In ‘Alice,’ go down the rabbit hole with MOMIX in this Lively Arts presentation
By Donald Munro
For Moses Pendleton, energy equals creativity.
The acclaimed choreographer, who over the past 40 years has turned the MOMIX dance company into a towering name in the dance world, is sitting on a porch at his home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, gazing at a serene mountain view, enjoying the fall weather and hoping it isn’t too hot when he and his dancers travel to Fresno later in the week to perform “Alice” at the Saroyan Theatre. (The performance is 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6, at the Saroyan Theatre.)
Pictured above: MOMIX performs Sunday, Oct. 6, at the Saroyan Theatre. Photo: Sharen Bradford
This is one of his best places to think – to create – but not because of the tranquility of the scene. It’s all about the “big E.”
“Without energy, you don’t have the force to make that trip into your interior,” he says on the phone. “You know the reason I can sit on my porch and torch the imagination is that I just came from an hour swim in an icy cold mountain lake, and then I bike five miles a day and lift weights. And I train the body so that the brain can operate. Once I’ve done all that, then I’m ready to go into the unconscious.”
Those energetic trips of imagination have created indelible images in the minds of audience members for decades: fantastical organic colors and shapes; the mysteries of a baseball pitcher’s motion; strange creatures and fascinating animals; absorbing costumes and lighting design.
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“Alice,” based on excerpts from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” is Pendleton’s newest creation. On stage, Alice’s body grows to a 10-foot size and shrinks and grows again as the dancers use props, ropes and even other dancers to create the visual effects.
“There are four or five Alices in the production, sometimes all at the same time,” he says. “With mirrors, there are even 20 at points.”
There’s no effort to tell the entire “Alice” story, as other formats have done. (Including the Disney version, which Pendleton ate up as a kid.) Instead, he calls the story a “taking off point for invention.” Other “Alice” interpretations that served as inspiration include Tim Burton’s movie version and Salvador Dali’s series of a dozen Alice-inspired paintings.
“I use the iconic characters and situations to take off into MOMIX’s own personal rabbit hole, if you will.”
He sometimes mixes the idea of a costume that’s also kind of a prop, but one that changes the human form into some other imaginary being, creation or vegetative essence. An example: In one part of “Alice,” Pendleton uses large exercise balls with white stretch fabric pulled over them and attached to the body. They look like polar bears but are called Molar Bears because of their resemblance to dentures.
He is the first to point out that his imagination is not the only one contributing to the process.
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“You know, I’m the director of a collaboration in a way. I like to almost see myself as a catalyst for choreography. I set up an environment of play where the bodies are moving unconsciously and not trying to choreograph. They’re just dancing or just playing – playing a mock turtle or playing a rabbit, and just let them play, like they’re in Montessori or something. I basically take a kind of alchemical approach to creativity. You throw all kinds of bits of information into the retort and spin it. Hopefully it comes out a golden piece of choreography or an idea.”
In the end, Pendleton hopes that audiences find that sitting in a theater at a MOMIX show is a little like him perching on his glorious mountain porch: Both are places that you can allow your mind to expand and wander.
“Enjoy the trip,” he says. “We invite people to come and escape for a couple of hours into the rabbit hole.”
