How do you convince people that a new building on your college isn’t just for the students and faculty?

If you’re Colorado College officials and the new building is the Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center, you get their attention by having bodies seeming to fly and dance around it.

Founded in 1991, the California aerial dance company Project Bandaloop has performed around the world on skyscrapers, in streets, on billboards, in fjords and in canyons for audiences totaling nearly half a million people.

You can think of them as Cirque de Soleil freed from the tents and concert halls. Their only stage will be the bold curves and angles of the new building, which they will treat as their dance floor, thanks to a series of well- placed cables and trusses.

“A key theme in our work is trying to reframe how people perceive dance and movement by changing the rules of how we dance,” says Project Bandaloop’s artistic director Amelia Rudolph, who visited the building during its construction and helped the builders create rigging points that could be used by the dancers and other artists.

“By taking dance into the streets and placing it in front of many people who have seen very little or no dance before, we can introduce them to the art form in environments where they didn’t think they would ever see dance.”

The troupe is on a mission to make dance more mainstream. But it also wants to provide viewers with opportunities to have transformative aesthetic experiences.

“By taking the dance floor from a horizontal to the vertical plane, people’s perceptions of the interaction of body with gravity is changed,” says Rudolph.

“And through that reframing, if we’re lucky, people may experience a moment of disorientation – in a positive way – that causes them to reconsider other notions in their world that were set.”

Rudolph will give a free public lecture and slide show at 5:30 p.m. Monday in the Cornerstone Arts Center Film Screening Room.details PROJECT BANDALOOP PERFORMANCESWhen and where: 7 p.m. today on the front exterior of the Cornerstone Arts Center building, which faces Cascade Avenue. The second performance is at 9 p.m. Saturday, and will be held inside the building. The final performance is at 2 p.m. Sunday, outside the building at 825 N. Cascade Ave.Cost: Free

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