The Diana Wortham Theatre at Pack Place presents the unique and imaginative award-winning modern dance company Pilobolus at 8 p.m. February 24-25. A decidedly unusual dance company now in its 39th year of evolution, Pilobolus is highly acclaimed for its startling mix of humor and invention.

Using everything from athletic acrobatics to puppetry and shadow imagery, Pilobolus creates a metamorphosis on stage between physicality and illusion: “Bodies become imagery, and one image merges into another, organically, poetically, inexplicably!” (The New York Times)

Begun in 1971 in a Dartmouth College dance class, this outsider dance company quickly became renowned throughout the world for its imaginative and athletic exploration of creative collaboration: a unique weight-sharing approach to partnering that gave the young company a non-traditional but powerful new set of skills with which to make dances. Nearly 40 years later, Pilobolus has evolved into a self-sufficient organization, its members choreographing, dancing, managing, and publicizing their own programs.

For its February 24-25 performances, Pilobolus presents five works: Lanterna Magica, a new, full-company work celebrating the natural world, mythology, and the supernatural; Pseudopodia, a tumbling solo work set to an all-percussion score; Darkness and Light, which joins the imagination of a puppeteer with shadow imagery; Symbiosis, a male-female duet tracing the birth of a relationship between two creatures sinuously and sensuously intertwined; and Megawatt, a full-throttle, full-company piece blending startling energy with an ironic take on the excess and high-voltage state of the world we live in.

Pilobolus has received a number of prestigious honors, including the Berlin Critic’s Prize, the Brandeis Award, the New England Theatre Conference Prize, and a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in cultural programming. In June 2000 Pilobolus received the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for lifetime achievement in choreography and in 2004 the company was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes. In 2007 Pilobolus was featured on the live telecast of the 79th Academy Awards ceremony.

World renowned Pilobolus brings its highly unusual and imaginative dance to Asheville. Diana Wortham Theatre at Pack Place. 8:00pm, February 24-25, 2009.