Hailing from suburban Washington, Moses Pendleton and his 34-year-old dance company Momix are visiting Shanghai's Daning Theatre on October 24-25, bringing their most lauded work, Botanica, as part of the Shanghai International Festival of the Arts.
Premiering in 2008, Botanica takes inspiration from the cycles of nature, one of the founding concepts behind the dance theater.
"We live and work in the countryside ourselves," explains Pendleton, who remains the group's artistic director. While Momix is best known for its strong physical presentations and incredible stage effects, Pendleton's roots in dance run deep. As a college student at Dartmouth College, he co-founded the award-winning Pilobolus dance group, who performed at last year's Shanghai International Festival of Arts.
As a professional dancer, Pendleton describes himself as "a solar-powered artist." He once revealed to reporters that maintaining a life in an urban setting was rather disturbing to him. "For me landscape art represents a botanical ordering of a chaotic mind," he says. "It works for me."
His words are better unraveled in the CINE Golden Eagle Award winning film Moses Pendleton Presents Moses Pendleton. Directed by J. Mitchell Johnson, this one-man show recounts Pendleton's life and its connection to dance by capturing a day in his life.
During the film, the artist shows no hesitation exploring his physical possibilities through constant movement. Scenes where he's still are seldom captured, Pendleton's spirit seemingly adrift in outer space.
It's almost exhausting, as well as thrilling, watching the film depict a day in his life. However, Pendleton feels it merely mirrors one of his ordinary days. That's how he produced the idea for Botanica.
"It begins not in the body, but in the mind," he explains. "In my daily life, I observe nature closely. I ask the dancers to become plants and animals, to think like them in order to move like them."
That earthiness comes to life during rehearsals. "We brought sunflowers into the studio and had recordings of birdsongs playing as we warmed up," he adds. "We used costumes and projections to further enhance the illusion of simulating nature through the body."
Amassing a group of brilliant dancers from different disciplines ranging from breakdancing to ballet, Pendleton believes that it's essential to bring out dancers' "natural genius."
He encourages dancers to express themselves physically to the extreme. "I have to be the bhagwan or the shaman," he says. "I have to make you feel like it's okay to be what we're asking you to be."
No VPN? Watch the video on Youku.
Though Shanghai is an untouched land for Pendleton and his Momix group, he's confident that the ultra-metropolitan city will be charmed by the suburban soil that they're bringing with Botanica. "Our aesthetic is to use simple elements – props, fabric, costumes – to create images that move," he explains. "It's as Eastern as it is Western."
That simplicity, however, does not fall to its music choices. Seemingly disparate selections from Transglobal Underground, Vivaldi, Delirium, Peter Gabriel and Hindi beats are flawlessly connected with ornithological bridges of bird songs.
Performed in a city known for its constant hustle and bustle, Botanica should be a visual and audio feast for urbanites longing for nature.
// Oct 24-25, 2pm (Sat) and 7.30pm (Sun), RMB50-500. Daning Theatre, tickets.
// Check out a preview of the Shanghai International Festival of the Arts here.
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