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When movement artist Rachael Lincoln first discovered the art of vertical dance in her 20s, she had just moved to San Francisco and was saying yes to every professional dance opportunity she could find. One day, she saw an audition notice for BANDALOOP, an Oakland-based company known for its breathtaking performances using harnesses and ropes, which allow artists to leap across vertical surfaces—like cliffs and sides of buildings—using the vertical plane as a stage.

With a background as a dancer and a springboard and platform diver, Lincoln already had a sense of her body moving through air. She was accepted into BANDALOOP and began a decades-long collaboration that has expanded her ideas about dance and the human body through a choreographic technique called Low Fly. Today, as an associate professor of dance at the UW, Lincoln brings this innovative method into her teaching.

Much of BANDALOOP’s work takes place in publicly accessible venues like bridges, the sides of tall buildings and the outdoors, though some performances take place in theaters that use the floor as the surface to fly above with the help of a rope. “Dancing isn’t publicly accessible to everyone, unless you purchase a ticket,” Lincoln says. But BANDALOOP might reach “someone who’s on their commute and may suddenly see people dancing on the side of a building. Though I love dance in a theater setting, it can be inaccessible to many people in many ways.”

Decades ago, Rachael Lincoln joined a dance group called BANDALOOP that uses climbing technology to bring dance to unusual spaces, like the sides of tall buildings.

In 2020, Roel Seeber, a BANDALOOP company member who had come to the UW as a graduate student, approached Lincoln about offering Low Fly classes. One of the dance department’s three dance studios had rigging points, which they had checked and certified for safety. Together, Seeber and Lincoln created a rationale and syllabus for the new course.

Five years later, the class continues to have a profound effect on dance students. “It places you in a position where you need to constantly adapt and make live-time decisions,” Lincoln says. “As dancers, we can over-emphasize control, but momentum and gravity are harder to wrangle than shape and line. Low Fly is a constant navigation of rarely consistent physical forces—it is impossible to master this form and not be a strong improvisor.”

Hannah Wiley, one of the founders of the UW dance program, says Low Fly should be a requirement for all dance majors because it expands a dance student’s expressive and creative range. The rope attachment allows them to experience “a different relationship to falling––or teetering on the edge of falling––that frees them to experiment with greater physical and emotional risk taking,” she says.

Lincoln will showcase Low Fly with long-time collaborator Leslie Seiters in an upcoming show at On the Boards. Featured as part of In Tandem: A Trio of Duets which exhibits three pairs of different performers, Lincoln and Seiters will perform a rope-and-harness duet inspired by BANDALOOP’s Amelia Rudoph that also draws from author Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital,” a novel following astronauts in a space station over 24 hours.

For Lincoln, watching film and reading fiction nurtures her choreographic sensibility. “I love words for their literal meaning and for the imaginative leaps they make possible,” Lincoln says. “They can propel you, sometimes instantly, into the absurd or the unknown. I love being transported by someone else’s imagination. I want to make dances that do that.”

“In Tandem: A Trio of Duets” takes place at On the Boards from December 18 to 20.