(362) Choreographer Moses Pendleton, on MOMIX's 'Alice' at Performing Arts Houston
Today on 'Conversations on Dance' we are joined by Moses Pendleton. Moses has been one of America’s most innovative and widely performed choreographers and directors for over 40 years. A co-founder of the ground-breaking Pilobolus Dance Theater in 1971, he formed his own company, MOMIX, in 1980. Mr. Pendleton has also worked extensively in film, TV, and opera and as a choreographer for ballet companies and special events.
We talk with Moses about his unique trajectory to dance and directing performances, the founding of Pilobolus and MOMIX, and his production of 'Alice.' See MOMIX in 'Alice' with Performing Arts Houston on September 16th and 17th at Cullen Theater, Wortham Center. This performance is perfect for all ages and tickets start at $39. Visit performingartshouston.org for tickets and more information. See all upcoming events from Performing Arts Houston at performingartshouston.org/events.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:12]:
Today on Conversations on Dance, we are joined by Moses Pendleton. Moses has been one of America's most innovative and widely performed choreographers and directors for over 40 years. A co founder of the groundbreaking Palabilist Dance Theater in 1971, he formed his own company, MOMIX, in 1980. Mr. Pendleton has also worked extensively in film, TV and opera, and as a choreographer for ballet companies and special events. We talk with Moses about his unique trajectory to dance and directing performances, the founding of Pilobolus and MOMIX, and his production of Alice. See MOMIX in Alice with Performing Arts Houston on September 16 and 17th at Cullen Theater, Wortham Center. This performance is perfect for all ages, and tickets start at $39. Visit performingartshouston.org. For tickets and more information, see all upcoming events from Performingarts Houston@performingartshouston.org Events or click the link in the show notes.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:11]:
Moses, thank you so much for joining us this morning. I've been aware of your work for ages and we've long wanted to have you on and talk know you're just a real vanguard of the industry. But having not had you on before, we always love to start at the beginning and just go all the way back to sort of when you first became aware of dance and what made you want to explore it and what those early years in dance were like for you.
Moses Pendleton [00:02:11]:
I began on a farm in northern Vermont, so my basic structure is farming, skiing, English literature and accidents led to dance and Blobilis and MOMIX. That's where it comes from. But the beginning, the roots of my roots were Agra roots in the Northeast kingdom of Vermont, Lindenville, Little Gem in the green. And that's where I got my start. And my father was someone that was quite keen on creating the perfect Holstein Friesian cows. And these are the black and white that I showed you, a picture of Holstein Friesian and his dream became my dream, and to create the perfect cow. It wasn't really a dairy farm. We're really into breeding and sculpture and things like that. I spent a lot of time studying the anatomy of Holsteins and showing them at local fairs around New England. But to make a long story short, my father passed away when I was twelve, so he was gone. That dream was gone. And I moved on to my mother. Knowing how attached I was to my father sent me not to ballet school in the summers, but to a ski racing camp in Mount Hood, Oregon, to train with the Austrian ski team, a place called Timberline Lodge. It was built during FDR. Timberline, yes, that's where I yeah, I've been there. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's a fantastic place. And on the glacier, that's where I learned to ski. Ski well. So these Austrian skiers, Peppy Gransheimer and Andre Moulture, famous skiers from the 60s who have retired and now they're instructors, but they still maintain the gleam in their eye and the enthusiasm and the outrage and the courage to go downhill very fast. And they taught me that they were my surrogate family. But of course, later on when we formed pilobolus and then one of our early works in momics is a piece on skis, obviously might not have done that. My background was actually not of ballet, but of athletics and skiing. And so whenever you take whatever it is that you make, if you're true to your creative spirit, you will draw almost unconsciously on your past and your things. And so I draw on the Agra and the plant and the soil and the farming aspect of it, as well as the athletic part. And then put on top of that. I went to Dartmouth and graduated in English literature. And I spent most of my time there not knowing what I wanted to do, but at least you could read some cool books and meet some inspiring professors. And that's what I did. But that also helped informed me to kind of have develop maybe a kind of poetic sense about whatever it is that you do. You just have to look at it in a certain way. These are formative experiences, I must say. Also, just to add my Agra connections. Pilobolus this had to be maybe it's 1968 or something. I had came back to my father's farm in Vermont and they rented the fields to a herd of Holstein Friesian. And we put together in the summer prepoloblus, we put together a show that would feature a 50 head of milking Holstein Friesian cows. And this was a theater, a lot of people don't know that. The first theater we had was called the Vermont Natural Theater. And during at my family farm, we invited 50 witnesses, including Ellen Lovell, who is the at the time was the head of the Council on the Arts in Vermont. And we sat her on an adjacent hillside in my family farm. And I performed by putting over a white sheet over my head and leading a herd of 50 milking, mind you, milking Holstein. And the experience that the program read was you would have an experience of stampeding Holsteins coming directly at you. And Cows, being as curious as you know them to be, would follow wherever I went on this angled, this hillside, green, black and white, green grass, and a white Casper like ghost figure that I played to draw them left or right and eventually running full speed right at the audience. And just before the cows ran over the audience, there was a ditch. And I dove in into the ditch, out of sight. And as soon as I was gone, they lost their object of pursuit. And this just tarred, someone rang a bell and they just stopped and started grazing. And the little bell would ring and the audience was encouraged to move off into the next piece which was a dancer doing an imitation of a bird on one leg on a spruce stump. But it was a three mile hike around my family farm with all these little interactions of human bodies and nature and between cows and trees and grass. Anyway, that was the ritual running of the Holsteins which was these were the formative years that got us to think, you know, our crazy, wild escapist imaginations. There seems to be a market for know later on. As I say, I went to Dartmouth to be on the ski team. I was on the ski team and the second day of ski practice I was playing soccer and that's what the ski teams did in the fall. The most dangerous exercise you can imagine playing soccer with people who are athletic but have no idea how to play soccer. The athletes end up kicking each other more than the ball and I was the result of that and got a very badly broken leg. My second day in class at Dartland and I was in the hospital with a cast up to my thigh. Ski career shattered? No idea. My mother was one floor up dying of breast cancer so it was a bad year. Sat with my parents, were gone at a very early age. I'm there with the cast on my leg. No ski career got way behind in all the academics, which was difficult up there. The freshmen at Dartmouth had three years of calculus before they took calculus. One at Dartmouth. I'd never heard of calculus. You could imagine that kind of thing. But the short part of this is that I took a dance class at Dartmouth to get myself and leg recuperated to get back on the ski tape and then felt that my dance instructor at the time at Dartmouth much more attractive than my ski. Just I went with the flow or with a flower or however you say it. So I got involved with dance and didn't get back on the ski team. And kind of that's how pilobolus formed itself. I'm curious because long winded about this.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:09:32]:
No, it's fascinating. So you're starting dance at a later age than some would probably than your peers around you but you're also starting choreography, it sounds like, kind of at the same time. So how was that a challenge to create dance without maybe the vocabulary that other people had? But how was it also like I can see it also being very freeing that you can really do whatever you want because you don't feel kind of constrained by maybe that dance vocabulary that everyone else.
Moses Pendleton [00:10:05]:
Yes. I never think of myself as a dance choreographer. I'm more a kind of a physical visual artist. For example, I see pictures. As much as you love to hear me talk I basically am a visualist who loves to blabber when you give me podcast. No, but that's right. That's what a podcast here. Yeah, that was very normal for me to go and work either with cows, dried cabbage heads, or highly trained dancers in the MOMIX company. For me, I go in and I don't train them to dance. I hopefully just release them to find the dance within them and then let that go in improvisational ways that it goes into the mad mosaic by Moses, that it has an alchemical principle to it. In other words, you don't really think about what you're making. You just put some various elements together, put it in the mix and spin it, and hopefully it comes out a golden idea for a new dance. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's leaden and it's black and it sinks to the bottom of your mud puddle. The training is, and the fun of it is to do it collectively at a certain level. I would go in, get I would be more a catalyst for choreography. Go and inspire them like my Professor Cox inspired me. I have to be like him and give them some inspiration that allows them to find their dance. And maybe we do it in a way an eye with an outside eye would try to help direct it. I also use many other elements to create an image that might be you use dance in part, but it's a mixture of lighting, sound, temperature in the audience. I get most concerned about the temperature because all of this has an effect on how whatever it is you've worked so hard at doing is perceived by an audience. So in order to create, I like to go outside and see what it is that Moses is makes it perhaps edits a bit in the early stages of creativity. It's an interesting process that I've been involved in and not dissociated from writing poems for romantic poetry classes or thinking up ways to amuse my friends at a dinner party. I've been interested in entertaining in a way that's something that's been fun for me. It keeps me young. And now, I mean, there's 50 years that separate me from the company. And in the early days we were all the same age. That is also what are they? They're pre gen. Z. They're millennials. Would they be in their early twenty s now? What are they? All right, give me an idea. Yeah. Gen Z could be the next full evening work. Something about in that strata you're talking about evolution and history. People put themselves not just Republicans and Democrats and atheists and Catholics, but Gen Z, millennials and boomers. I'm a boomer and I can't get out of it. I'm a late boomer. A very late, you know, in terms of inspiration, many times right now, in August, we're rehearsing for two new shows that are going out all over the world in Italy and the US. Two different programs. But at the same time, in the afternoon, I try to create periods in the day where you get certain things of reality done, the dishes done and the dances rehearsed. But then the Dafry Movement Hour, the club, the nightclub in the afternoon. So we go over to our barn studio and I like, a DJ will find cool music and everything that will create the ambience. I work very synesthesia. You know what that means? There was a movement called synesthesia in which painters would attribute whatever they painted to what music they were listening to that drove their brain to make those visual decisions. And I'm a firm believer and of sound mind that what you listen to might be very attributable or what you're looking at is very attributable to what you're actually listening to. So when we go to make a new dance more like Bono or Edge or something I'm trying to make a score for them that gives them a place to play in a play pen, an acoustical play pen. The studio needs to be worked on acoustically. I have speakers in each corner. The barn. The barn. We don't call it a studio. We call it the barn. Everybody loves the barn. It was actually a renovated horse barn on our property. But we go out to the barn and now I realize it needs to be organized acoustically. And this is how I'm making the piece. I'm trying to get up the level of acoustics in the studio so that when people are out doing some kind of imitation of an octopus they do it in the spirit of this particular sound and it might help them. Like a therapist. How do you get someone to free up free up their blocks, unblock them and then you see that ultimately all of us are infinitely creative. You have to release those forces. And I do it through humor and being a good natured guy and trying to make it fun. Because in the end, anything and any kind of work you do, if you can make it fun, you probably do the work better. And you're not like, shutting down. You're actually expanding like sunlight on a morning pond.
Michael Sean Breeden:
No, I can just let you go all day. And I love this discussion of creativity and your exploration of your own mind, essentially. But how did you reach a point where having a company like Pilobolus or then later MOMIX became the sort of vessel for this creativity? At what point did you decide, like, we need some sort of formal vessel for explorations?
Moses Pendleton:
A very valid question there. We were very fortunate in the early days that our instructor, Alison Chase, at Dartmouth, one of our first assignments was to make our own dance. The idea of that we were making a dance. Dancers who were not dancers but knew how to cross country ski knew the other person. Stephen Johnson was Dartmouth's number one pole vaulter. So we start using on the stage. We thought we take what we know and then put it together. He actually did. Amazing. He ran down the center of the aisle with a real pole vault and pole vaulted onto the stage, out of the audience, hit the floor, rolled up, did a backhand spring and splattered the wall. And I said, I've never seen anything like this. This was pre Cirque du Soleil, this kind of thing. This is late 60s incredible. And so it was physical, but wild and put in another context. It's like putting running Holsteins in your theater, or putting theater. That kind of thing was fun and exciting, and we were getting academic credit for it anyway, we did this one piece called Pilobolus, which got us going. It was very athletic, sculptural again, putting three bodies and making them look as one thing was the thing. But someone who was the agent to Frank Zappa, friendly with him, invited us down to Smith College to perform this piece, Pilobolus. In their first month of taking a dance class, we're performing for 3000 screaming Smith girls to open Frank. Frank's, do you know what I'm talking about? Frank Zappa. Yeah, we opened for Zappa at Smith, and Zappa came and the place went wild. And you're asking me, how did you get into it? What encouraged you? This was just almost an accident that really sparked our collective imaginations that we could go further with this, whatever it is. And Frank actually came out and was quoted on the COVID of Timeout magazine in London, frank Zappa loves Pilobolus. Theater of the very far out. He didn't call us a dance company, he called us theater of the Very Far Out. I remember the students, King back, and Zappa said, guys, that was incredible. And they had Flo and Eddie of the Turtles who were with him as well. It was an incredible concert. But he said, can you come to Iowa City the next day? And I went, oh, Mr. Zappa, we love to do that, but we have a math exam at 10:00. But we went back to Hannah. We're charged, we use that word a lot. What charges you? What gives you a charge? We were charged. We sat in a cemetery, the old Dartmouth cemetery, eating lunch, the three of us, blobalis. We said, you know, I think we got something going here. And then we just built something out of nothing, really. And creating this kind of theater of the very far out that became Pilobolus, that transformed into MOMIX, I guess.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:20:45]:
Tell us about that, that transition to MOMIX.
Moses Pendleton [00:20:49]:
Well, Pilobolus was really an artistic collaborative, and I just think, like any rock band, the collaborations get a little stale and it doesn't feel so creative. And I was quite interested in going out and doing something a bit more where I'd have more actual control. That's changed. Now. I really don't care about control, but I was doing the same thing that I was telling you earlier about every beast has a different body to explore musically, artistically, and you want to bring that beast out. It could be a very quiet white lotus if you were looking at certain ballerinas that they're so delicate, you can't even breathe in their presence. They'll fall over. I love that frailty. And so I was seeing a real diversity of human forms, feminine, masculine, collectively, individually. That was very exciting. And the philosophies that you put out, the messages really are kind of what I think about doing. And so I'm feeling more responsible now as to what I say and how I say it. Whereas in the early days I had no idea what I was saying or why I just said it. And I get in trouble. I get a lot of trouble. It's different because I've always lived this collective mind. So I'm bringing kind of prefacing. My latest and most powerful passion is photography. I have really found a release in working solo. I call it in. My little joker parole. My puns sol. Two words etude sun studies. And it's. And I go every day studying and editing and taking more pictures. It's kind of like the shrinking of Monet. In his latter years, he was a world traveler and everything, but he moved to know outside of Paris with his wife and to create a little microcosm of the world, including his lily pond, which was his ocean. And he was really someone who was very attracted to the sea. And so he made his own little as an artist, you can imagine enough. It doesn't take much if you're a really good artist, it doesn't take much to spark the imagination to create worlds all around you in your own backyard and in his own lily palm and then paint them and study them and worship them in a way and live by them. This is what I'm finding. The biographies of famous painters and I'm respecting of their work. Monet always comes to mind because of his connection to the outside, to the plenaire aspect of creativity. That's something that I grow tens of thousands of sunflowers currently. This is part of my choreography, if you will, is just keeping them alive from deer and parasites and inclement weather. I have a lot of babies in the basket. Tens of thousands of giant Russian mammoths that I'm growing in order to show them with a video I make with my cell phone. I can do everything. My right hand is my DP and my left hand is my actor right? I'm always filming my hand being the dance of my hand with a flower sketching splats of shaving cream in a mud puddle to create kind of bordan like cultures. I want to hear about how all these outside things are like the photography you're doing and caring for nature, like raising sunflowers and how does that impact the work you do?
Michael Sean Breeden:
Let's talk specifically about a work that will be seen at Performing Arts Houston September 16th and 17th. How does that outside work impact what the creative process is in the studio?
Moses Pendleton:
Okay, so, for example, my passion for flowers is manifested, or you wouldn't be surprised to see a garden of flowers manifested through MOMIX bodies and stretch fabric and projections in Alice, which is what we did. It was in Alice in Wonderland as well. The plant world is another area that finds itself easily in whatever works that MOMIX has ever done, even to the point they're pieces of it in baseball. So I'm always moving in the floral and a floral footstep, even though the flowers might be like lilies floating on a liquid surface that was reflecting something above, that was the whole thing about reflections. The one thing about Alice, and I must say it's not Alice in Wonderland, it's MOMIX is Alice. By that we mean that we used Alice to inspire us to make our own moments show inspired by Alice in Wonderland or Alice Underground, or as many people who come disgruntled from seeing Alice, these are all Alice Cooper fans. It could be that there is a part of like in the word MOMIX, it's never one thing. It's a mix of light imagery, iconic characters drawn from Alice in Wonderland, like you were dreaming Alice in Wonderland. And there's a slash of the Cheshire Cat and a movement of a tall lady and just enough things, because we were playing with the fact that most people know Alice in Wonderland. So that is the first movement. The first movement is what we think the audience understands. When you say Alice or Alice in know, they all want to bring their you know, everyone was by Disney just recently someone asked, Ever, were you inspired by the book? I said I was more inspired by other people's inspirations of the book, namely Disney. Disney put what's like I grew up on Alice in Wonderland only through how Disney and their writers and animators translated Alice in Wonderland. And in fact, in my research about Lewis Carroll and Dodson and the initial book, you never would have heard of Alice in Wonderland if it wasn't for the fortunate occurrence of having one of the great illustrators, Teniel illustrate Carol's first book. So it was really a book that you looked at as much as you read, and it's always being translated visually. That's what Lewis Carroll hoped would happen with his book. Originally, his main goal in the end, was to have Alice in Wonderland as a musical comedy on the West End in London, of which he oversaw over 100 productions, attempts to do Alice in Wonderland, mostly to his delight. That's how he was doing dramaturgy for a live show. It's fascinating and many people throughout, so it was always meant to be visualized, illustrated, played with. Another inspiration was Salvador Dali, who was commissioned to make twelve paintings based on Alice in Wonderland. And if you didn't know that, first off, you would have no idea what it is you're looking at. You would say, that's a very interesting Dali. But you see, he would take liberties. And so what Alice is doing is bringing out the Alice in you or in Moses or in MOMIX or in Dolly or in Tennial. That's what this book has been doing. And what did Disney draw from the book anyway? We took a lot of liberties with that. We had permission, therefore, to go ahead and make something that is not the book. The real Lewis Carroll aficionados will go away from the show a bit perplexed perhaps, because they want to say, where's the trial? Why isn't is what is Humpty Dumpty doing in Alice in Wonderland? Of course, Disney mixed Alice in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass, they just took characters out of one and the other and mixed them together. And basically it's about going down the rabbit hole and going down the rabbit hole kind of in today's kind of uptight political scene is a negative. For me. That was always a positive. That was almost a necessity. And we've made a show using projections, music, strange dancing, and referencing Alice in Wonderland to some king of experience where you just go nonstop down a moment's rabbit hole, and hopefully you were inspired by it and walk out with a little less gravity in your step.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:30:28]:
We're excited for the audiences at Performing Arts Houston to get that inside look into your brain and your arts and everything that inspires you. It's been so wonderful to hear about all of that, so we hope everyone will come out September 16 and 17 to see ‘Alice’.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:30:44]:
Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciated it.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:30:50]:
Conversations on Dance is part of the Acastcreator network. For more information, visit conversationsondancepod.com.