Momix at Annenberg Center

Move over, Shrek

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

That amorphous 13-member dance troupe Momix can do everything from de-evolve to fleshy amoeba one or execute finely appointed bare-footed fouettes if they have to. It‘s all part of the fairground expressionism of its artistic director, Moses Pendleton. His company closed out the Dance Celebration season with its rowdy 25th anniversary 13-piece sampler, “The Best of Momix.” And really it was emblematic of a terrifically diverse 06-07 series assembled by Dance celebration artistic director Randy Swartz, who continues to cultivate relationships with vanguard modern troupes from around the world.

Pendleton, a Pilobolus founder, is a movement auteur who derives inspiration from every area of dance as well as from nature, sports, meditation, inner and outer galactic worlds and the theatrically bizarre. He not only dazzles with tricks; he also makes phantasmagoric theatrics of skiing, baseball and gymnastics, for instance, as sleights of dance, even if his works are often slight on dance itself.

No wonder that parents take their kids to experience Momix. At a Saturday matinee I was seated next to a young lady celebrating her seventh birthday with the troupe (she was going to see Shrek 3) later that same night). By the look of delight on her face, I suspect that Shrek had nothing on Momix.

Hydraulic puppetry and goofy bipeds

Discman is the 25-foot high day-glo hip-hop terrestrial that kicked off the program. Hydraulic puppetry was no less dazzling in ways the creature danced. Another goofy biped was choreographer Brian Sanders’s eight-foot stage monster, “The Last Vaudevillian,” who biliously flips and flounces to the delight of kids in the audience and the horror of the elderly, who may recognize some of these moves all too well.

Pole has three ceremonial warriors aligning their poles as demonstrations of grace, balance and skill, framing capoeira torso curves and balletic judo kicks. The three gracefully swirl and vault around their poles. Pendleton just lets the beauty of the body moving in the air unspool like a primal dream.

The Wind Up had Cynthia Quinn (choreographing with Pendleton) spinning into mach speed with her silver orb. Not to be outdone, Yasmine Lee took a double size silver hoop to a new dimension of the rhythmic hula in Orbit. Millennium Skiva had Lee and Steven Marshall in fetish mercury suits and on skis, showing off the gnarly crouches and knurly vaults of extreme sports.

Menacing spiders

Later (and not so riveting) were the scary nail spiders of Arachnophobia, menacing each other. The show’s ending shadow dance, E.C., had kids laughing at animated silhouettes. It’s an optical marvel, but it runs on too long.

Two works that Pendleton can consider trimming but are nonetheless stunning are the tantric imagery in Sputnik, scored to Dead Can Dance. A woman in a lotus position sits in a brass basin, and six dancers attach poles, making the basin spin as they swing in and out of its vortex, again hypnotizing with the simple effect of swinging bodies. A curved jungle gym is Pendleton’s Dreamcatcher, catching Danielle Arico and Marshall in pendulous counter-balances and skyward trajectories.

Tuu, a gorgeous contortionists’ duet, begins with Sara Kappraff clamped on Timothy Melady’s back, and the duo starts opening their limbs like time-lapse blooms. They cleave and morph into one riveting bodyscapes after another. Within that, their transitional adagio work and technical clarity achieves the highest level.

The dancers let the pyrotechnic moves rip during their curtain calls. These suggest that Pendleton may yet take them into unrecognizable movement terrain. But they can only get there by being accomplished dancers.