MOMIX DANCE COMPANY
Momix uses the simplest of means: a few well-engineered props, precisely placed lights, and their own highly tuned bodies. But out of this bare landscape grow theatrical images that are not only technically and aesthetically masterful but emotionally supercharged as well. Their dances center around images of birth and the preconscious, suspended in a refreshingly nonrational space. This is the land of association and intuition, of illogic and inspiration. In this primordial world–in which the dancers, with their delicate and fluid technique, seemingly perform underwater–imagination soars, intellect becomes irrelevant. Watching Momix is a little like being ducked under Niagara Falls: before we can think, we’re immersed.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Momix’s game plan in each dance is to take some object or device and explore its dramatic potential. Spawning, for example, consisted of three women–Lisa Giobbi, Cynthia Quinn, and Carolyn Minor–dancing with three huge balloons shaped like eggs. Choreographed by Giobbi, Quinn, and Moses Pendleton, Momix’s founder and artistic director, Spawning held me spellbound as the dancers gracefully and expertly handled their precious cargo, never letting the balloons go yet never seeming burdened by their demanding size. These women, demonstrating consummate skill and control, lugged their balloons on their backs or laid their arms over the balloons’ white, tense surfaces or held the balloons in their teeth and twirled beneath them. As part of the final section, the women placed the balloons between their knees and bounced lightly across the stage, their arms extended as if holding reins. The image of three women in nude leotards riding on huge eggs across a stage lit with blue lights demonstrated the purity and virtuosity of Momix’s visual language. Here was a stage picture that had no meaning and yet was powerfully meaningful, conjuring up nurturing, birth, flight, a particular side of the feminine.
In E.C., a dance performed behind a huge scrim, Momix turned the usually stilted and stagy gimmick of shadow puppetry into an inspired study of the human form in all its smallness, hugeness, and everything-in-betweenness. At one point a man was seen flying through the air a la Superman, complete with a model town whizzing by underneath him. Then his torso fell to the ground, but his legs remained flailing in the air. As in all their work, however, Momix modestly revealed the trick: at the end of E.C., the scrim was lifted to show us two upstage slide projectors whose beams had been crossed, allowing the shadows of two dancers, who stood perhaps ten feet apart, to be joined on the projection surface. Still, how some of the images were actually accomplished–the precision required must have been tremendous–is beyond me.
