Current Work

"Loft!" is a full evening length performance that includes popular repertoire and the new work "Interiors, Phase I" featuring an interactive set by Todd Laby. This touring show can be combined with an outdoor component.

Outdoors we are currently touring "Three Building Pieces" - which is a suite of dances that is adapted to the specific architectural features of a site. We also perform various hybrids of indoor and outdoor work.

We premiered short new works for the opening of the new wing of the Art Institute in Chicago (with the Taiko Project) and for our appearance with the Detroit symphony this year (’08). These new works are now folded into the repertoire that we can chose from to perform on architectural sites.

IdEgo: (Coming in 2010)

IdEgo is a new collaborative outdoor vertical dance piece by choreographer Amelia Rudolph, the dancers of Project Bandaloop, director Ellen Sebastian Chang and sculptor/set designer Todd Laby. IdEgo investigates the tension between individual and group identity and between intimacy and “spectacle” through movement, sculpture, text and song. Chang will challenge Rudolph and the dancers to explore theatrical performance elements outside their traditional lexicon. Todd Laby’s set will support, and create an environment for the metaphors of the work adding aesthetic and kinetic complexity. The artists’ collaboration is the work itself and the final performance piece, its expression.

Interiors: (2007)

Interiors I is the first half of an indoor vertical dance piece by choreographer Amelia Rudolph in collaboration with the dancers of Project Bandaloop, with an interactive set design by Todd Laby that celebrates and questions assumptions about every day life. Interiors I turns this world on its side, exploring relationships in domestic space through lyrical, minimalist and highly physical three-dimensional dance that references both physical and mental interiors. In the context of a "house", movement that negotiates a climbable flying dinner table and a suspended oversized picture frame animates and magnifies the smaller motions of life. The set and the dance evoke an "interior" bristling with underlying mischief.

The piece begins with an element of surprise and evokes an emotional landscape through movement that includes a sideways dinner party, dancing with furniture and a suspended mysterious trio in which the chandelier come to "life". It returns to a playful conclusion as guests join in on what is an intimate and awkward sideways date at the hanging table. Throughout the piece a single character remains in the picture frame, observing, only to be intruded upon once by the house dwellers. Together the piece tells a topsy-turvy story of the beauty in the everyday. The multi-dimensional choreography reframes movement, relationships and values unearthing the beauty of the quotidian and expanding the ordinary to include the absurd.

Cranes in Mumbai

March 8, 2010
From Vancouver where I am working with Julia Taffe's Aeriosa dance company on the public library, I want to say a word about Mumbai. Our Whirlwind trip there was fantastic and we put together a show on the Maker Maxity buildings and on two cranes for an event March 6th. The dancers rallied from the couch to perform amazingly in three separate pieces. During rehearsals on the cranes, a couple of women construction workers in bright saris with their two tiny daughters on hand, grew big smiles seeing their American sisters show such courage and beauty. Between wonderful aromatic meals and walks on the Juhu beach, the company worked hard to make our first Mumbai show fantastic. All in a weeks work.

– Amelia