MOMIX is a dance company, though the word hardly encompasses what you see onstage. These are certainly dancers; strength, flexibility, and grace permeate every choreographed move. The creativity of visuals integrating projections, props, lights, and fanciful costuming, however, is unlike what one normally associates with the art form. The company additionally excels at an iconoclastic view of nature and at wry humor. VIVA MOMIX is composed of 16 short pieces (with intermission) that will send you out into the cold smiling.
A great many of tonight’s dances utilize infectious percussion, sometimes only percussion. All accompaniment is unique and specific. Facial expressions enhance. Choreography is by Artistic Director Moses Pendleton. Examples:
Solar Flares features dancers holding/undulating what look like very long, orange rubber tubes. Their bodies erect, stretching, jumping, extending limbs; configured in line and spread formation. Tubes move like hummingbird wings. Music by Brent Lewis. Performed by The Company.
Marigolds opens with four fluffy, many-petaled flowers on the stage floor. First hands emerge, then heads. The dancers stand; now flowers with legs. In the course of this lighthearted piece, the petal aurora successively drops to waist, thigh, and floor held by a body stocking. We see blooms become bell-like. Music by Suphala, U-zig Michael Paradinas. Performed by Jessica Adams Fowler/Alison Coleman/Adrienne Elion/Kelly Trevlyn-Fatscher.
Photo by Renato Mangolin
Daddy Long Legs showcases three hat and chap-dressed cowboys, each with one, extra long (prosthetic like) leg used to support, balance, pivot, gallop, and whirl. Clever and fun. Music Philippe Cohen Solal, Christopher Miller, Eduardo Makaroff; Performed by Blake Bellanger, Anthony Bocconi, Nathaniel Davis
Projections of white scribbles cover the stage in Paper Trails. Three balls of what appears to be crumpled paper pull apart revealing individually wrapped dancers. Sounds of scrunching add to accompaniment. Sections gather and crimp, at one point resembling folded napkins. Vocals are wordless. Projected stripes and strokes tumble onto everything. Music by Ramin Djawadi, Yvonne Moriarty, Gavin Greenway, and the Lyndhurst. Performed by The Company
Photo by Max Pucciarello
Table Talk is an extraordinary physical conversation between a dancer and a table. How many different ways can she relate – use the table for support, leverage, balance? Limbs extend, wrap, bend, roll as her body sinuously goes backwards from table top to floor, crawls under and returns to the plateau for further exploration. A testament to focus, precision, imagination, and craft. Music by R Del Naja, A. Vowles, G. Marshall. Performed by Jessica Adams Fowler.
Three intertwined couples sit on a mirror at the start of Floating. Face to face, belly to belly, leg over leg they lean back pressing soles of feet to one another’s feet, forming a peak as the mirror reflects diamond shapes. Connected limbs and bodies shift, one upon the other, rolling over, falling forward, bending back, peddling – also manifest in glass. Music by Shpongle: Simon Posford & Raja Ram, Vocals Abigail Gorton & Michele Adamson. Performed by Jessica Adams Fowler, Anthony Bocconi, Alison Coleman, Nathaniel Davis, Kelly Trevlyn-Fatscher, Teddy Fatscher.
Photo by Quinn Pendleton
In Man Fan, a single dancer wields a cloth – silk? veined fan extending from his grasp to the top of the stage’s wings. S l o w l y it unfurls, turns, closes, adjusts to the dancer’s moves. Light plays on the diaphanous cloth. It’s a butterfly, a lily, a parachute. Music by Azam Ali. Performed by Anthony Bocconi. Prop by Michael Curry.
Photo by Renata Mangolin
Tonight’s finale, If You Need Some Body, finds dancers partnering stuffed, articulated male dummies with paper mache heads. Female dummies share skirts with male dancers acquiring borrowed legs. Any human move creates amusing reaction from his/her counterpart. Droll. Music by Johann Sebastian Bach. Performed by The Company.
Opening Photo by Charles Azzopardi
VIVA MOMIX
Founder and Artistic Director Moses Pendleton
Through January 7, 2024
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Avenue at 18th Street
