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DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Hanging with Bandaloop as They Dance On The Platform at Kendall Square
By Christine Jowers/Follow @cmmjowers on Instagram
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Published on November 7, 2026
Bandaloop, Photo:Michelle Parkos/ mparkoscreative
Activating the Newest Center for Arts and Culture in The Boston Area
Bandaloops Free Performances at The Platform are scheduled for November 7th at 12:30 and 3:00 p.m
It’s the first day of Bandaloop’s rehearsal for their grand opening performances at The Platform, 585 Kendall Square, and Thomas Cavanagh, the executive director of this breathtaking California-based company known for dancing on the sides of skyscrapers, historical monuments, cliffs, and mountains, is already pitching a return gig.
He is inspired. While Bandaloop’s artists are set to scale the massive building, floating and twirling in duets and sextets at heights of around 300 feet, Cavanagh feels there's still more the group can do to vertically partner with this unique structure.
What about gliding down the back of the Takeda Theater’s rear wall as it opens out onto Cambridge, revealing dancers poised mid-air to a surprised audience inside? What could happen if the company brought in their projection artists, lighting designers, and puppeteers? So many possibilities.
While “new” architecture often translates to austere glass and rigid lines, the Platform’s exterior surface, designed to ripple like a stage curtain, is covered with curved tiles in undulating hues of orange and blue. The edifice seems organic; it almost breathes. No wonder Bandaloop feels beckoned to create new work here. Melecio Estrella, the company's artistic director, calls it “one of the most beautiful buildings” to work with.
And The Platform’s interior is as inviting and alive as its exterior. Connie Chin, executive director, and Maure Aronson, founder of Global Arts Live, point out that the cultural part of this hybrid endeavor (the building is home to both Global Arts Live and Takeda Pharmaceuticals) was developed explicitly to welcome the community.
Cozy seating, thoughtfully organized in a plant-filled lobby, encourages audiences to hang out or wander in before and beyond performances. Color choices of refreshing green and blue, and gentle curves everywhere, from the grand entrance staircase to the seating arrangements in both the cabaret and the state-of-the-art Takeda Theater, promote interaction. The experience reminds everyone, especially six years after an isolating global pandemic, that art, people, technology, and creativity aren’t meant to be siloed off from each other.
Inside the theaters and rehearsal studio, which can serve as an informal performance space, world-class dancers and musicians, both homegrown and from around the globe, will perform, conduct residencies, be produced, and self-produce (affordably because every technical element they could possibly need is in-house). Most exciting for Boston-area artists, 25 nights of free production will be available for local companies, with an application process to be announced by the beginning of the new year.
Outside The Platform, the construction workers across the street look up; in fact, everyone outside 585 cranes their necks toward the sky. Six dancers, harnessed and hanging from thick black wires, rappel down the building’s lowest tier (which is pretty high up). They hover, waiting for Estrella's notes. He is patient and caring with the dancers as they get accustomed to the facade. Somebody notices a jiggly tile. They stop to avoid it. Safety is key. In the 35 years the company has existed, there’s never been a major accident or mishap.
“It is scary,” says Estrella, who started as a dancer with the company in 2002, but has now shifted to directing, a new passion. “None of us would do this if we weren't so diligent, so fiercely protective of our safety. We know our gear so well, and we know our own bodies so well, that fear is met with a lot of skill, knowledge, and trust in each other and our team. And we only move at the speed of trust. Our rigging team and technical team take any question from us. Any dancer can call a stop on a show. No one’s rushed. [Because of this] the dance can come to the forefront of our minds. Fear is still there, but it's just not controlling us.”
Bandaloop’s artists are not, as I presumed, professional rock climbers, but dancers who started working the way most do, in a studio on a horizontal floor. Many of the artists come from Joe Goode’s Performance Art Group out of California. Many have contact improv backgrounds and are, in Estrella’s words, “nature freaks.” Dancing vertically simply extends their curiosity for flight and freedom. Estrella and Cavanagh refer to the Bandaloop experience as “vertical joy,” or they talk about the “magic tension” between the dancers, their gear, and one another. It’s a lot like flying contact improv. Soaring above us, they seem ethereal acrobats, living versions of Paul Simon’s lyrics: “angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity.”
FLOCK, the work being performed at, or rather on, The Platform, created by Estrella and Damara Vita Ganley, the company’s associate artistic director, is not about angels, though. Instead, the dance combines ideas of bird migration with immigrants' journeys to new lands. Estrella and Ganley, whose mothers migrated to the US from the Philippines and Chile, respectively, feel the work hits them personally. “We were working with ornithologists, says Estrella, “when we learned about the phenomenon of interspecies flocking, that not always one flock, but many, travel together. To think about birds and invoke birds in this art form felt like a no-brainer. Like, oh yeah, we are the flock.”
Soon he and Ganley realized their choreography revolved around questions about bodies traveling together in intense, sometimes political landscapes—how they move, listen, and take care of one another on the journey. As they worked, Estrella recalls wanting to address the experience of a child migrating. "How do we take care of our migrating children? Also,[how do we capture] the wonder and the awe, the necessary imagination that children use to contextualize the big life changes that are happening to them?”
The music in the piece, composed by artists Ben Juodvalkis and Destani Wolf, also relates to migration. “Destani has this beautiful ranchera voice, with mariachi roots, and she's written these gorgeous songs about the journey, taking it, and being on our way.”
Among Estrella’s favorite places to travel and dance are seaside cliffs, “feeling that the ocean is right there dancing with us, just that kind of expanse is awe-inspiring. Then you get those expanses in the high mountains. I’m so blessed that in my career I’ve danced in the Guanajuato Mountains of Mexico, the Colorado Rockies, the California Sierras, the Italian Dolomites, the Indian Himalaya, and mountain ranges in China. Creating dance in those open, expansive places where there aren't a lot of humans is like nothing else. Just being exposed to the elements, you’re falling in love with nature over and over again.”
How does the experience of the natural world compare to partnering with urban buildings?
“When you're on a rock, on granite, looking down below, it's very abstract, like being in a dream world,” says Estrella, “Being in an urban setting is a little more severe when you have cars and streets, and the hard concrete below, and the glass of the building [to contend with]. It can be anxiety-provoking. But this building is incredible. From the rooftop, you can see the Charles River and, across the river, Boston. That’s one of the secret, not so secret, perks of our job. Being on rooftops and having a bird's-eye view of a city's landscape. It's pretty incredible what we're able to see because we're up so high, above it all. And the feeling of this is peace for me.”
