Prickly Situations. - Review - dance review

Dance Magazine, May, 2001 by Gus Jr Solomons

MOMIX THE JOYCE THEATER NEW YORK, NEW YORK JANUARY 30-FEBRUARY 18, 2001

MOMIX, Moses Pendleton's offshoot from the Pilobolus company (which he co-founded), rang in 2001 with three weeks worth of unique surrealistic imagery. A sort of space-age Alwin Nikolais, Pendleton has the knack for turning props, including his dancers' bodies, into visual puns, setting them to exotic music, and staging them with uncanny theatrical panache.

His new creation, Opus Cactus, is a series of twenty-one short sections inspired by the Arizona desert. Like all his works, it was made in collaboration with ten members of the fourteen-dancer company and, in this case, Ballet Arizona. Some sections are hokey, like the phosphorescent tumbleweeds in "Desert Storm" that flit around, then form a big snowman-like creature. Some are jokey, like the short snippet "Menitations" where four men in headstands, with just their upended faces lit, lip-sync the Eastern-sounding music.

But mostly it's remarkably inventive, and physically and visually spectacular. "Mountain Walk South East West," for example, has three men in industrial-strength kneepads and boots leaping across the space, then reproducing the leaping action on their knees before they gather for some amazing hinging down onto, and up from, the floor.

"Ostrich of the Imagination" harks back to Pendleton's Pilobolus days, with women clamping their legs around their arching male partners, looking like gawky birds. "Tracking the Earth" has everyone lying on little wheeled dollies, whizzing back and forth or spinning like tops. The final part, "First Contact," has three women in harnesses that allow them to run in reduced-gravity slow motion, as if on the moon.

Pendleton, the master puppeteer himself, manipulates a huge bird puppet designed and constructed by Michael Curry that hovers over the scene. The magical lighting, which heightens the illusions, was created by Pendleton and Joshua Starbuck.

Unfortunately, individual dancers aren't listed in the various sections, except for Brian Sanders, some of whose solos are performed as part of the piece. In his "Sonoran: But Not Asleep" he reclines in a hammock strong up with bungee cords, with predictably unpredictable results; and in "Dream Catcher" he and another man counterbalance each other's weight on a sculptural space frame that rolls and rocks.

The other hardy dancers who bring Pendleton's visions so vividly to life are Cynthia Quinn, Brian Simerson, Craig Berman, Suzanne Lampi, Joshua Cohen, Kori Darling, Michael Holdsworth, Pi Keohavong, Nicole Loizides, and Kara Oculato.