URBAN SCUBA
In 2026, choreographer/director Brian Sanders brings a new URBAN SCUBA—a large-scale acrobatic-aerial-dance-theater spectacle where the typical rules of gravity and order don’t apply. To survive in the upside down world of URBAN SCUBA requires a new set of skills and tactics, an ingenious imagination and physical daring. URBAN SCUBA takes a deep dive into the layers of civilization and cultural evolutions, finding beauty and new perspectives in the discarded and unwanted remnants of human civilization. Repurposed technology, locomotion, our obsession with plastic, and a splash of joyful nostalgia are driven by the show's highly original pulsating electro-rock music score.
A culmination of choreographer–direcrtor Brian Sanders artistic journey, URBAN SCUBA weaves together elements of his most dynamic, artistic, and beautiful work into one explosive show. The work was initially devised and performed in 2009 to sold out audiences at the experimental Fringe Festival in Philadelphia, PA, and set in an abandoned underground swimming pool with the audience seated in the pool’s shallow end. With a reinvention beginning in 2023, the performers began exploring an entire world of pools, cages, flying bicycles, plastic patios, dumpsters, and more—bringing together the threads of Sanders body of work: the discovery of lost, discarded things, and their reinvention into new works of great beauty, promise, and freedom. The multi-year process of URBAN SCUBA’s expansion is driven by a reimagining of much of Sanders’ most beloved work over the last thirty years. URBAN SCUBA is accessible to a broad range of dance, theater, music, and circus audiences, as well as a show that appeals to all ages.
In an undisclosed city there’s a dark, cavernous abyss. What unexpected discoveries lay deep below the surface? Curiosity outweighs danger, and the intrepid inhabitants of this city take an “urban scuba” expedition through stunning cityscapes, subterranean caverns, shimmering aquatic depths, and the unfolding celestial heavens. Complete with an actual dumpster dive, ingeniously reconfigured sculptural apparatuses are hauled up, and the mad, gleeful performers swing, spin, glide, and partner one another in impossible feats of physics to create moving images of daring beauty. Seeming to defy gravity in their innovative aerial partnering and often displaying awe-inspiring beauty and trust, our performers wend their way down through the layers of our shared past and the leftovers of those who came before.
