Moses Pendleton of MOMIX is more than a choreographer and artistic director.
He’s a movement magician. He’s an illusionist who integrates theatrical tricks, such as lighting, projections, music, multiple dance styles and wildly inventive costuming with the purest theater technique — that of the human body.
He creates sculptures with his dancers that evoke emotion and touch sense memories and break artistic boundaries in multimedia productions such as “Botanica,” a breathtakingly beautiful fantasia on a Victorian botanical garden.
Pendleton will be in Boise as MOMIX makes its Idaho debut with “Botanica” at the Morrison Center on Jan. 13, with Eagle’s Tsara Bequette in the cast. (You can read about her in Scene on Jan. 13.) Pendleton has a long-standing friendship with the center’s executive director James Patrick, who handled many of MOMIX’s premieres when he led the Warner Theatre in Torrington, Conn.
Pendleton calls himself a populist, a grass-roots showman who simply wants to make you smile. He first got a taste of that growing up on a Vermont dairy farm and showing the family’s cows at the local county fair. But he’s more than that. He is an original American mover.
While earning a degree in English literature at Dartmouth College, he studied dance and became one of the founding members of Pilobolus Dance Theater in 1971. In the 1970s, the company pushed the limits of the human body to create a new type of movement theater that turns dance athleticism into an art medium that continues to dazzle the mind.
Ten years later, Pendleton co-founded MOMIX and added a huge dose of theatrical magic to the mix to achieve large scale illusions and shows that amaze. Today, there are 40 dancers that make up the three companies that tour internationally.
The name “MOMIX” comes from a veal calf supplement and to Pendleton represents a concoction of ideas and creativity. The company is all about the mix between imagery and physicality, he says, between nature and art. That brings us to “Botanica,” a work that grew out of the natural world that exists around Pendleton’s home in Connecticut.
Pendleton keeps a strong connection to his farm-boy roots. But instead of a dairy farm, he lives in a rambling Victorian house and grows sunflowers.
An avid and talented photographer, he captured images of his flowers, insects and birds. He used them as the initial inspiration for “Botanica.” Some of those became projections in the show.
“This show reflects my interest in the world as a sunflower grower and someone who really does find my sense and soul in the soil,” Pendleton says. “I spend an inordinate amount of time — more than most directors of dance companies — in the woods. That’s where I get my inspiration, from sunlight and water and the natural world. Then, as an artist, I obviously need to translate it in a collaborative way into a dance/theater form, and it becomes ‘Botanica.’ It can’t be just watching tulips grow for a few months on stage, although I’d love to do that sometime.”
Q: So, what is “Botanica”?
A: It’s all about the magic in the garden, my friend. It’s a MOMIX romp through the four seasons. It begins in the dead of winter with night crawlers twirling underneath the soil to prepare it for the birth of plants. Then it jumps to spring and summer night frenzies with centaurs, flowers and other creatures.
We took a lot of liberties with the months, but it has that feeling of going in a cyclical way all the way back to winter. Then hopefully there are several interesting items and the logic of surprise as there should be in a garden. It’s a mix of reality and fantasy.
Q: Is there a story?
A: It doesn’t really tell a story, but hopefully it’s evocative and stimulates the imagination and people go away with a little less gravity in their step and start ordering their tulip bulbs with great success.
But it does give you a sense of life and art, which are the same things.
I’m in the business of art and entertainment, and that’s how it should be funded, like a business, the same as education and health and welfare. Art is the business of our living, the business of keeping us moving in an upward direction as a culture.
I think life is good business. You know we’re having an energy crisis. It’s a personal energy crisis. Through the arts and culture you can start to feel the energy of life again. It will inspire you to get your job done.
Q: How did you get from those initial ideas and images to movement?
A: Once you get the picture, then you see if it can move through time and space and become a dance. I think of MOMIX as in the position of a painter or sculptor. We start with the visual image, then fill it out with props and costumes and the dancers, who really play the roles of things that are not human: rocks, trees, flowers.
So during the process, there needs to be some directorial — and “actorial” — attention to what it takes to make these non-human entities believable human activities on stage. That’s the requirement. These roles are very physical and difficult to do; then you have to make the audience have a sense of something more. That’s the beauty of the show. It makes contact with worlds beyond human, which perhaps says something deeper about our humanity, or about what it should be.
Q: How do you fuse the elements of reality and fantasy?
A: I’ll give you an example. There’s a beautiful piece in “Botanica” done with just multiple layers of petticoats that are orange to make them look like puffballs or marigolds. It’s an ingenious costume because we can move the puffball from the top of the head all the way down.
You’re listening to sort of Indian-sacred tabla and seeing something like a samba, just for a moment before it disappears. As it moves along the body, it changes into a tutu and all the way to become a marigold carpet that just skitters off in a sort of imitation of hornets.
That kind of metamorphoses is very true to the garden, very true to marigolds and hopefully that’s part of the sense of it.
Q: You talk about “the mix” a lot. What is your philosophy of the mix?
A: In the philosophy of the mix, you cross over from fine arts to dance, from installations to scientific discoveries. And it leads to and influences everything because it offers a collision between our technology and the natural world.
Maybe it leads to a new kind of theater. Technology brings us new ways of how we see light and how we receive sound. That will influence what goes on stage, if there will even be a stage in 100 years. Maybe there will be screens in the forest someday?
Dana Oland: 377-6442
