Momix, mo' people, & sunflowers - Momix Director Moses Pendleton's sunflower ballet - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1997 by Paul Ben-Itzak

WASHINGTON, Connecticut--You'd think that with his company's biggest New York City engagement ever coming up this month, Momix director Moses Pendleton would be thinking about how he's going to fill 21,000 seats at City Center for the October 28-November 2 season. Instead, reached in late summer at the farm where he lives and rehearses his troupe, Pendleton wants to talk sunflowers. Lots of them. The several thousand, in fourteen varieties, which he raises. The time David Parsons donned a sunflower mask, coated himself in mud, and stood in one of the patches all day until the mud dried. The sunflower banquet Pendleton would soon have when the flowers were in full bloom (their height can reach fifteen feet). The photographs he takes every morning charting the progress of the plants. The bluebirds that descend in the fall and turn the flowers into just so much breakfast food.

"Right now I'm working on this sunflower ballet," says Pendleton. "I want to see if I can't get costumes made and sets designed, so there is some reason to all this mad sunflower growing. I hope to make this a piece--some kind of archaeo-astrological contact must be made between the sunflower garden and what's above it." As Pendleton talks, sitting on the porch of the barn where Momix rehearses, it's easy to believe he is creating the idea for the dance at that moment, verbally improvising a concept the way some choreographers improvise movement. "Maybe it's something like Spalding Gray," he posits, referring to the mono-loquist. "It might start out as this visual monologue about a man in his field going nuts and all these things start to happen in his sunflower garden. I might even be in it."

Later, Pendleton will go inside the team and "play with" (Momix's nomenclature for "rehearse") his dancers and, perhaps with the aid d him and video, create a work part dance, part theater, part photography, part illusion--which will likely be seen at City Center.

If this is usual for Pendleton, whets different this year is that more New Yorkers will have a chance to see the magic. While the company has had no problem filling venues that seat 4,000 outside of the United States, here it usually plays smaller houses--in New York, its home is often the 472-seat Joyce Theater. The move to the 2,684 seat CRy Center, says Pendleton, is a way to "try to a broader mix of an audience for Momix. [There are] millions of people in New York that have never heard of Momix."

Those who come to Momix's City Center shows will probably see, in addition to the sunflower ballet, a new dance involving a Sputnik-like object that the dancers had just begun to play with in late summer, and a mixed program including last years hit Doing Time, in which two dancers in prison stripes cavort in, around, above, and between bunk beds and each others limbs.

As for Pendleton, he is spending his time on more than sunflowers. An Italian film crew was set to storm his farm in September to make the film version of the 1991 Passion, starring Natalia Estrada, whom Pendleton describes as "the next Sophia Loren." Another crew was planning a film about the making of the movie. "I'm growing a prison of sunflowers where Natalia will have to come in almost like a Wilhelm Reichian box."