Mirthful moves Mixing it up with Galumpha BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

They might as well have called themselves Heffalump, there are so many mix-’n’-match parts to Galumpha. The ensemble of three are dancers — since the founding duo won the Edinburgh Festival Critics’ Choice Award for choreography in 1996. They are also a comical acrobatic act, since many of their sight-gag routines wouldn’t be out of place under a big top.

Whoever they are, Galumpha will be rarin’ to entertain us on Monday, January 31 at 8 p.m. at the University of Rhode Island Fine Arts Center in Kingston. (Call 401 874-2787.)

Two of the dozen or so routines they will be performing set the end points of their spectrum. The one titled "Velcro" is the playful bit they did on The Late Show with David Letterman, in which white pom-poms and black headgear develop various attachments. Putting aside slapstick for technical and aesthetic finesse is "The Human Fly," in which the trio form shifting human sculptures that are quite graceful.

Galumpha was formed in 2002 by Andy Horowitz and Greg O’Brien, who had been performing together since their college days in the late 1980s. They recruited Marlon Torres, whose dance experience traced back to when he was a regular performer on a Saturday morning TV kids’ show in Venezuela.

Horowitz got his initial movement training studying martial arts in Taiwan, where he acted in kung fu movies. He has also performed as a stunt rider in a Wild West show. O’Brien received a BA in theater with a dance emphasis from Binghamton University in New York, where the two are artists-in-residence.

Greg O’Brien spoke from Binghamton, fresh from rehearsal.

Q: You’re dancers, you’re acrobats, you’re clowns — is it in that order, in your own mind?

A: I tend to think of myself personally — I’m not speaking for the other guys — primarily as a dancer. I’ve learned the acrobatics entirely through using my friends as human jungle gyms. So the acrobatics — I think that if I were to audition for Cirque du Soleil, they might recognize some weaknesses!

It always surprises me when someone looks at one of our dances and says, "Wow, that’s really hilarious!" Because I don’t think of it as funny, I think it as funny-strange not funny-ha-ha.

Q: Did you recruit Marlon Torres for the kind of dance you had in mind, or did he help you develop what you wanted Galumpha to be?

A: Much so the latter. Marlon brought with him some remarkable talents as a dancer. So one of the things that happened was that we’re — as we have always characterized ourselves — kind of fun, goofy pseudo-dancers who had some acrobatics training but who really sold their abilities as innovators rather than their technique. Marlon brought some solid dance technique back into the company. We began working much harder on our dancing. He really enhanced our acrobatics: it became cleaner, more refined.

Q: You have a personal favorite among your selections?

A: We do a piece to a Rachmaninoff prelude, which has really become one of my favorites in our program. Just the three bodies and a piece of black fabric, and there’s a pretty remarkable transformation that takes place over the course of the dance. It’s one of the additions that Marlon has brought to the company. It becomes a very character-driven piece towards the end — but when it starts off we almost look like a very traditional modern dance company.

Q: Is there a commonality to what you all find fascinating when you develop a new piece?

A: It’s in those moments when there is commonality that it’s like magic. Those are rare moments. We push through hundreds and thousands of moments where any one of us is excited but not all three of us are, and that keeps us going, that keeps us working on the project. And when all three of us find that we’re equally excited, then we know that we’ve hit on something special . . . We don’t need to choreograph it to death; we just simply need to let it exist. Those moments are rare, and I couldn’t possibly explain how we arrive at them.

As a collaborative artist, my job is not to get frustrated when my enthusiasm isn’t shared. And also to curb my pessimism when I don’t share someone else’s enthusiasm. It happened just the other day in rehearsal. I wanted to go somewhere with a particular sequence of acrobatics and lifts and human architecture that we were working on, and one of the other guys wanted to go somewhere else. And I realized that I was becoming the obstacle, because all I had to say was: "All right, we can try them both out."

Q: Having three of you, with one of you a tiebreaker, could be a disadvantage as well, if you reduce what you develop to what’s easily agreed to.

A: Well, you know how we work it out? The pieces that end up as the lowest common denominator, they get made and they get quickly discarded, because we all recognize that they’ve just been compromised too much. That isn’t to say that those don’t have merit — often we’ll take out what we all agree are the best moments or the best visuals or the best ideas from that piece and begin work anew. We’ve done that dozens of times.

One of the things that we’ve learned over the years is not to be afraid of failing. If we’re afraid of failing, then we’re never really going to be able to be innovative. So every once in a while, a piece gets overly compromised, and that’s OK.