Is it mountaineering or art? Both, for the Bay Area’s vertical dancers
Being a professional dancer requires skill, determination and core strength. And when you’re dancing hundreds of feet in the air — with no safety net — it requires fear.
“I’m opposed to the culture of ‘no fear,’ because fear reminds you of what’s important,” says Amelia Rudolph. “We like to say that we love our fear because our fear keeps us alive, our fear keeps us vigilant.”
Rudolph is the founder of the longtime West Oakland-based dance group Bandaloop and more recently of A.R.M.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, whether it be an Oakland skyscraper, Seattle’s Space Needle or the Yosemite National Park monolith, El Capitan.
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’s Jo Kreiter’s Flyaway Productions in San Francisco with its “apparatus-based dance” and Zaccho Dance Theatre, 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, and many others who – likely right this moment – hang from impossible angles like happy, warm-blooded spiders.
All of them will tell you that what they do, while like traditional dance, belongs in a rarefied air all its own – there’s no other feeling in the world quite like doing it.
“It’s hard to put into words the level of freedom you sense in the cells of your body,” says Rudolph. “It’s unprecedented as a dancer — as an athlete — to have that kind of relationship with gravity in a way that everything is slowed down and you are held by the air.”
The roots of vertical dance – sometimes called aerial dance, though that term blends spills over into the circus world – go far back and across the ocean to France.
“There were several companies there who were experimenting with the art of climbing, which was called Danse Escalade,” says Roel Seeber, an independent dance artist and instructor from Oakland. “In the 1960s and ’70s, they were using climbing as a creative form for video and films. This French movement was a really interesting one – mountaineering meets theater meets performance.”
In the U.S., Trisha Brown of the eponymous, post-modern dance company staged a 1970 piece in New York City called “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building.” It featured a man attached to a harness and ropes doing just that, while reacting to the ambient sounds surrounding the building.
“(Brown’s) 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,” art researcher Acatia Finbow writes for the Tate museum. The performance was notable not just for its physicality – Finbow notes the dancer evinced “considerable effort” fighting gravity – but for “challenging the audience to consider the expansion of the site of dance into the world around them.”
In 1995, the people of San Francisco were privy to dance expanding around them when Joanna Haigood mounted a public piece titled “NOON.” 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, “Safety Last!”
“For the longest time – and I mean the very longest time, maybe even the majority of my career — my work has been questioned as to whether or not it was dance,” says Haigood, cofounder and artistic director of San Francisco’s Zaccho Dance Theatre. “I think that isn’t part of the discourse at this point, though. People have generally accepted it as dance.”
Part of the appeal of vertical dancing is the entry into secret, off-limits spaces.
“I would say that doing this work has given me a very blessed life,” Haigood says. “There are only a few people who have access to the top of the (clock) tower. It’s usually maintenance folks, or people in city government who manage to find somebody with the key … But it’s a fairly restricted area. It was nice to see graffiti from the early 1900s.”
Roel recalls falling in love with the style while performing in an abandoned cement mine in upstate New York. “I 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,” he says. “And there’s this thing about being able to fly, which I think is intimately connected with being in a space that’s reserved for the avian creatures.”
Rudolph’s 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’s El Capitan, ascending more than 400 feet up a cliff wall, sleeping up there and rappelling down at dawn to live music.
“We climbed with four climbers and four dancers. One was a belly dancer who brought her baby snake with her,” she recalls. “El Cap we had to keep very low-key, because we didn’t ask permission and we were in Yosemite Park … It was a little more activist back then, you kind of just went and did it, saying ‘sorry’ not ‘please.’”
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’s Old Jeddah city. They’ve wowed audiences on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and at the 2017 American Music Awards, where they dangled with singer Pink from the side of an L.A. hotel.
“She was incredibly kind and hard-working, and she learned our form in four days,” says Melecio Estrella, artistic director for Bandaloop. “It was quite a memory having her sing into my face while we were dueting.”
Speaking later to Jimmy Kimmel about the experience, Pink said she was a “lot higher than I wanted to be” and signaled that she “got through the dangerous performance with the help of some whiskey.” The word “dangerous” isn’t tossed around lightly in vertical-dance circles. But in a pursuit where “break a leg” takes on new meaning, danger does exist.
There is a notorious incident from the 1980s with a Japanese company that was performing in Seattle. “The performance, subtitled “Dance of Birth and Death,” had four nearly nude dancers — their heads shaven and their bodies coated with rice flour — hanging upside down from the top of a building and being lowered, head-first, slowly to the ground,” according to a United Press International report.
A rope snapped and the show “turned 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.”
But that kind of accident is almost unheard of. At Bandaloop there’s a formidable safety system that Rudolph helped establish, involving multiple layers of triple-checking sites and equipment. “People are like, ‘You defy gravity.’ I say, ‘No, I don’t. I have huge respect and would never try to defy her.’”
That frees up everyone to simply enjoy the dance – 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.
“The world is so heavy right now. Like, we feel so much weight from the climate crisis, the political crisis, the economic crisis that we’re all experiencing,” says Estrella. “I feel the lightness — the gravitational variance of vertical dance, where it looks really light and floaty — feels like an antidote to the heaviness of our times. And that beauty, I know that I actually need it to survive.”
More information on bandaloop at bandaloop.org, details on classes and workshops at the Oakland studio at bandaloopstudio.com. For details on A.R.M.A. projects, go to ameliarudolph.com.