Familiar Tricks from Momix

Momix opened its run at the Joyce Theater last night with “Passion,” a 17-year-old work set to the lush Peter Gabriel score for the Martin Scorsese film “The Last Temptation of Christ.” “Passion” is awash with visual trickery and symbolic allusion, but it is disappointingly short on substance. For better or worse, the dance’s combination of acrobatics, prop work, and pantheistic imagery never fails to bring up comparisons to Cirque du Soleil. Is choreographer Moses Pendleton enthused by the comparison? It’s probably safe to assume that he would rather have his work described as “multimedia dance theater.”True, there’s something pure in Mr. Pendleton’s vision for his dance company. The choreography seems to follow a clear, agreed-upon series of rules. The group creates the choreography as such. Shape is valued over movement pattern. More often than not, the dancers don’t perform as dancing humans, per se; instead, Mr. Pendleton prefers to transform bodies into dazzling, otherworldly phenomena. Partnering is divorced from the traditional aesthetic wherein two humans perform a dance together; the athletic dancers interact to create shapes, above all. (The company’s recent commercial for Hanes, viewable on YouTube, is a decent introduction to the style.) In essence, the “dancing” is a sort of moving sculpture.That may sound academic, but Momix is an international crowd-pleaser. Several gasps, oohs, and wows were overheard during Tuesday night’s performance, and many rose to their feet at the end of the evening.“Passion” begins with an image of a tree projected on a scrim. Throughout the work, evocative images slowly morph in the forefront — Buddhist sculptures, masks, Egyptian carvings, cloudy skies, a clock, a group of soldiers, the Earth. Behind the screen, five dancers in flesh-colored unitards and skullcaps stand in a tightly packed line. They start by moving their arms, whether in staccato bursts or in sinuous waves, acting as one organism, a tree of life or a many-limbed Shiva; soon, a pendulum momentum takes over, and the caterpillar’s legs swing in 180-degree arcs.A woman performs a ribbon dance (magical, at times, but too long). Five umbrellas twirl across the stage, motored by pairs of heavily muscled legs; a trick of lighting turns the props into translucent, moving kaleidoscopes. Nearly nude bodies tangle and untangle. A woman’s out-of-control knees turn out to belong to the male dancer hiding beneath her dress. Acts of levitation occur.Throughout, the movements’ origins as an outgrowth of the company’s much touted collaborative process are evident. Themes build, sometimes to successful moments, and are taken away; sadly, improvisational workshopping doesn’t always make for interesting choreography. Too often, punch lines are obscured by an overly long play on a theme. Though there is a great deal of satisfying rhythm in this dance, the movement sequences don’t interact with the powerful score in any interesting ways (the use of canon doesn’t cut it). Positioning is simple, too — the dancers travel back and forth across parallel planes, or they’re arranged in circles and lines.The movement aims for an organic, unearthly feel, but the vocabulary, perhaps fresh at its inception, feels tired — it’s the usual canonical modern dance movements (barrel turns, floor work, a few arabesques) fused with elements of yoga, gymnastics, and Eastern dance. And after all these years, are Momix’s legendary acrobatics still impressive? The movement is certainly challenging, and the able dancers — Danielle Arico, Joshua Christopher, Suzanne Lampl, Yasmine Lee, Steven Marshall, Brian Simerson, and Cassandra Taylor — are adroit performers. But these days, it takes a bit more to impress.Though the arc and imagery of “Passion” seem to beg for an analytic unpacking — a great deal of dervishy spinning; monastic, red-robed figures; a bona-fide crucifixion scene on a trapeze of sorts; near-nudity as a shortcut to depth; the entire life cycle, from amoeba through crucifixion and death, set before our very eyes; the very present background narrative of Christ’s last days — the trance-inducing viewing experience doesn’t lend itself to that sort of thought process.Until June 8 (175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-691-9740).

Familiar Tricks from Momix

Familiar Tricks from Momix

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