DANCE REVIEW : Familiar Works in Momix Program in L.A.

Director Moses Pendleton kept his dancers hidden behind body masks or shadow screens for so much of the largely familiar Momix program at the Wiltern Theatre on Thursday that we seemed to be seeing some of them for the first time in their curtain calls.

Except for Cynthia Quinn (who lives with Pendleton and their daughter), they were scarcely individualized even when fully on view--a curious anonymity for artists expressing an irrepressibly idiosyncratic creative viewpoint. Momix performs May 5 and 6 at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo.

Where the original cast and co-choreographers of “Skiva” projected an awesome sensuality, this gymnastic, bare-chested pas de deux on skis is now meekly performed by Lisa Giobbi and Kurt Baumann as just another special-effect novelty--like “Helva,” in which Joseph Mills does Elvis Presley moves with a TV screen for a face. Baumann and Giobbi don’t demand their quota of body worship, don’t haunt our imaginations, don’t make any dent whatsoever.

“E.C.” from 1982 continues to be the theater-of-wonders showpiece that sets the Momix audience aflame. But Quinn’s smaller-scale choreography and nuanced dancing give the program a different kind of distinction, whether she’s manipulating a dummy-partner through ballroom maneuvers in the comic “When We’re Alone” or fluidly tracing unusual broken-extensions (with both arms and her free foot aligned behind her) in the lyrical “Bird in My Dreams.”

However, her new solo coda to “Stabat Mater” is a mistake: a whirlwind of spinning (sometimes on her knees) that undercuts the psycho-sexual intensity of the preceding duet section. Created for Pilobolus by Pendleton, Quinn and Timothy Latta, “Stabat Mater” points to the kind of potent movement theater that Momix has now largely abandoned in favor of fun and games.

Set to music by Vivaldi, it shows a hooded postulant praying inside a Gothic arch, caressing the pillars and reaching upward. But when the arch turns out to be a man’s legs (extended through the use of stilts), we reinterpret her devotion as sublimated desire--and his avoidance as fear of sex. Quinn and Torin Porter make forbidden fruit seem very tempting indeed. And what a relief after the empty, decorative cleverness of the “Spawning” balloon act or the old “Venus Envy” shell game.

Momix performs May 5 at 8 p.m. and May 6 at 3 p.m. in the McKinney Theatre at Saddleback College, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Tickets: $12 to $14. Information: (714) 582-4656.