Off The Wall

Despite Bandaloop's early popularity among audiences, some climbers were suspicious of the idea of vertical dance. Last summer Mayfield ran into climbers he had known for years, and one called out, "Hey, Mayfield, where's your tutu?"

"Some people in the climbing community are open-minded, others are skeptical," Mayfield says, shrugging off the incident as good-natured teasing. "Climbers I know have come to see us perform, and they thought it was cool."

As for the performers themselves, many are dancers who have become avid climbers, and some are climbers who have become dancers. Heather Baer, a dancer who says she had "never touched a rock before joining Bandaloop," now climbs regularly, sometimes with Schneider, her fianc�, whom she met through the troupe. Mayfield, by contrast, has taken up dance and performs with a (horizontal) dance company in the Bay Area. In addition to performing and teaching dance, Rudolph is the director of corporate training at CityRock. She also competes as a climber, placing 11th in a sport-climbing competition at CityRock in 1992 and second in speed at last year's event.

Bandaloop plans to perform at San Francisco's Theater Artaud in July, and Rudolph hopes to perform in India, possibly in the Himalayas. Despite these lofty ambitions, the reality is that finding funds to support vertical dance is a continuous challenge. Rudolph spends a lot of time writing grant proposals, and she is a tireless self-promoter. But thanks to her efforts, Bandaloop scored a five-minute appearance on ESPN last November. Still, the troupe's performers are quite a long way from being able to quit their day jobs.

"It's the nature of the beast," Rudolph says. "For a dance company we've been lucky to get as much attention as we have, considering how young we are. My goal is to get better at what we do, to do it more often, and to do it all over the world. But just doing it is good."