Boulder – Women standing precariously at a slight angle on the slightly bent backs of walking men.
A Charlie Chaplin character suffering a run-in with a chair and teetering and scrambling as he tries to traverse five tubes lining the floor.
Six side-by-side dancers slowly sliding onstage on their backs like caterpillars.
Such unexpected images converged Tuesday evening during the return of the Pilobolus Dance Theatre, fresh from its recent eye-opening shadow-theater performances on the Academy Awards broadcast.
As a cheering, sold-out audience in Macky Auditorium made clear, the Connecticut ensemble, celebrating its 35th anniversary, is unquestionably one of the country’s most popular dance companies.
It combines vaudevillian pratfalls, high-voltage moves and intricately balanced, intertwined formations, dependably delivering humor, acrobatic thrills and stunning visuals.
Pilobolus’ downside has long been a shortage of substance – real choreographic meat. While it can produce circuslike ooohs and aaahs and no shortage of laughs, there is little in the way of deeper meaning or profound emotions.
But such shortfalls are easy to overlook in the face of spectacular athleticism, breathtaking forms and a sheer sense of fun, not to mention the amazing skill, precision and strength of the troupe’s seven dancers.
All these facets of Pilobolus were on view Tuesday in a program of six prototypical works that ranged from the turbocharged, hip-hop-flavored “Megawatt” (2004) to the slapstick in “Walklyndon” (1971).
The company’s trademark sculptural style could be seen to advantage in “Symbiosis” (2001), a stunning, fluid duet in which the two dancers – often seeming to move as one animallike organism – cradle, climb and cantilever off each other.
The evening opened with the newest work, “Aquatica” (2005), in which a woman on a seashore is lured into an underwater world of flowing, flitting sea creatures, by the repeating waves, re-created by rolling, extended bodies.
Having no qualms about disrupting the sense of aquatic verisimilitude, the dancers break into a series of comedic high jinks as the women jump on the backs of two crablike creatures, doing their best bronco-buster imitations.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
