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Momix: Lunar Sea See what it might be like to dance on the moon

Momix visual theater event 'Lunar Sea' brings a 'Fantasia'-like experience to region

Date published: 1/18/2007

By MICHAEL ZITZ

Audiences often react anxiously as they watch performers float impossibly through the air during "Lunar Sea," which flows from the fertile imagination of artistic director Moses Pendleton.

The visual theater performance combines former jock Pendleton's acrobatic choreography with puppets by "The Lion King" creator Michael Curry, lighting that creates the illusion of flight, and a surreal lunar landscape.

Tonight at the Paramount Theater in Charlottesville, and Saturday and Sunday at the George Mason University Center for the Arts in Fairfax, audiences will see what it might be like to dance across the surface of the moon.

Pendleton uses black light to make male performers disappear and female ones appear to float. That, he said, turns the male dancers into "puppeteers." The illusion creates a sense that computerized special effects are being used.

He's known for the humor in his productions.

In the case of "Lunar Sea," "It's more surprise and a certain wonderment--it's almost perplexing in a way," Pendleton said. "It's interesting to watch audiences' reactions to this piece."

Sometimes, he said, the audience seems to feel genuine anxiety about the possibility of the dancers plummeting to the floor.

"The audience seems to be thinking about how you're doing it, not what you're doing," Pendleton said.

He grew up on a dairy farm in northern Vermont, and the idea for "Lunar Sea" sprang from the idea of a giant black-and-white Holstein cow jumping over the moon.

"I couldn't get any of the dancers to want to be part of the Holstein," he said with a chuckle.

The inspiration for "Lunar Sea," he said, was "what it would it be like to have a dance on the moon, to fly and soar."

He said he wanted audiences "to have a feeling they were watching something completely different."

The dancers seem to be defying gravity.

"I basically took this kind of approach where I erased all visible means of support," Pendleton punned. "No visible means of support" is a subtitle to the show, he said.

As a farm boy in northern Vermont, Momix artistic director Moses Pendleton was an avid Pony League baseball player and is a lifelong fan of the sport. So he was thrilled when the San Francisco Giants asked him to put together a show for the opening of the Major League Baseball team's new spring training ballpark in Scottsdale, Ariz. Using the humor so often evident in his work, Pendleton was more than up to the challenge. He lovingly and whimsically created beer cans and hot dogs dancing to James Brown's "I Got You (I Feel Good)" for "Baseball," and put his artists through their own "spring training," making them take actual batting practice so they'd be convincing in the show. It worked so well that Pendleton took "Baseball" on tour repeatedly and earned a rave 2003 review in The New York Times. The Times reviewer wrote that Pendleton "made a witty, stylized movement vocabulary out of the moves and swagger of baseball in the field and in the bleachers." As a boy, Pendleton painted a "strike zone" on the side of his father's barn--a real-life scene straight out of "The Natural." "I used to be good at firing tennis balls at the side of the barn while listening to Curt Gowdy do the Red Sox games," he said. But a broken leg steered him away from the ball field and toward the stage. Pendleton said one of his biggest thrills came as a result of the "Baseball" show, when the Toronto Blue Jays asked him to throw out the first ball at a game. "I almost beaned Albert Bell," he recalled with a laugh. "The guy who was catching dove for the ball and saved me from being embarrassed. I got nervous when I looked at the scoreboard and saw my head on the screen, 40 feet high." --Michael Zitz WHAT: Momix's 'Lunar Sea' WHERE: George Mason University Center for the Arts, Fairfax WHEN: Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 4 p.m. COST: $44, $36, $22 INFO: 703/993-8888 WEB: momix.com, gmu.edu/cfa TICKETS: 888/945-2468, tickets.com WHAT: Momix's 'Lunar Sea' WHERE: The Paramount Theater, Charlottesville WHEN: Tonight, 8 p.m. COST: $50, $45, $42, $39 WEB: momix.com, theparamount.com TICKETS: 434/979-1333

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Date published: 1/18/2007