An Oakland Dance Troupe Brings Vertical Choreography to Broadway

In 1990, Amelia Rudolph was hiking through Tuolumne Meadows, a stunning mountain pass in Yosemite National Park, when she had an epiphany on a shiny granite bluff: “Could you make a performance here?” she wondered. “Could you dance on a cliff?”

Rudolph, a dancer in the Bay Area who trained with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, had just written a college thesis on dance and ritual and recently become an avid climber. Those experiences converged in her mountaintop revelation — and inspired her to make a dance while dangling from the climbing wall at the gym where she worked.

That dance, though unrefined, was enthusiastically received. “I realized I tapped into some part of our human imagination that loves to fly,” Rudolph, 61, said in a phone interview.

From that seed grew Project Bandaloop, now just Bandaloop, a vertical dance company that fuses contemporary dance with climbing technique and technology. Using equipment, like harnesses, ropes and belay devices, Bandaloop can take dance’s soaring, ethereal qualities to extremes and bring them to unlikely perpendicular surfaces like the rock face of El Capitan in California or Tianmen Mountain in China.

“The spirit of the company,” Rudolph said, celebrates “the power and vulnerability of natural spaces.”

Now Bandaloop’s gravity-defying movement and ecological DNA have come to Broadway in the musical “Redwood,” starring Idina Menzel, which opened on Feb. 13.