SKETCHING THE DESERT’S QUIET BEAUTY WITH THE HUMAN BODY
MOMIX’s Opus Cactus inspired by landscapes of American southwest
MOMIX has arrived in Alberta and so has its quiet esthetic beauty. Directed by former Pilobolus co-founder Moses Pendleton, his troupe of strong, highly composed movement-illusionists set the meditative mood quickly, carrying its Calgary audience along in a seamless show of pure physical ingenuity. It was a welcome departure from the usual high-tech shows in vogue with other companies today.
Alberta Ballet is widely known for routinely bringing in superb guest companies year after year. Artistic director Jean GrandMaître has turned to more highprofile American dance companies in recent years to wow the faithful following in the hopes of attracting even bigger audience numbers.
It appears to be working as all shows for their latest invitee, MOMIX, are nearly sold out.
Mixing dance with other art forms ensures a company’s survival in what is already a highly expensive artistic business model. As much as many of us love the classics and especially contemporary dance, some of the more entertaining hybrid art forms that dance can take on skilfully blend in popular idioms as well. A case in point was Travis Wall’s Shaping Sound, here last month and offering a stunning new hybrid narrative form of darkest consequences in their glorious think-piece After the Curtain. Pilobolus came last season and demonstrated the extent to which the human body can transform itself through tremendous flexibility and artful shadow play.
But Thursday night at the Jubilee it was the enduringly popular MOMIX taking the stage and displaying its famous dance/acrobatic/contortionist skills in a remarkable remount of Pendleton’s Opus Cactus (2002), a series of 18 vignette reflections on desert habitats of the American southwest.
It was fun and interesting watching the company take on iconic images of the Sonoran Desert, including the well-known saguaro and the multi-armed organ-pipe cactus. Two-, threeand four-body ostriches, lizards and Gila monsters followed in segmented stretching, twisting, and posing in impressive displays of core strength. MOMIX showed us that there is dance art everywhere in our natural environment — we only need look to our everyday surroundings to see it.
Best of all, MOMIX put together a kind of tribute to the many thriving desert cultures in the world. The varied soundtrack was lush, static and thoroughly evocative of Arabic, Hopi, East Indian, Australian and Touareg sound worlds, deeply moving in their informed blend with a carefully construed choreography. Sometimes, the theatre was pitch dark so that we could see the illusionist tricks of projection against shadowy backdrop of concealed kinetics. At another point, two dancers were dizzyingly spun in endless rotations about two poles in full light.
In the show’s finale, three tethered dancers were swung in circular- then swing-set motions while costumed in body lines reminiscent of Cirque du Soleil angularity, all set to Latin and Hopi chanting amid cool electronica. The set piece nicely capped off the show’s eclectic atmosphere, never too complicated, never overwhelming, an analgesic poultice made antidote to the needless complexity of other dance companies trying to over-impress. MOMIX shows work precisely because their artistry speaks for itself. Opus Cactus was the kind of understated quiet heat we all needed to dispel our omnipresent frozen wastes of winter.
Another memorable piece was the delightfully symmetrical fan dance for four women, soothing in its uncomplicated athleticism, a definitive meditation that characterized the show’s easy feel and quiet engagement with its appreciative audience. Overhearing conversations during the interval and afterward, Calgary dance fans seemed more attuned to the show’s reflective heat than its flashier elements thanks in large part to splendid lighting (Joshua Starbuck and Moses Pendleton), which helped sustain the show’s immersive, meditative mood.
Costuming (Phoebe Katzin) was equally beautiful and seemed often to take on a life of its own. One could never tell if each scene began its conception with music, dance, habitat or clothing first in mind. The show conveyed all its artistic angles with equal creative strength — an impressive accomplishment.
From ghostly apparition to fire walker dance, MOMIX distilled its elemental, spiritual, and sensual movement into an impressive inclusion of all that is our human encounter with the timelessness we find in desert-scapes. Anyone who has encountered the dryness of the desert and spent time there knows that the experience is anything but sensually arid. MOMIX has translated the transcendental beauty of desert life keenly well through its own unique movement art.