Momix To Appear At The Jorgensen 10/29

Combining dance, athleticism, theatricality, technicality, humor, and what can only be called magic, Momix brings its best to Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday, October 29 at 7:30 pm, with The Best of Momix, a sampling of the troupe's highlights from 1986 to 2004. Over the years, the company has thrilled fans in more than 22 countries and has been featured on stage, screen and television. Ballet-Dance Magazine calls their work "uncharacteristically accessible...they evoke a sense of wonder and delight."

The uncannily athletic and graceful dancer-illusionists of Momix do not simply imitate life, they become the life of the audience's imagination. They float weightlessly through extraterrestrial worlds and hurl through the air like baseballs. At one moment they project lighthearted fun, and at another, subtle sensuality, as they create visually complex webs of movement around simple stationary objects - a rope, a pole, a ball, a revolving platform - to music that is sometimes techno-hip, often otherworldly, and always riveting.

Momix is an offshoot of the creative company Pilobolus, co-founded in 1971 by Moses Pendleton, one of the world's most innovative and widely performed choreographers. As the Artistic Director and founder of Momix, Pendleton creates a surreal, sometimes bizarre, universe where light and shadow vie for supremacy, where a scrim creates an amorphous veil dividing the inner and outer worlds we all inhabit, though rarely explore. Here, the human figure transforms into a luminescent spider, opens slowly like a blooming flower, and undulates with poisonous reptilian grace across a desert landscape. It becomes metallically humanoid as it crouches, vaults and somersaults on skis; it reforms into a player in a free-wheeling paean to America's national pastime, then reincarnates as a spinning ballerina, ultimately thwarted in her attempt to break free from earth's grasp.

The cast of Momix is composed of strange, exotic, shape-shifters, illusionists who create DayGlo bodyscapes that are elemental in their simplicity, but labyrinthine in their writhing permutations. When Momix takes the stage, nothing stays in place; everything is alive with change. The universe - like the mind - is in an eternal state of becoming.

Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts is located at 2132 Hillside Road on the UConn campus in Storrs. Regular tickets are $25, $27 and $30, with some discounts available. For tickets and information, call the Box Office at 860.486.4226, Monday through Friday, 11 am-5 pm, or order online at jorgensen.uconn.edu. Convenient free parking is available across the street in the North Garage.