Urban Scuba is a new acrobatic-aerial-dance-theater spectacle from choreographer/director, Brian Sanders. Initially devised and performed in 2009 to sold out audiences at the experimental Fringe Festival in Philadelphia, PA, the work was originally set in an abandoned underground swimming pool. With the audience seated in the pool’s shallow end, performers splashed, dove, and swung above and into the pool’s deep end.

Urban Scuba allows us to take a deep dive into the layers of civilization and our own personal and collective cultural evolutions, finding beauty and new perspective in the discarded and unwanted remnants of ourselves. Stunning imagery of cityscapes, subterranean caverns, shimmering aquatic depths, and even the celestial heavens unfold before us. Themes of technology, locomotion, our obsession with plastic, and a splash of quirky nostalgia are supported by Urban Scuba's creative original music score with a grungy electro-rock feel. The multi-year process of bringing Urban Scuba back and bigger than ever expands and reimagines much of Sanders’ most beloved work over the last thirty years. Pulling from various physical practices, performers take their bodies to new heights, often literally, in unexpected and gravity-defying feats. For Sanders, a MOMIX alum, these corporeal experiments and collaborations serve as the medium through which to access what can be discovered within ourselves. With its highly imaginative and provocative point of view, Urban Scuba is accessible to people from across diverse communities, genres, and audiences who can, together, share in an experience of seeing the world in a new, wondrous way, expanding what dance and theater can be, do, and feel like.

Urban Scuba follows the story of two scavengers, residents of a futuristic city who come across a dark, cavernous abyss. Is the dangerous descent worth the risk? What unexpected discoveries lay deep below the surface? Their curiosity outweighs the danger, and we follow their “urban scuba” expedition through cleverly projected super-titles blended into the set. Complete with an actual dumpster dive, innovative and recycled sculptural apparatuses are hauled up, allowing performers to swing, spin, glide, and partner one another in daring feats of physics. Seeming to defy gravity in their innovative aerial partnering and often displaying awe-inspiring beauty and trust, they wend their way down through the layers of our past and the leftovers of ourselves.