Dance

The Momix house program tells us that Lunar Sea, new to New York, was “conceived and directed”—notice, not “choreographed”—by Moses Pendleton, the founder and leader of the popular troupe now celebrating its 25th birthday. Indeed, though its 10 performers are clearly proficient movers, Sea is not a dance but rather multimedia light entertainment for the eyes that blithely ignores engaging the mind or heart. In black light, behind a scrim alive with projections of moon geography and other amazing aspects of nature, figures sheathed in pale, luminous head-to-foot body stockings pretzel themselves into impossible shapes, ingeniously supported by colleagues nearly invisible in dusky space suits. Already depersonalized, even dehumanized, they’re sometimes flown mechanically, like postmodern Peter Pans, or replaced entirely by Michael Curry’s phantasmagorical abstract puppets. Pendleton must have realized that 85 unbroken minutes of this stuff would pall, and offsets it with a red-lit male-female duet evoking the metamorphoses of nightmares and erotic dreams. I was more interested in the way the moon tricks worked and would have been happiest attending a tech rehearsal.