Momix transforms dancers into art with costumes, props, lighting

The dance of Momix, performing Thursday in Olympia, has more in common with an art installation or a living painting than with a traditional dance performance.

“You can look at this almost like moving art, moving paintings,” company founder and choreographer Moses Pendleton said in a phone interview this week. “Momix is not just a modern dance company. The dance is just part of it. It’s a combination of lighting and sound and projections and props and bodies.

“Like painters or sculptors, we try to create an image,” he said of his collaborative work with the company’s dancers. “We try to paint that picture first and then move it through time and space.”

The company, which last visited Olympia in 2011, returns with “Alchemia,” a two-section dance organized around the theme of alchemy, the transformation of matter, and around the elements of earth, air, fire and water.

“I’ve always spoken about Momix as an alchemical process,” Pendleton said. “We take disparate objects and spin them through a show with eclectic music and different kinds of sound and try to create an impression.

“We use special lighting and props and various ideas to create otherworldly images.”

Momix tours internationally, does an extended run in New York City each year and has created work for television commercials. Two of the company’s dancers, choreographed by Pendleton, shared the role of Bluey, a remote-controlled robot clown, in “FX 2.”

Pendleton, who started Momix in 1980, previously co-founded Pilobolus, another dance company known for creating spectacle and illusion. He said his work is inspired by influences as diverse as nature — he grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont — and poetry.

“Between their special effects and their costuming and their props, they are really able to take on a themed piece like no other company,” Ken Johnson, co-director of Johansen Olympia Dance Center, the show’s sponsor, said in a 2011 interview with The Olympian. “They are able to transform the stage like no other dance company.”

Johnson appreciates the accessibility of the company’s dances and the athletic ability of its dancers. He saw the Washington, Conn.-based company perform many times while living in nearby Hartford,

“Optical illusions and other neat-looking tricks, achieved by a lithe cohort of dancer-athletes and an extensive design team, have long been the selling points of Momix,” dance critic Siobhan Burke wrote in July in the New York Times.

She and other reviewers found “Alchemia” less satisfying than the company’s usual fare. “The show’s abundant stunts, arranged into a long series of short vignettes, are less mysterious than predictable,” she wrote.

Manuel Mendoza, writing in the Dallas Morning News last year, praised the “deeply layered visuals bringing together a number of clever design elements.”

Like other Momix productions, this one incorporates elaborate costumes, props and costumes that become props. Dancers take to the air on wires, transform their costumes into different shapes and dance with lengths of PVC pipe.

“Animating the inanimate is part of the Momix aesthetic,” Pendleton said. “It’s like Fred Astaire taking a broomstick or a coat rack and making it seem like it’s a dance partner.”

And with the help of lighting, sometimes the dancers’ bodies seem to become something else.

“I will take bodies and put them in black light and have strange costumes,” he said. “The body is cut up and reassembled in different ways. You see body parts, but they aren’t just human bodies.

“You can end up with optical confusion. The audience starts to wonder what they might be seeing.”

This story was originally published September 23, 2015 at 9:15 PM with the headline "Momix transforms dancers into art with costumes, props, lighting."