Stilts and body paint are just a few of the innovations The Carpetbag Brigade brings to Rhode Island College on Wednesday for a show exploring human evolution.

Edica Pacha

If you missed The Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater Company when it played WaterFire a couple of years ago, you can catch the California-based troupe when it comes to Rhode Island College Wednesday night. Six actors covered with white body paint will perform a piece about human evolution — on stilts.

The unusual theater company, begun in Arizona and now based in an Oakland, Calif., loft, has been around for a decade, and it draws on Japanese dance, Mexican influences and circus routines to produce its own brand of physical theater. It is known for both indoor and outdoor performances.

“We work with a poetic landscape that evokes images and stories that are not told in a linear fashion,” said co-director Kristen Greco, explaining what is meant by physical theater.

“Regular theater might be more of an a-b-c-d type of story, but we work with a more poetic framework presenting lots of images, so the audience can interpret its own story.”

The group is touring a piece called The Vanishing Point, which deals with “evolution and change,” said Greco, who grew up in Cranston.

“It’s about how the human body holds stories through time, how we hold the history of evolution in us, how we have extra ribs, wisdom teeth we don’t use and a tail that is disappearing from our bony structure. It looks at how we hold time in our bodies.”

The show, which uses original music and exotic animal costumes, also touches on the issue of extinction and the “ratio between the number of humans on the planet to the number of animals.”

The central figure in the show is a creature that evolves more rapidly than the rest of the cast.

All this is performed on stilts that are about 2 or 3 feet high. Greco said the company uses a form of modern dance that has been transposed to stilts. The dancers execute lifts, falls and partnering.

“It’s acrobatic stilt work,” she said, “highly athletic and highly physical.”

Greco, who also works as a massage therapist and Pilates instructor, joined Carpetbag Brigade in 2000 right out of the University of Colorado, where she majored in visual and performance art. Four years later, she started directing shows. At this point she alternates between directing, choreographing and performing, which she will do when the group comes to RIC Wednesday.

The company was founded by Jay Ruby, who studied physical theater in Denmark and Germany.

Greco, 31, said she got interested in stilt work two years out of college when she attended an aerial dance festival taught by an Australian named David Clarkson.

“It sounded utterly fascinating,” she said.

Clarkson taught the group the basics of working with lifts and the like and Carpetbag developed its own style of dance, which in part, draws on a form of Japanese dance called Butoh. Butoh, which can be grotesque, tends to “encourage the less tame parts of the self to emerge,” said Greco. “It works with the more wild and unpredictable parts of the psyche and body.”

The Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater Company performs Wednesday night at Rhode Island College’s Roberts Auditorium in Providence. Tickets are $35 with discounts for seniors, RIC students, faculty staff and alumni and children. Call (401) 456-8144 or log onto www.ric.edu/pfa.

cgray@projo.com