Hoop tamer

Michael Moschen

by Marcia B. Siegel

One of Michael Moschen's most endearing exploits involves a small silver baton and a hoop about 18 inches across. As he steps carefully across the stage, he points the stick at the twirling hoop, or strokes the circle's edge. The hoop obeys the stick, stopping, reversing direction, floating up and down in front of his body. He doesn't seem to touch the hoop at all.

Postmodern juggler Moschen, who opened the Dance Umbrella season last weekend at the Emerson Majestic, is a wizard, a clown, a dancer, and an animator of Euclidean science. Other jugglers toss objects around. Moschen assumes objects have a life of their own and trains them to be beautiful. At the beginning of his show, the audience screamed at his feats. Fifteen minutes in, it was holding its breath.

Moschen gives titles to various sections of his program ("Triangle," "Circles," and so on), but the evening is basically a one-man display of unique virtuosity. There are some new effects and some well-loved old ones, like the opening, where he keeps a stack of eight crystal tennis balls in the palm of his hand, massaging them to life. One by one he releases the balls, continuing to keep the rest in motion. They creep around his hand, slide up his arm and across his chest, roll over one another like kittens. Although it isn't possible, he appears to be doing nothing more than providing the balls with a place to play.

Not satisfied with putting one set of inanimate creatures through their paces, Moschen extrapolates to bigger objects or new environments. Besides the palm-sized balls, he likes things in the shape of a circle or a snaky curve, and sometimes you can't tell whether something is a prop or a sculpture. At the end of the first long section, he sets one of the crystal balls inside a huge crescent moon sitting on the floor. The ball slides down the crescent and up the other side, gently rocking the moon. Later on, he rolls the crescent and other outsize curves along his neck, shoulders, torso, as if they were giant hula hoops.

He uses a 10-foot triangle as a three-way handball court, bouncing balls off its inside surfaces to create different rhythms. Stepping inside the triangle, he tapdances softly in a tennis-ball duet. Later, he throws rhythms onto a doubly rebounding surface -- a drumhead made of a lit-up disc, with a similar disc lowered over it. As the balls streak from his hands and ricochet off these surfaces, they seem to create their own geometric designs in space. But there are also designs for their own sake, like the big constructivist sphere made out of different-sized hoops that revolves on a wire and creates an infinite number of three-dimensional patterns.

Although Moschen is developing ideas choreographically with collaborator Janis Brenner, he thinks like a circus performer. He's clowned with the greats -- Lotte Goslar, Bill Irwin -- and at the Emerson he silently enlisted an accomplice from the audience to help him juggle with an apple that had to be chomped on in exact timing.

Like a circus, the show is a series of effects; some get richer as he extends them, but some -- like pulling flowers out of a hat -- can happen just once. It takes a lot to bring off these magical, almost mystical coups. At one point Moschen, aided by David van Tieghem's space music, Dave Feldman's lighting, and Anne Patterson's "visual collaboration," just walks across the stage waving two enormous silver wands from his shoulders. In another brief journey he twirls two sparkling silver hoops around his hands.

At the Emerson, it seemed the blend of visual effects, scenic metamorphosis, and choreography hadn't quite been achieved. The show takes terrific coordination backstage, with many changes and cues, and the crew on opening night wasn't moving quite fast enough. But Boston was the beginning of a national tour, and I thought Moschen might still be refining it. What he's pulling off is as much engineering as artistry, a visual and kinetic treat as well as a spiritual visitation.