Rooted in the Earth, Reaching to Heaven : Dance: Momix choreographer Moses Pendleton connects with nature in ‘Passion,’ coming Friday to OCC.

It isn’t easy to get hold of Momix choreographer Moses Pendleton. First you have to lure him away from his sunflower garden.

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“I spend a lot of time out there,” he said in a phone interview from his home in upstate Connecticut. “It’s sort of New Age until you realize how aggressive the squirrels are. They love to climb up the plants and break off the heads. So much for your love for small animals. It’s a rodent war out here.”

Then he must deal with man’s best friend. “Say, could you call back in about five minutes? I’ve got this dog gnawing at my ankles and I forgot to put him out. His name is Remy. He’s a Sheltie, a miniature collie. Think of a reduction of Lassie and turn the pitch control to the max.”

All this, he promises, will lead to discussion of his 75-minute work from 1991, “Passion,” which Momix will dance Friday at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

For starters, the work incorporates lots of slides of--what else?--sunflowers. “The piece opens inside an oak tree, very druidic, a pagan scene in a forest,” he said. “Then this module gets to hover over it and eventually explodes into a sunflower. It’s Tantric, dreamlike hallucinatory images, but connected to very flesh-like sexual imagery, but abstract. Like a cockroach without its pants.”

Huh? Pendleton laughs. “Well, I don’t know what a cockroach would look like with its pants on,” he said.

It’s clear that Pendleton has his own way of explaining things.

The dog figures into this explanation because he envisions it as part of “how you deal with an interruption--a high-pitched Sheltie barking at the back of your brain,” he said. “Part of my training up here is to see if I can concentrate under that constant bombardment. If you live in the city, it’s not the pollution in the air that’s the problem, it’s noise pollution. Here it’s bumblebees, Lyme tics, squirrels.”

He created the work for the Swiss mime troupe, the Movers. “I got a grant from the Bank of Zurich. So that got me going on it. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have done anything. It was a job.”

The dance is in 21 sections and is set to rock musician Peter Gabriel’s score for the Martin Scorsese film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis.

The music came first, he said. “I spent a summer listening to it. If you can listen to music 100 times, there’s a good chance of it [winding up] in a piece of yours.”

Still, when it came time to create the work, he turned to cello music by Offenbach. “This technique of maybe playing a very slow score and having that be the structure to improvise in, to have bodies reacting to, you come up with a certain kind of image. Then, you switch the sound score; that puts a hard edge to it. It gives it a dimension, so it’s not so flat.”

As usual with this innovative mime-theater-dance troupe, the choreography was a collaborative effort between choreographer and dancers, with each improvisatory session videotaped.

“It’s a way to get everyone involved in the piece,” Pendleton said. “This is very important. I’ve never worked by coming into a studio and telling people what to do. I’m more a catalyst for the choreography and then I have the final edit.

“We kind of set up the situation so that the dancers can play and get an idea what to do. If it’s a good working process, you get this free-associative behavior on a collective level with the dancers. Next morning, with the sobriety over the cup of coffee, everyone gets to see what they were dreaming about with their voices. We edit it down, and eventually it gets to be part of the piece.”

The process continues. “I was working on it today,” he said. “It’s gone through a state of metamorphosis. . . . We continue to chisel and hone it.”

“Passion,” he said, moves “from the earth to the heavens. Really we weren’t using any more logic than that. It has this sense of progression. It’s very dreamlike, almost hallucinatory, like Kazantzakis’ writing--not that we’re doing ‘The Last Temptation.’ But who’s to say we’re not doing the last temptation of somebody?”

Of Pendleton?

“Perhaps. I think every piece you do is a temptation. I start with a feeling. I don’t ever know where it will lead. It would be boring if you knew.”

In creating “Passion,” Pendleton called for technique ranging from the “very pagan-like through the balletic. The physical requirements are very high. It’s almost like witnessing some kind of Olympic event. There’s a section in which two golden side-lit men, very muscular, go through this routine of leapfrogging over each other. So there’s this question whether they can keep that up. So that’s passion on that purely physical level.”

There is also Christian imagery in the work, but Pendleton said he’s “[Joseph] Campbellian, rather than Christian. I don’t go to church, but I make sure I’m at the top of the house each day saying goodby to the sun. I get inspired and feel it’s very necessary to my routine to go through these rituals.

“I think in ‘Passion’ there’s this connection with plants and animals and minerals and how the human is connected to that. I believe in metamorphosis and connection, which I hope the audience will see,” he said. “It’s quite an undertaking to go through, but it helps put people into a trance, a kind of meditation. Our lives should incorporate more fantasy, more dream. That is part of our being. We should learn how to cultivate it.”

* Momix will dance Moses Pendleton’s “Passion” on Friday at Orange Coast College, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $27. (714) 432-5880.