MOMIX

Dancers drop screen in Momix
Friday, May 18, 2007

Photo courtesy of maj.org.

By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

The shadow acrobatics of the performance group Pilobolus at this year's Oscars had a lot of viewers scratching their heads. Where did these people come from, and what were they doing at the Oscars?

This Tuesday, the screen will come down when Pilobolus co-founder Moses Pendleton brings his offshoot group, Momix, to the Joyce Theater in Manhattan. The show, a retrospective, takes excerpts from major Momix pieces of the past 26 years -- but takes away the trademark screen to reveal the dancers.

"It's Momix unplugged," said Pendleton.

Unveiling the actual performers -- and by doing so, taking away some of the magic -- was a difficult decision for Pendleton. "David Copperfield, for example, doesn't show you how he does his tricks," he said.

Image courtesy cod.edu.

Not seeing the wildly contorted human bodies behind the fantastic silhouettes also takes away from the performance. Momix, and Pilobolus before it, imitates shapes and forms that are beyond the normal confines of a human body by borrowing techniques from dance and gymnastics -- and inventing a few on the way.

In one evening-length show that will be excerpted for the Joyce, "Lunar Sea," dancers combine their bodies into two giant spiders and stage a leviathan battle, ending with the triumphant arachnid devouring the offspring of its enemy. "It's one of the most difficult pieces we do," Pendleton said.

But viewers have complained that it looked too easy.

"The illusion was so strong they didn't think it was live, they thought it was a video game," he explained. For the Joyce show, Pendleton will be using black light on the spider battle but removing the screen.

Image courtesy of voiceofdance.com.

It's only the latest evolution in a free-spirited performance group that has been evolving since its inception.

Part of that process is the creation of a unique vocabulary of movement that evades definition. Often compared to Cirque du Soleil, Momix and Pilobolus have also been claimed by the dance community. But as Pendleton points out, Pilobolus was originally dubbed "Energy Circus" at its founding, a "cirque" before "soleil," and none of the members of that original performance group had training in dance.

"We had these potential lawyers, doctors and businessmen, and no one wanted to go into business," said Pendleton of his Pilobolus co-founders, all students at Dartmouth at the time. "They wanted to go into the woods and play drums."

In 1971, two months after Pendleton took his first dance class to speed his recovery from an athletic injury, the group launched a work titled "Pilobolus." The process, from the beginning, was to "make a connection to the plant and the animal and the mineral -- things other than the human -- and mentally [create] form from nature, then [train] your body to fill out that choreographic vision," Pendleton explained.

Courtesy of Titiwam on Photobucket.

The group realized what it had created after opening a show for Frank Zappa at Smith College.

"[Zappa] wanted us to go on tour with him, and we told him we had math tests, but the seed was planted," Pendleton said. "He encouraged us. ... If we hadn't had that encouragement, we would've gone back to school."

After all, who can go to veterinary school when Frank Zappa has called your work the "theater of the very far out"?

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com

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