We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

(Symbiosis, a biology-inspired dance performed by members of Pilobolus at the 2005 TED Conference.)

Veteran experimental dance troupe Pilobolus has performed everywhere from Sesame Street in the 1970s to the 2007 Academy Awards, where they contorted their bodies into a bunch of giant silhouettes symbolizing Little Miss Sunshine and Snakes on a Plane. Discarding the normal rules of dance and incorporating mind-boggling acrobatics into a built-from-scratch physical language, Pilobolus has redefined modern dance several times over.

In 1999 the dance troupe teamed up with a pair of unlikely collaborators: Maurice Sendak and opera director Arthur Yorinks. It was the first time Pilobolus had allowed outsiders to contribute to their unique process, and the result was a dark and masterful rumination on the Holocaust called A Selection. While the end result may have been a brilliant success, the journey to that point was awkward and contentious, to say the least. Mirra Bank’s 2002 documentary Last Dance provides an intimate look at the backstage drama, the dance’s evolution, and Sendak’s imagination at work.

While the dancers freely improvise in early meetings, we see Sendak sketching figures and jotting down wild, poetic interpretations of bizarre contortions, constructing a theater piece based around a living Rorschach test. Fusing the dancers’ fluid instincts with abstract narrative elements culled from Brundibar (the Czech opera that Sendak later adapted into a picture book with Tony Kushner) and the real life drama of Theresienstadt, Sendak imprints a sinister, melancholy mood into the piece– but not without his signature pension for playfulness. Watching A Selection come to life is a thrilling and rare chance to see the birth of a collaborative artwork, even for someone (like myself) completely unversed in the world of dance.

Highlights from Last Dance include Sendak’s brilliant costume designs and decorations, the constant presence of an exceptionally peculiar dance critic, and a villainous choreographer/Gallagher-doppelganger’s futile attempts to wrest control from Sendak by complaining that the author was making the dance “too narrative.”

Vintage Eggers! Or maybe not vintage, but also not newish. This is Dave Eggers accepting his 2008 TED Prize and giving a little talk about his wonderful organization 826 Valencia. I like TED talks because they remind me of the Google headquarters, lucid dreaming, evangelical Christian rock concerts and school all at once. But in a great way.