Nurturing Nature

Choreographer finds inspiration in the outdoors

Good luck following a conversation with Moses Pendleton. His choreography has been considered “highly inventive and illusionistic” for nearly half a century, and chatting with him is to an ordinary interview as his dances have been to predictable ballet — something completely different.

Pendleton started life in the most practical world imaginable: He was born and raised on a dairy farm in northern Vermont and expected that he too would be a dairy farmer. On the flip side of that coin, he says his earliest experiences as a showman came from exhibiting his family’s dairy cows at the Caledonian County Fair. But he was training to be a skier at Dartmouth when a broken leg suffered during soccer practice changed the direction of his life even more serendipitously.

“I was carried off to Mary Hitchcock Hospital, and I spent my first four weeks of my freshman year at Dartmouth in a cast up to my thigh,” he told Unlocking Litchfield, a magazine in his home region of Connecticut. “When I finally got out of the hospital and started recuperating, I enrolled in a dance class as an act of therapy, to try and get in shape for the ski team. Then I fell in love with my dance instructor, and she was so much more attractive than my ski coach. The rest is biological, I guess.”

Pendleton earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1971 and immediately started touring with Pilobolus, formed with a couple of classmates and named … after a barnyard fungus. MOMIX, which he founded in 1980, is based on the name of a supplement given to calves.

None of that history seems to matter much to Pendleton now. He’d rather talk about his exercise regime — swimming, bicycling, lifting weights — his photography — which has made its way into upscale museums and galleries — and his marigold seeds — 20,000 of them — which were waiting a week ago to take their place in the rays of a huge sun at the center of his garden. “It’s a very organized area for a disorganized and chaotic mind,” he says.

Not that Pendleton’s days aren’t organized. He says he figured out some time ago that he works best in 45-minute segments — and he plays best on a schedule, too. Every day he’s home, he takes his camera and chronicles his run through the woods — “on the same track every day, almost down to the minute” — around his home.

“Right now, I’m studying daffodils and how to capture their essence,” he says. “Last month it was mud and ice. Before that, leaves. I’m really enjoying just seeing the metamorphosis of the seasons — taking notes, audio notes and photographs. I’m doing something now with just dead kale. I have 350 pictures I took of kale, and now I’m trying to organize the sequence.

“It’s like making a dance without dancers, using dried leaves and frozen ice, then I’m going to animate it, score it and make it into a short film. I’ve kind of retired in to this private vision.”

That doesn’t mean he’s lost touch with his dance company. “Opus Cactus,” which will be presented Sunday at the Walton Arts Center, is a reflection of how his private vision becomes a public performance.

“The Sonoran desert was new to this New Englander, and it was quite an inspiration,” he says. “I took those visions and translated them into dance form — into light and shadow and imagery. [Dancers] playing rocks and suns and cactus and lizards and all these kinds of things that don’t really tell a story, but the imagery can be somewhat evocative and engage the audience in the magic and illusion of nature as the light goes low.

“It’s almost a dream state, which was kind of the idea. I want to get people to come to the show and escape into the dream world of MOMIX.”

COURTESY PHOTO Moses Pendleton, the founder of dance troupes Pilobolus and MOMIX, spends most of his time these days outdoors among his sunflowers at his home in Connecticut.