The 'Vertical Choreographer' Who Helped Redwood Soar on Broadway

A couple of years ago, in downtown Oakland, locals going about their daily business might have glanced skywards to see a troupe of dancers, suspended high above the pavement, moving fluidly across the side of a building. Over the years, the sight has become almost routine in the area. “We’re kind of a normal thing in Oakland,” Melecio Estrella said recently, during a conversation at the Mermaid Oyster Bar in New York’s Theater District. “People who work downtown and see us dancing on their lunch break are like, ‘Oh, there they are again.’ We’re the artistic cousins of window-washers.”

The one unusual thing about this day was that among the gravity-defying dancers was Broadway superstar Idina Menzel.

“Nobody knew it was her,” Estrella recalled. “We kept it quiet.”

Estrella is the artistic director of Bandaloop, a company specializing in what it calls vertical choreography—a site-specific, airborne form of contemporary dance. Using regular climbing equipment, Bandaloop’s dancers turn vertical surfaces, in architecture and in nature, into their dance floor, creating a mesmerizing and vertiginous fusion of dance and abseiling that, at its best, resembles ballet in zero gravity.

Over the past three decades, the company has performed in more than 40 countries at 350 sites, from skyscrapers and bridges to cliffs and billboards—including a Times Square billboard in 2006.

Most recently, Estrella has brought the art form to Broadway. As vertical choreographer for the new musical Redwood, he has created movement for a story that, fittingly, reaches for the treetops. The show stars Menzel as Jesse, a grieving mother who finds solace in the towering redwoods. In a key moment in the show, she straps in and ascends—literally and metaphorically—to another life.

For Estrella, who grew up in Northern California and spent his childhood among the redwoods, the project feels deeply personal. One of the songs in Kate Diaz’s score, “Great Escape,” might as well be the Bandaloop anthem:

"Here I am, I’m up a mile high / But somehow I’m safer in the sky."

One of Estrella’s earliest tasks on the show was getting Menzel acclimatized to the altitude. “Idina was just so persistent in her learning,” he said. “What we do is quite vulnerable. We’re asking people to get on a rope that’s thinner than your finger, climb to over a hundred feet, and trust the equipment enough to dance. But Idina was really excited to learn this form of dancing.”

Estrella worked closely with Menzel and her co-stars, Michael Park and Khaila Wilcoxon—they play Finn, a scholar researching the forest’s ecosystem, and Becca, a tree scientist—first getting them comfortable with basic arborist climbing techniques. None of the actors, Estrella noted, had much experience with climbing, rappelling or abseiling. “There may have been some ziplining,” he said. But, he allowed, “being a powerful singer is a deeply physical practice, right? It’s a dance in itself—around breath, around the vocal apparatus.”

Alongside the show’s director Tina Landau, Estrella developed a movement language that uses tree climbing as a foundation, then gradually expands into something that's simultaneously more acrobatic and lyrical. In one sequence, Menzel and her co-stars gracefully glide, spin and somersault through the air, with a giant redwood (rendered in painted plaster by scenic designer Jason Ardizzone-West) as their dependable launchpad and dance partner.

There is a psychological element to getting safely up in the air. “This world is full of really difficult things right now—natural disasters, political crises,” Estrella said. “Attention isn’t always here. But in Bandaloop, our culture of safety is about bringing attention back—to the gear, to each other, to the dance, to the art at hand.”

According to Estrella, choreography and music were closely intertwined during the development process. “Kate was more than willing to shape the music around what the choreography could do. She built floating moments into the score, along with punctuations of staccato movement.” Projection designer Hana Kim also collaborated closely with the movement team. “We’d adjust elements in real time: 'I’ll change this here, you change that there.' ‘Can we have a moment where everything stops?’”

“It takes more patience and communication in this kind of process, where we’re constantly iterating, but it’s also more exciting.”

Bandaloop was founded in 1991 by Amelia Rudolph, a dancer-turned-climber who saw a natural connection between climbing and dance. Estrella stumbled upon the company in the early 2000s, seeing a tiny, low-resolution internet video of dancers leaping from a waterfall in Yosemite. “I didn’t know what it was,” he says. “This was before YouTube. I just thought, ‘What is this?’”

He auditioned without fully knowing what he was in for. At a callback, he and other hopefuls were brought to a climbing gym. As part of the audition, he was asked to stand sideways on a climbing rope—treating the wall as the floor—and improvise a “physical poem.”

For Estrella, the aerial awareness and 360-degree perspective came naturally. His preferred mode of dance was also well suited to the company. “It’s somatically based—meaning from a feeling state,” he said. “A lot of presentational styles of dance are about thrusting into space. But where I come from is more about listening—internal listening, external listening, listening to the world around and interacting with it to create dance from a sensitive place.”

Redwood touches on something that has always been at the heart of the Bandaloop mission: the healing power of nature.

“I’m always asking, ‘How can we learn from the wisdom of nature? How can we fall in love with it over and over again?’” As an artist, Estrella is driven by a belief in the need for art in a world that doesn’t always prioritize it. “Awe—everyday awe—is a necessary ingredient for a healthy life,” he says. “It’s why I do this work.”