THE MISSION OF PILOBOLUS IS TO:

Create, perform, and preserve dances
applying the collaborative creative methods of Pilobolus.

Expand and diversify audiences 
through projects of all types and scales – in live performance, film, and digital media, characterized by the qualities of our namesake fungus— adventurous, adaptive, athletic, surprising and revealing of beauty in unexpected places.

Teach dancers, non-dancers, and organizations 
how to harness the creative potential of groups using Pilobolus’s methods.

ABOUT PILOBOLUS

Pilobolus is a rebellious dance company. Since 1971, Pilobolus has tested the limits of human physicality to explore the beauty and the power of connected bodies. We continue to bring this tradition to global audiences through our post-disciplinary collaborations with some of the greatest influencers, thinkers, and creators in the world. Now, in our digitally driven and increasingly mediated landscape, we also reach beyond performance to teach people how to connect through designed live experiences. We bring our decades of expertise telling stories with the human form to show diverse communities, brands, and organizations how to maximize group creativity, solve problems, create surprise, and generate joy through the power of nonverbal communication. 

Pilobolus has created and toured over 120 pieces of repertory to more than 65 countries. Over the years we have performed our work for millions of people across the U.S. and around the world. Pilobolus has been featured on CBS This Morning, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, NBC’s TODAY Show, MTV’s Video Music Awards, The Harry Connick Show, ABC’s The Chew, and the CW Network’s Penn & Teller: Fool Us. Pilobolus has been recognized with many prestigious honors, including a TED Fellowship, a 2012 Grammy® Award Nomination, a Primetime Emmy® Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cultural Programming, and several Cannes Lion Awards at the International Festival of Creativity. In 2015, Pilobolus was named one of Dance Heritage Coalition’s “Irreplaceable Dance Treasures”.  Pilobolus has collaborated with more than 75 brands and organizations in finance, retail, media, fashion, sports, and more to create bespoke performances for television, film, and live events.

In 2024, the first book capturing the legacy of Pilobolus was written by author Robert Pranzatelli and published by the University Press of Florida. Pilobolus: A Story of Dance and Life tracks the company from its counterculture origins through its pop-culture triumphs and contemporary global acclaim. 

choreography by Renée Jaworski and Pilobolus

choreography by Renée Jaworski and Pilobolus

Heralded for its “white-hot intensity” (The New York Times) and “stunning precision of harmony, intonation, and . . . spectacular virtuosity” (Gramophone Magazine), the GRAMMY-nominated Lorelei Ensemble is recognized across the globe for its bold and inventive programs that champion the extraordinary flexibility and virtuosity of the human voice. Led by founder and artistic director Beth Willer, Lorelei has established an inspiring mission, curating culturally-relevant and artistically audacious programs that stretch and challenge the expectations of artists and audiences alike.

Lorelei Ensemble is creating a living repertoire for a living audience, working with today’s leading composers to commission more than 70 new works that expand and deepen the repertoire of sounds, timbres, words and stories that women use to reflect and challenge our world. This new repertoire for women’s and treble voices demands fierce flexibility and openness from each artist and listener, allowing unparalleled music making that is born from the unique position of power and cultural influence that women hold. Collaborating composers include David Lang, Julia Wolfe, George Benjamin, Kati Agócs, Lisa Bielawa, Kareem Roustom, Jessica Meyer, and many more. Recent projects and commissions include Julia Wolfe’s Her Story, Christopher Cerrone’s Beaufort Scales, Katherine Balch’s songs and interludes, and a new collaborative program called BREATHE featuring composer-performers Charlotte Greve, Wendel Patrick, Ken Thomson, and Jason Treuting.

Recordings document and preserve the work of Lorelei and its collaborators for future artists and audiences. On the Cantaloupe, Cold Blue, New Focus, Sono Luminus, and BMOP Sound labels, Lorelei has recorded the music of living composers Kati Agócs, Peter Gilbert, James Kallembach, David Lang, Jessica Meyer, Scott Ordway, and Julia Wolfe, as well as historical repertoires from William Billings, Guillaume Du Fay, Alfred Schnittke, Tōru Takemitsu, the Turin Codex and the Codex Calixtinus. Lorelei was recognized with a 2025 GRAMMY Award nomination in the category of Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for its recording of Christopher Cerrone’s Beaufort Scales (2024, Cold Blue Music). Other recent releases include I long and seek after with Jessica Meyer (New Focus Recordings, 2024), and James Kallembach’s Antigone: The Writings of Sophie Scholl (New Focus, 2022).

Lorelei Ensemble maintains a robust national touring schedule, including collaborations with the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, National, and Nashville symphonies, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, A Far Cry, and Cantus, and performances at celebrated venues across the country, including Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tanglewood Music Center, and Boston's Symphony Hall.

Committed to education, Lorelei is empowering young artists to be our next creative leaders through its work with rising performers and composers at children’s choirs, high schools, and colleges and universities across the country. Cultivating both individual and collaborative artistry, Lorelei helps young artists hone their skills to become flexible, perceptive, and open-minded musicians. Past residencies include work with singers, ensembles, conductors, and composers at the Eastman School of Music, Harvard University, Yale University, Duke University, University of Iowa, Cornell University, and more.

The ensemble was founded in Boston in 2007. Lorelei Ensemble’s roster of artists is based across the United States and maintains active performing and teaching schedules. 

SARAH KIRKLAND SNIDER, COMPOSER

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” (The New York Times), “groundbreaking” (The Boston Globe), and “ravishingly beautiful” (NPR). Recently named one of the “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” by The Washington Post, Snider’s works have been commissioned and/or performed by the New York Philharmonic; Boston Symphony Orchestra; Cleveland Orchestra; San Francisco Symphony; National Symphony Orchestra; Detroit Symphony Orchestra; Philharmonia Orchestra; Birmingham Royal Ballet; Emerson String Quartet; Renée Fleming and Will Liverman; Deutsche Grammophon for mezzo Emily D’Angelo; percussionist Colin Currie; eighth blackbird; A Far Cry; and Roomful of Teeth, among many others. The winner of the 2014 Detroit Symphony Orchestra Lebenbom Competition, Snider’s recent works include Forward Into Light, an orchestral commission for the New York Philharmonic inspired by American women suffragists; Drink the Wild Ayre, the final commission for the legendary Emerson String Quartet’s farewell tour; Mass for the Endangered, a Trinity Wall Street-commissioned prayer for the environment for choir and ensemble, programmed by dozens of choirs the world over; Embrace, an orchestral ballet for the Birmingham Royal Ballet; and Hildegard, an upcoming opera on 12th c. visionary/polymath/composer St. Hildegard von Bingen commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, to premiere (venue TBA) in 2025. Her four full-length LPs – The Blue Hour (Nonesuch/New Amsterdam, 2022), Mass for the Endangered (Nonesuch/New Amsterdam, 2020), Unremembered (New Amsterdam, 2015), and Penelope (New Amsterdam, 2010) – have garnered year-end nods and critical acclaim from The New York Times, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Gramophone Magazine, Pitchfork, BBC Music Magazine, The Nation, and many others. A founding Co-Artistic Director of Brooklyn-based non-profit New Amsterdam Records, Snider has an M.M. and Artist’s Diploma from the Yale School of Music, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She will be a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University in Fall 2023. Her music is published by G. Schirmer.  

[NEW WORK] (world premiere)

Snider collaborates with the American novelist, memoirist, and cultural critic Mira Jacob to create an ensemble song cycle for treble voices that specifically address what wildness looks like through the female gaze. What does it mean to thrive on the periphery of so-called civilization, to feel the isolation and thrill of our untold stories, to build networks of shared knowledge for mutual survival? With these pieces, Snider and Jacob explore the many ways in which women experience wildness—temporal, spiritual, eternal.

ANGELICA NEGRÓN, COMPOSER

Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics as well as for chamber ensembles, orchestras, choir, and film. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise.” Negrón has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, loadbang, Prototype Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Opera Philadelphia, the Louisville Orchestra and the New York Botanical Garden, among others. Angélica received an early education in piano and violin at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico where she later studied composition under the guidance of composer Alfonso Fuentes. She holds a master’s degree in music composition from New York University where she studied with Pedro da Silva and pursued doctoral studies at The Graduate Center (CUNY), where she studied composition with Tania León. Also active as an educator, Angélica is currently a teaching artist for New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program.  She has collaborated with artists like Sō Percussion, Lido Pimienta, Mathew Placek, Sasha Velour, Cecilia Aldarondo, Mariela Pabón & Adrienne Westwood, among others and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún.  She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at WNYC’s The Greene Space working on El Living Room, a 4-part offbeat variety show and playful multimedia exploration of sound and story, of personal history and belonging. She was the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize. Upcoming premieres include works for the Seattle Symphony, LA Philharmonic, Louisville Orchestra and NY Philharmonic Project 19 initiative and multiple performances at Big Ears Festival 2022. Negrón continues to perform and compose for film..

she is not a wolf (world premiere)

A piece inspired by and connected to Angela Carter's short story Wolf-Alice which combines elements from an obscure variant of Little Red Riding Hood with references from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, and which explores the journey towards subjectivity and self-awareness from the perspective of a feral child. The text will consist of excerpts from the story in which the story refers to active things she is doing, thinking or experiencing. The text of the piece will highlight characterizations of Alice as wild, ignorant, savage and unrefined with other contrasting depictions of her as docile, sensitive, lonely, powerless, fearful.  The composition will explore a variety of raw and visceral sounds combined with more delicate vocal shapes that will be layered with electronic textures that draw from processed micro-samples of vocal and body percussion sounds. The piece seeks to create an eerily seductive soundscape through the lens of magical realism and peculiar fairy-tales and folklore while underlining the absurdity of how girls and women are sometimes portrayed in this literature throughout history. 
 

TINA TALLON, COMPOSER

Winner of a 2021-2022 Rome Prize, Tina Tallon (b. 1990) is a sound artist, creative technologist, vocalist, educator, and arts documentarian based in Gainesville, FL and working around the world. Her music has been performed by such esteemed musicians as Ensemble Intercontemporain, wild Up, Talea, and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group. She has received major grants and awards from organizations such as the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the American Academy in Rome, ASCAP, the Barlow Endowment, the La Jolla Symphony, and NewMusicUSA. Recent commissioners include the LA Philharmonic, Guerilla Opera, Steven Schick and the La Jolla Symphony, and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Her work has been presented internationally at festivals, conferences, and workshops including IRCAM’s ManiFeste, the LA Philharmonic’s National Composers Intensive, Iceland Airwaves, MIT-Grafenegg Forum, the Venice Biennale and many others. Dr. Tallon’s research interests include algorithmic bias, artificial intelligence, voice technology, and digital humanities. She holds B.S. degrees in Biological Engineering and Music from MIT, an M.F.A in Composition and Music Theory from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UC San Diego. Her primary composition teachers include Peter Child, David Rakowski, and Lei Liang, and she studied computer music with Tom Erbe and Miller Puckette. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of AI and the Arts at the University of Florida. 

BROAD BAND (world premiere)

"Written for the renowned Boston-based Lorelei Ensemble, ‘broad band’ will be a 40’ work for treble voices and live electronics that will focus on structural biases in technological mediations of the human voice and how those interventions have influenced our understanding of identity, agency, privilege, and authority, both individually and as a society. Everything from the circuitry in microphones to modern compression algorithms has been optimized for lower voices, and the gendered and racialized invective surrounding those with historically underrepresented voices has changed very little since the dawn of the broadcast era. Much has been published about technological bias in most aspects of everyday life, and many artists have used their platforms to create works that question and contextualize these interventions. However, few scholars have published about the ways in which these biases are present in various modes of voice technology and how they have shaped the cultural landscape. Even fewer composers have written music that directly addresses biases in voice technology, and surprisingly, it is a subject that composers have yet to focus on in many voice-focused genres (ironically, perhaps most of all, in pieces involving voice and live electronics). The text for ‘broad band’ will be constructed from patents, interviews, found sounds, and artificial intelligence, demonstrating the ways in which path dependencies established a century ago are still impacting the technological tools that mediate the ways in which we move through the world. Ultimately, ‘broad band’ will entreat listeners to examine their own biases, and inspire advocacy for voices that are silenced by structural inequity, both technologically and societally." 

PAMELA Z, COMPOSER

Pamela Z is a composer/ performer and media artist working primarily with voice, live electronics, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live looping, she processes her voice to create complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Julia Bullock with SF Symphony, and the LA Philharmonic New Music Group. Her interdisciplinary performances have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can (NY), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Dak’Art (Sénégal) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal). She’s a recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MIT McDermott Award, United States Artists, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder. www.pamelaz.com

[NEW WORK] (world premiere)

This new work will explore the concept of “wildness” through the myriad possibilities of wild sounds that can be made with the voice, ranging from the non-verbal placeholder noises that punctuate human speech to a barrage of very non-human sounds that mimic or call to mind animal voices and sounds made by real or imagined beasts of “the wild”. It will also examine the meaning of the word “wild” in all its many senses ranging from untamed or unrestrained to violent or insane to enthusiastic or extreme. 

Using a signature approach of my compositional practice, I will incorporate speech fragments – taken from interviews with the artists of Lorelei and others, who I will question about their thoughts on what it means to be wild, as well as field recordings of non-human sounds. The language and sounds that emerge from the interviews and recordings will be sculpted into a fixed media part, and will also generate pitched and rhythmic motifs that will be woven into the vocal score.

KATHERINE BALCH, COMPOSER

Called “spellbinding” (Seen and Heard International) with “glow and poise and electric tension” (The Daily Telegraph), the music of composer Katherine Balch captures the magic of everyday sounds, inviting audiences into a sonic world characterized by imagination, discovery, and textural lyricism. Inspired by the intimacy of quotidian objects, found sounds, and natural processes, she has been described as “some kind of musical Thomas Edison – you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas” (San Francisco Chronicle). Katherine’s work has been commissioned and performed by leading ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, l’Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the symphony orchestras of Dallas, Minnesota, Oregon, Albany, Indianapolis, and Tokyo. She has been featured on IRCAM’s ManiFeste, Fontainebleau Music Festival, and Festival MANCA in France, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK, Suntory Summer Arts and Takefu Music Festival in Japan, and the Aspen, Norfolk, Santa Fe, and Tanglewood music festivals in the United States. Her work has been presented in major global venues including Carnegie Hall, Disney Hall, and Tokyo’s Suntory Hall.

Winner of the 2020-2021 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Katherine was nominated by violinist Hilary Hahn for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2020 Career Advancement Award. She has also been honored by ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chamber Music America, the Barlow Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the International Society of Contemporary Music, the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and Wigmore Hall. Her music is published exclusively worldwide by Schott Music. Katherine documents her lived experiences on the page, with each composition serving as a diary of what has captivated her curiosity. When not making or listening to music, she can be found hiking, cooking, or hanging out with her feline sidekick, Zarathustra and her husband, fellow composer Ted Moore.

SONGS AND INTERLUDES (2024)

“In her essay A room of one’s own, Virgina Woolf considers the circumstances under which a woman’s capacity to self-express have been historically suppressed. I am attracted to this essay for a lot of reasons, but mainly for its elegance of language and storytelling. She somehow makes a no-nonsense, straightforward argument burst with poetry and attention to detail. Commissioned by Lorelei and Manchester Collective to write a piece in response to, or to exist beside, Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, I set about reflecting on Woolf’s words, filtering them out bit by bit until distilled collection of textual building blocks emerged, resulting in a page with only a word or two visible on each page. It bears a resemblance in my mind to the black triptychs that hang in Rothko’s Chapel — mostly monochromatic, with textural ripples. I’d like to think that there is an essence of the meaning of Woolf’s words contained in my filtering process, but now there is space for music to breathe between and give new life to the words.