point trapeze to dance<\/a>, and many others who \u2013 likely right this moment \u2013 hang from impossible angles like happy, warm-blooded spiders.<\/p>\n

\"AmeliaAmelia Rudolph, founder of Oakland dance company Bandaloop and A.R.M.A., performs in 2014 on Dana Pillar near Yosemite National Park in California. (Braden Mayfield)\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of them will tell you that what they do, while like traditional dance, belongs in a rarefied air all its own \u2013 there\u2019s no other feeling in the world quite like doing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to put into words the level of freedom you sense in the cells of your body,\u201d says Rudolph. \u201cIt\u2019s unprecedented as a dancer \u2014 as an athlete \u2014 to have that kind of relationship with gravity in a way that everything is slowed down and you are held by the air.\u201d<\/p>\n

The roots of vertical dance \u2013 sometimes called aerial dance, though that term blends spills over into the circus world \u2013 go far back and across the ocean to France.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were several companies there who were experimenting with the art of climbing, which was called Danse Escalade,\u201d says Roel Seeber<\/a>, an independent dance artist and instructor from Oakland. \u201cIn the 1960s and \u201970s, they were using climbing as a creative form for video and films. This French movement was a really interesting one \u2013 mountaineering meets theater meets performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the U.S., Trisha Brown of the eponymous, post-modern dance company staged a 1970 piece in New York City called \u201cMan Walking Down the Side of a Building.\u201d It featured a man attached to a harness and ropes doing just that, while reacting to the ambient sounds surrounding the building.<\/p>\n

\u201c(Brown\u2019s) intention was not to create a sense of theatricality, but to draw attention to the simple and natural act of walking through a situation in an unnatural scenario,\u201d art researcher Acatia Finbow writes for the Tate museum<\/a>. The performance was notable not just for its physicality \u2013 Finbow notes the dancer evinced \u201cconsiderable effort\u201d fighting gravity \u2013 but for \u201cchallenging the audience to consider the expansion of the site of dance into the world around them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DancersDancers from Zaccho Dance Theatre perform a piece called “NOON” in 1995 on the clock tower of the Ferry Building in San Francisco, Calif. (Theodora Litsios via Zaccho Dance Theatre)\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1995, the people of San Francisco were privy to dance expanding around them when Joanna Haigood mounted a public piece titled \u201cNOON.\u201d<\/a> Haigood and six other dancers rappelled down from the 245-foot-tall clock tower on the Ferry Building, where they dangled and enacted whimsical movements inspired by the 1923 silent comedy, \u201cSafety Last!\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cFor the longest time \u2013 and I mean the very longest time, maybe even the majority of my career \u2014 my work has been questioned as to whether or not it was dance,\u201d says Haigood, cofounder and artistic director of San Francisco\u2019s Zaccho Dance Theatre. \u201cI think that isn\u2019t part of the discourse at this point, though. People have generally accepted it as dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the appeal of vertical dancing is the entry into secret, off-limits spaces.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say that doing this work has given me a very blessed life,\u201d Haigood says. \u201cThere are only a few people who have access to the top of the (clock) tower. It\u2019s usually maintenance folks, or people in city government who manage to find somebody with the key \u2026 But it\u2019s a fairly restricted area. It was nice to see graffiti from the early 1900s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roel recalls falling in love with the style while performing in an abandoned cement mine in upstate New York. \u201cI remember feeling this sense of being able to touch space that was primarily inaccessible, and just to be in contact with it was instant love,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd there\u2019s this thing about being able to fly, which I think is intimately connected with being in a space that\u2019s reserved for the avian creatures.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rudolph\u2019s early dances were indeed in the realm of birds and of California nature. After founding a group called Project Bandaloop, she and her troupe headed into the Sierra Nevada to dance in the mountains. They did a piece in the early 1990s on Yosemite\u2019s El Capitan, ascending more than 400 feet up a cliff wall, sleeping up there and rappelling down at dawn to live music.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe climbed with four climbers and four dancers. One was a belly dancer who brought her baby snake with her,\u201d she recalls. \u201cEl Cap we had to keep very low-key, because we didn\u2019t ask permission and we were in Yosemite Park \u2026 It was a little more activist back then, you kind of just went and did it, saying \u2018sorry\u2019 not \u2018please.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DancersDancers perform on an ocean cliff in Ireland in 2023 as part of an international arts project led by Amelia Rudolph, founder of the Bandaloop and A.R.M.A. dance groups in Oakland, Calif. (Amelia Rudolph)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Project Bandaloop evolved into simply Bandaloop. Over the decades, its performers have danced on more than 400 sites worldwide including the Space Needle, the 11th-century Golconda citadel in India and Saudi Arabia\u2019s Old Jeddah city. They\u2019ve wowed audiences on the \u201cLate Show with David Letterman\u201d and at the 2017 American Music Awards, where they dangled with singer Pink from the side of an L.A. hotel.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was incredibly kind and hard-working, and she learned our form in four days,\u201d says Melecio Estrella, artistic director for Bandaloop. \u201cIt was quite a memory having her sing into my face while we were dueting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking later to Jimmy Kimmel about the experience, Pink said she was<\/a> a \u201clot higher than I wanted to be\u201d and signaled that she \u201cgot through the dangerous performance with the help of some whiskey.\u201d The word \u201cdangerous\u201d isn\u2019t tossed around lightly in vertical-dance circles. But in a pursuit where \u201cbreak a leg\u201d takes on new meaning, danger does exist.<\/p>\n

There is a notorious incident from the 1980s with a Japanese company that was performing in Seattle. \u201cThe performance, subtitled \u201cDance of Birth and Death,\u201d had four nearly nude dancers \u2014 their heads shaven and their bodies coated with rice flour \u2014 hanging upside down from the top of a building and being lowered, head-first, slowly to the ground,\u201d according to a United Press International report<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A rope snapped and the show \u201cturned into horror on a downtown street when a male dancer, his near-naked body whitened by flour, fell six stories to his death before a crowd of hundreds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BANDALOOPBANDALOOP vertical dancers Sarah Keeney, left, Courtney Moreno and Becca Dean perform during a rehearsal of the new show titled “Loom:Field” directed by Melecio Estrella, as part of their 30th anniversary on the Breuner building wall on West Grand Avenue in Oakland, Calif. in 2022. (Ray Chavez\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

But that kind of accident is almost unheard of. At Bandaloop there\u2019s a formidable safety system that Rudolph helped establish, involving multiple layers of triple-checking sites and equipment. \u201cPeople are like, \u2018You defy gravity.\u2019 I say, \u2018No, I don\u2019t. I have huge respect and would never try to defy her.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That frees up everyone to simply enjoy the dance \u2013 both the people stunned out of their daily routines and made to look up, and the performers looking down while flying high through the air.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world is so heavy right now. Like, we feel so much weight from the climate crisis, the political crisis, the economic crisis that we\u2019re all experiencing,\u201d says Estrella. \u201cI feel the lightness \u2014 the gravitational variance of vertical dance, where it looks really light and floaty \u2014 feels like an antidote to the heaviness of our times. And that beauty, I know that I actually need it to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

More information on bandaloop at bandaloop.org<\/a>, details on classes and workshops at the Oakland studio at bandaloopstudio.com.<\/a> For details on A.R.M.A. projects, go to ameliarudolph.com.<\/a><\/p>\n

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