Soaring high above the earth, Bandaloop knows the ropes

EVERETT -- Amelia Rudolph clambers up an indoor rock wall with the confidence of one who has scaled mountains and the grace of a dancer who has spun in midair suspended from them. One leg swings behind the other to reach a foothold, and her back arches as she leans back to scope out her next maneuver.

Combining rock climbing and modern dance -- two fields that seem to have little to do with each other -- to create a unique aerial dance form has been Rudolph's passion for more than 15 years. She's brought it to life as the founder of Project Bandaloop, a Bay Area-based international touring company that will give three performances at the Shubert Theatre next weekend.

While in town to deliver a private lecture at the Museum of Science, she gave a reporter a crash course in basic climbing techniques at MetroRock's indoor rock wall.

What Bandaloop does isn't easy to describe. The eight dancers perform in conventional indoor theater spaces as well as off the sides of mountains, skyscrapers, and bridges, often featuring site-specific work. A video compilation of their performances shows dancers in midair, each wearing a harness and suspended by a rope attached high above them. They join together and split apart, sometimes resembling aerial synchronized swimmers.

In another piece, they're kicking off craggy rock faces, barefoot with red pants flapping in the wind, turning somersaults and then landing lightly back on the rock. In yet another, they ''fly" down ropes, perpendicular to the rock, faces turned to the sky. They look both lyrical and powerful.

''It's as if all the rules of gravity are rewritten," Rudolph says after the lesson. ''And you're rewriting them as you're making dances."

Given enough rope, say 275 feet, a Bandaloop dancer can free-fall for 11 seconds. ''I timed it," she says. ''That's a ballerina's dream. It's an incredible feeling of what we call loft."

Talk to Rudolph too much about climbing, though, and she looks uneasy. ''We're a dance company," she emphasizes. But she says this while wiping the chalk dust she had used for climbing off her hands. And her arms look more muscly than a dancer's.

A few other modern dance companies use aerial elements. But Bandaloop sets itself apart by dancing indoors and outdoors -- sometimes in the same performance.

Most of the Shubert show will take place on the stage, with performers dancing alone or in pairs, some on the floor, some suspended in the air or on a portable climbing wall.

The show will culminate outdoors, with the audience invited to leave the theater, walk across the street, and watch the same dancers spin and somersault while hanging from the roof of a 7 1/2-story cement parking garage.

That sounds mighty high for a dance troupe, but for these guys, it's nothing. Bandaloop has performed 2,400 feet up in Yosemite, off of Seattle's Space Needle, and high over Times Square. Rudolph estimates that a half million people around the globe have seen the group dance.

Rudolph has a serious demeanor, appropriate for one whose art endangers her artists' lives, as well as her own. But the troupe has never had a serious accident. She credits that to the presence of two expert riggers -- the head rigger is Steve Schneider, one of North America's best-known career climbers -- who travel with the show, as well as to the company's stringent safety requirements. Each performer's equipment, which includes nylon climbing rope, harnesses, carabiners, and a self-locking belay device called a grigri, is triple-checked.

Once, before a dancer was to perform off the face of a 23-story Houston skyscraper, an error was found on the third check.

Steven Maler, resident director at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, says he wanted to bring Bandaloop to the Shubert, which the Wang operates, because the troupe appeals to different audiences.

''If you're a climber, you can appreciate the athleticism of what they're doing," he explains. ''If you're a dancer or a dance enthusiast, you can admire the extraordinary choreography of bodies moving in space in a new way."

Rudolph, who is a dancer and choreographer as well as the artistic director, has always combined different interests. Growing up in Chicago, she started ballet at 6 and was also a competitive gymnast. At Swarthmore College, she studied biology -- and won awards for her choreography. Her most influential teachers were not mainstream; Mark Morris, with whom she studied at Jacob's Pillow, ''focused on the idiosyncrasies of movement," she says.

Rudolph performed with several conventional dance groups, but what really changed her was an intensive course in contact improvisation, a dance technique, at UCLA.

''I had never done anything like it before," she says. ''I went from having a very technically based, individual sense of movement to an internal sense of movement related to someone else's weight and movement."

At 25, she started rock climbing and found her first experiences overwhelming, ''in a good way," Rudolph says. ''I feel that clinging to the spine of earth on these granite crystals. . . . It's an awe-inspiring situation. There are times when it gets serious all of a sudden and you're not sure you can make the next move. You start to panic a little bit and your foot starts to tremble. You just have to breathe, use all your skills, and then it's like you're OK, it's fine."

Climbing mountains has taught her numerous life lessons, she says, beyond mastering the rigors of the sport. They include ''your relationship with your climbing partner, the level of trust that you need so that you can make the situation as safe as it possibly can be. Just finding your way through the mountains, not getting lost on a cliff. All these things. It's very intense."

The improv training, she says, fed into her climbing. Rudolph started to think about the rock or wall as a partner.

''My feet would push against the wall from one foothold to another, and like contact improvisation, I was doing a duet with the rock. That helped inspire the beginning of what Project Bandaloop is today."

Rudolph found CityRock, one of the first climbing gyms in the United States, in Emeryville, Calif., and asked owner Peter Mayfield if she could experiment there with combining climbing and dance. Working with eight dancers and four climbers, including Mayfield and Schneider, she held her first performance at the gym.

For a dance company, this one has been remarkably stable. Mayfield and Schneider have worked with her since Bandaloop's inception in 1991, as have four of the dancers.

The troupe's name, she says, is borrowed from Tom Robbins's 1984 novel, ''Jitterbug Perfume." In the book, Bandaloop is a dance that confers immortality upon its dancers, something that members joke is already happening, given that Rudolph is 42 and another dancer is 45 -- ancient by industry standards.

But the youngest member is 25, and Rudolph is aware of the importance of both mentoring younger dancers and attracting a diverse audience. More than half of their performances are free, she says, including the summer festivals where Rudolph says she has heard some of her favorite comments. ''Dude," one 13-year-old skateboarder announced, ''That was rad!"