I remember the first time I saw a MOMIX performance: I was transfixed by the movements of a single dancer who spun at the center of a dark stage, a ring of silver strips that she wore as a shawl spinning out around her, undulating against a background of mesmerizing music. I felt everyone’s held breath around me, bodies taut, eyes riveted, the entire theater seeming in suspension. That is how a performance by the contemporary dance company goes: suspension, awe, standing ovation.
My first encounter with MOMIX was over a decade ago, in San Francisco, but of all the companies that TITAS brings to Dallas, it is the one that, in my experience both viewing and reviewing dance in this city, seems to stagger the city’s imagination. We like to be invited into the jaw-dropping. We like for our breath to be taken away.
Perhaps it’s two dancers in silver body suits and skis, balancing in air, their bodies strange, coiled machines of balance and musculature. Maybe it’s another number in which a dancer sprawls, kaleidoscopic, on a mirror, her body reflected in spider-like multi-limbed illusions, the sheer blistering visual brilliance such that it is hard to recover. MOMIX pieces toy with your sense of perception. The company, founded in 1981 by Moses Pendelton, is about dance less as choreography and more as a concatenation of movements that push the boundaries of what we imagine a body can do. What we imagine we can see.
They’ve delved into the unsettling, stirring effects of black light. This time, for tonight’s performance at the Winspear, they promise a paper dress, whirling sparkles that mimic stars in “Pleiades,” and illuminated globes like full moons in “Spawning.”
And this is why I say, I can think of nothing more immersive for your Friday evening. They come once a year and remind us both of our humanity and our otherness. I think it will be dazzling.
And as of this writing, seats are still available in all sections. Find them here.
