MOMIX's ALICE! Inaugurates TPAC's 2022-23 International Dance Series This Weekend
Company founder Moses Pendleton Says Audiences Will See ALICE IN WONDERLAND With a New Focus
Moses Pendleton, the founder and artistic director of MOMIX - the celebrated dance company that inaugurates Tennessee Performing Arts Center's 2022-23 International Dance Series this weekend - readily admits that he's had a lifelong affinity for Lewis Carroll and his fanciful tale of a young girl whose unexpected journey to Wonderland provides the inspiration for the company's Alice! which will transport audiences from the James K. Polk Theatre on their own wondrously captivating journey.
"I've always identified in some ways with Lewis Carroll and in terms of Alice in Wonderland, I have been playing around with themes from the story for years," Pendleton admits in a telephone conversation from his home "away in the woods" prior to the company's trip to Music City. "Years ago, I created a 20-minute piece inspired by Alice in Wonderland with my daughter when she was 10 years old. It has always seemed a good fit for Momix."
While Carroll's surrealistic tale serves as inspiration for MOMIX's Alice!, audience members shouldn't expect a total retelling of the story, Pendleton suggests. Rather, the original story has inspired what is perhaps an even more surrealistic, more fantastic tale.
"I don't intend to retell the story, but to use it as a taking off point for invention," he says.
"The story sets itself up for various interpretation," Pendleton explains, pointing to a series of artistic interpretations created by Salvador Dali that likewise expound upon the themes in Carroll's tale, but which "you wouldn't have any idea that it's about Alice in Wonderland."
Thus, when Pendleton began to bring his own vision of Alice to life, he and company members found themselves developing some of the iconic characters - "the White Rabbit becomes a group of rabbits, and you'll find Cheshire cats and the lobster quadrille from Alice in Wonderland, but we took everything and did it with a MOMIX aesthetic" - and imbuing the new work with the company's trademark physicality and awe-inspiring imagination.
The resulting production is clearly a fantasy, taking audiences down their own rabbit hole, merging the unconscious and the fantasy world created to provide a vibrant since of escapism that Pendleton says is "good for the welfare of the country" at this point in contemporary life.
"It's a good escape, a valid escape," he says. "And it has its own relevancy in that way."
By creating an illusion of the fantastic world suggested by Carroll's prose, MOMIX's Alice! is "entertaining, funny and fast-moving."
Described as "one of America's most wildly creative companies, MOMIX is recognized as a maverick of creativity and invention." MOMIX's Alice! plays Friday and Saturday night, January 27 and 28, at TPAC, with curtain at eight o'clock each evening.
In addition to MOMIX's Alice!, the 2022-23 International Dance Series also includes Ballet Hispanico's DOÑA PERÓN (playing April 28 and 29), an explosive portrait of Eva "Evita" Perón, one of the most recognizable and controversial women in Argentinian history and The Scottish Ballet's THE CRUCIBLE (May 19 and 20), an unmissable and thrilling ballet that unleashes the emotional force of Arthur Miller's masterpiece, vividly accompanied by the Scottish Ballet Orchestra performing Peter Salem's haunting score.
For tickets and for further information, call the TPAC Box Office at (615) 782-4040 or go to www.TPAC.org.
From This Author - Jeffrey Ellis
Jeffrey Ellis is a Nashville-based writer, editor and critic, who's been covering the performing arts in Tennessee for more than 35 years. In 1989, Ellis and his partner l... (read more about this author)
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