If you’ve never seen a MOMIX show, you’re in for a treat. If you have, you know the wild, enthralling experience that awaits. The thing about MOMIX is that it’s impossible to categorize. The troupe lands somewhere among acrobatics, illusion, puppetry, theatrical spectacle, modern dance, contact improvisation, and the awe-inspiring thrill of a three-ring circus. 

Since its launch in the 80s by Pilobolus co-founders Moses Pendleton and Guggenheim Fellow Alison Chase, MOMIX has defied performing arts center genres. Where does something like MOMIX go on a season? Dance? Theater? Circus? Typically, MOMIX appears in the dance offerings simply because that’s the closest fit, although far from exact. 

 

In the 1970s, there was a mini era of enthusiastic experiments across all arts, visual and performing. Wild collaborations occurred; sensational out-of-the-box thinking opened whole vistas of new, unexpected works—from this revolution in curiosity and creation emerged culturally significant performing arts outliers that inspired the country. But, no one could clearly define what they were. We’re talking Jim Henson’s Muppets, Andy Warhol’s Happenings, punk rock, and movement theater pioneers like Pilobolus and MOMIX. 

MOMIX founders Pendleton and Chase specifically wanted to work with the body as an artistic tool to create extraordinary images. They understood that to achieve their vision, they would need to incorporate nontraditional dance elements like projections, inventive props, costumes engineered to transform and evoke, and let their definition of “music” be unlimited. In time, they referred to their cast not as dancers but as dancer-illusionists—a very important distinction. 

What emerged from MOMIX’s uncharted movement theater blew audiences away. Through stagecraft and sheer imagination, humans transformed into plants and animals, grew and shrank onstage, combined to create seemingly physically impossible sculptures, and incorporated prop play to achieve mind-bending optical illusions.  

MOMIX Arrives in Greenville  

This November, you’ll get the chance to see one of MOMIX’s most celebrated and popular works, Botanica. The show explores the cycles of nature, outfitting performers in lush, detailed costumes to create a fantastical world of birds, insects, flowers, and the seasons themselves. The music varies from natural sounds to Vivaldi, immersing us into the realm of life on earth with no human constructs, sweeping us into a surreal experience of nature's rhythms and beings. 

MOMIX’s performance here marks the first of this season’s hard-to-define, physics-defying dance offerings. Next up is Italy’s NoGravity Theatre in January with their stunning take on Dante’s The Divine Comedy. After that, see the world-renowned Pilobolus perform their intergalactic-multiverse-travel show TRIPS in March.