" Momix in Orbit, " presented last weekend at the Emerson Majestic by CRASHarts, was like a great hardware store where there’s a special tool for everything you always used to fix with a penknife and duct tape. The collaborative company of dancer-gymnast-puppeteers offered a whopping 14 tiny spectacles drawn from its extensive career in film, video, commercials, industrials, sports entertainment, and show business. The program was about as profound and long-lasting as the idea of a $50 lemon peeler that makes the rind come out in scallops.
Momix stage pieces present the dancer in some transformative way — either distorting the body with physical tricks and illusions or combining the body with a prop to make a moving, more-than-human image. Artistic director Moses Pendleton has a hand in most of the choreography, but everything takes close collaboration — dancers experiment with specially designed props, environments, and lighting (Howell Binkley and Joshua Starbuck are the resident lighting men) to create each vignette. In this program, some of the items might have been excerpted from longer and presumably more developed pieces, but most of it seemed to fall under the heading " How Many Ways Can You Twirl a Hula Hoop. "
There was in fact a hula-hoop number, Orbit. Nicole Loizides, in a two-piece black patent-leather swimsuit, kept the hoop spinning by undulating her torso. This left her arms free to create decorative, exotic-dancer shapes, and she could travel and even leap across the stage without disturbing the hoop’s revolutions. In the proper light, a fast-moving object like the hoop can create a three-dimensional after-image. For Pleiades, Loizides, Jane’l Caropolo, and Djassi Johnson twirled what may have been sticks with small flags attached, in a dark space lit by starlike projections. You could see only the pathway of these props and hear them swishing. In a second part of the same piece, the women held long, flexible wands in the shape of an X, twirling them and spinning in place at the same time, again creating geometric trace forms against the sky.
Circle Walker, the most elaborate of the prop pieces, featured Tim Acito and an enormous spherical object designed by Alan Boeding. The ingenious prop consisted of two tubular half-circles perpendicular to each other and held together by some light metallic spars. Acito first posed inside the sphere, stretching and curling along its superstructure. Then he put it into motion, eventually swinging and somersaulting from it as it rolled.
Acito demonstrated a few more acrobatic skills in Table Talk, doing flips, falls, and single-hand stands on the eponymous prop. Other numbers featured three women hugging white beach balls, then riding them like horses (Spawning); Acito standing on a piece of cloth that allowed him to spread and close his legs without lifting them (Underwater Study #5); and a duet for skiers out of their element, in silver mylar suits, helmets, boots, and skis (Millennium Skiva).
There was one big production number — the only one, I think, where there was any attempt at group choreography. The title, Sputnik ( " Fellow Traveler " ), didn’t match my reading of the piece, which suggested a parody of Martha Graham’s decadent late period. A goddess-like woman squatted in a large brass bowl. Three male attendants in purple trunks speared the bowl with long, heavy sticks. Three female attendants, after giving proper obeisance to the goddess, rode the spears in lazily erotic poses as the men ran around giving them a push now and then, so the whole thing revolved like a saucer ride in an amusement park.
Momix also did pieces using puppet techniques and trapeze skills. The most amusing, E.C., was a shadow play where the size, shape, and configuration of the dancers’ bodies were all controlled by their relation to a backlight on a scrim. They got some grotesque and funny effects, like legs without torsos, a body thin as a pencil, a baby six inches high.
The complicated technical requirements of the evening were perfectly designed, engineered, and produced, as I guess we should expect from a company that’s spent so much time in commercial entertainment. From an artistic point of view, though, Momix doesn’t come near the fantasy creations of its unacknowledged progenitor, Alwin Nikolais, who died in 1993. Besides making beautiful theater illusions, Nikolais developed a dance language and style that allowed the human component of the show to create its own effects. People called Nikolais’s theater " dehumanized, " but it was more like a self-invented universe where physics, biology, and human relations operated by a different set of rules.
