Photo: Basil Tsimoyianis/Bandaloop

In 1989, choreographer Amelia Rudolph was clinging to a sheer granite wall in California’s Sierra Nevada when she wondered what it would look like to dance there. Soon after, Rudolph founded Bandaloop, a dance group that has performed on numerous rock walls, as well as Seattle’s Space Needle, skyscrapers in South Korea, and dozens of other sideways stages, sometimes for public audiences numbering in the tens of thousands. Beginning this June 16, six dancers and a nine-person support crew headed into Yosemite’s wilderness for ten days of hiking and pirouetting. The pinnacle of the journey was a performance on the face of 8,500-foot Mount Watkins, a stage that offers a rare perspective of Half Dome and an audience of birds, bugs, squirrels, and perhaps a bear or two.



Photo: Bandaloop dancers on Mount Watkins, nearly 3,000 feet above the valley floor. Rudolph’s goal with the group has been to challenge preconceptions about modern dance. The performers make it look easy to fly off the wall, but their abdominal muscles are often screaming as they fight gravity to hold their bodies perpendicular to the face.