by Leigh Witchel
Alice in Wonderland might be the perfect subject for MOMIX. A familiar story that doesn’t need to be explained to the audience in order to follow it provided one opportunity after another for the kind of stage magic that MOMIX does best.
The voyage into Wonderland was less a dramatization of Lewis Carroll’s tale than a series of episodes that loosely tracked the plot. We first saw Jade Primicias as Alice, seemingly floating midair as she read her own story. Behind her, Colton Wall gently maneuvered her. Once they changed angles, it became clear she was on a ladder suspended parallel to the floor. She nodded off briefly as he rocked her, then they both hung with their legs dangling in between the rungs, spinning and rotating. He tipped the ladder and she climbed upwards to end the scene.
One apparition followed another, which all hung in your mind like smoke from a caterpillar’s hookah. In front of the curtain the March Hare carried the Mad Hatter out on his shoulders, as if swimming. Alice was again suspended, this time between the Mad Hatter’s legs. From there, not one, but four Alices went down the rabbit hole, climbing on to the rim of tubes that looked suspiciously like garbage pails and falling back into them. The next group of Alices wore enormous skirts that billowed as they rose and fell on stage. It took some time to figure out they were actually life-sized puppets.
Dancers in striking rabbit masks took to the stage. They huddled in a nervous clump as they moved their heads and ears to the sound of a toy piano. The music, a collage from everywhere, was picked for atmosphere and a beat, not cultural accuracy. It was Bollywood, then Spanish rap, throat singing after that.
A quartet of dancers wore masks made from enormous photographs of baby faces. Simple hand gestures kept the masks facing front whether the dancers were straight or in profile. But if there’s anything about MOMIX that choreography teachers the world over would approve of, it’s that they never half-use a prop. A sextet of dancers with huge exercise balls dribbled and bounced them in several formations, and finally body-surfed on the balls. MOMIX isn’t done with a prop until it’s squeezed everything out of it.
The lobster quadrille was brought to life by four women in brown skirts with a red overskirt. At first the red skirts were worn over the head so the women looked like immense mushrooms from “Fantasia,” but were endlessly transformed. They brought the skirt waists above the chest or at their waists to create different silhouettes. After they wore them on their heads as a riff on the massive headdresses you might see in a Flemish painting, but also pulling the red skirt overhead and compressing the middle so it looked like a Georgia O’Keeffe flower. They managed to make a hat, a brooch and probably several pterodactyls.
Seah Hagan danced a very effective aerial number as the Queen of Diamonds; the band she was suspended on was decorated with red fringe so it flared out when she spun. MOMIX isn’t averse to technology. One section used similar video methods to capture what was happening onstage and project it on the cyclorama as Zvi Gotheiner used in his “The Art of Fugue.” But the group prefers paper-cup-and-string ingenuity. For the Black Queen section, the Queens of Spades and Clubs each had two attendants, one prostrate at each side. Each whole trio glided about mysteriously, courtesy of caster pads you might buy at a hardware store.
Each scene featured a different effect, one after another. A purple-haired woman used a red skirt to miniaturize herself by hiding under it and scuttling about. It’s the magic of surprise and transformation that Mummenschanz brought all over the world, or what the Moiseyev Dance Company brought here since 1958 with “Two Boys in a Fight.”
That sketch, a Moiseyev classic, was echoed as well in a section where a woman made her limbs vanish inside an inflatable costume, but the most beautiful of these effects was an ingenious mirror dance. By the careful angle of the mirrors, each of the dancers created a partner, then transformed themselves into spidery creatures built from mirrored legs.
The evening was tight and fast-moving at first, but as it went on, it went on . . . There was a long gymnastic sequence for two couples, and a seemingly longer section for a pair of Alices sheltered by immense red roses held invisibly overhead like palm fronds. Because “Alice” doesn’t have to faithfully narrate the story, MOMIX could easily cut a section or two.
There was a psychedelic edge to the whole evening; after all, creator Moses Pendleton founded Pilobolus in 1971. Projections were integral, at first on the backdrop, then colorful stained glass and riotous paisley projected on to costumes made of white stretch fabric. It all led up to a logical conclusion: Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” with five Alices. Hagan, the central Alice, rose upwards suspended by wires so her immense skirt could be filled with projections of rainbows. It somehow made sense.
At its least inspiring, MOMIX can get circus-y and obvious, but “Alice” was a great intersection of what MOMIX does and how it does it. Few stories give a better excuse for phantasms and stage effects. Still, it could have been pruned. Even the curtain call seemed to be five curtain calls, though the eight hard-working dancers deserved their applause.
Bring the kids. If the one behind me was any indication, they will love it.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Alice” – MOMIX
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
July 19, 2022
Cover: Jade Primicias and Colton Wall in “Alice.” Photo © Equilibre Monaco.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
