DANCE REVIEWS : Agile Dancers Make Up World of ‘Passion’

If you take a dozen or so genres of movement performance and arrange them into 21 short scenes with five beautifully agile dancer/athlete/mimes, you have “Passion,” a 1991 Moses Pendleton work presented by Momix at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa on Friday. It’s a kind of refined gymnastic spectacle, which takes place entirely behind a gauzy scrim and contains elements of playfulness, sculptural splendor and ceremonial reverence mixed with irreverence.

It begins with a nature theme, with flowers, trees and clouds projected on the scrim, and it ends with a crucifixion image--mind you, a somewhat playful one, since a lot of artful swinging on ropes is involved. Sacred overtones throughout come courtesy of the taped score: selections from Peter Gabriel’s music for the Martin Scorsese film “The Last Temptation of Christ.” But what “Passion” is about most is the creation of clever body shapes, which arrive or walk around in fun ways, whether they’re used in prayerful postures or playground antics. The bodies of the dancers (Erin Elliott, Steve Gonzales, Renee Jaworski, Cynthia Quinn and Brian Simerson) are in the foreground, nearly nude most of the time, lean and perfectly modulated as they scurry like graceful insects or arch into resplendent poses you’d find on an art nouveau lamp.

Variety and balletic suppleness are key, very like Cirque du Soleil, but Gabriel’s programmatic music, with its endlessly drawn-out, chant-like electronic hums, ominous stylized thunder and homogenized quotations from tribal, Indian classical or Middle Eastern rhythms, reduces the impact of the dancers’ energetic impulses. Or else the constant parade of clever shapes just starts to seem endless. In the face of such mechanically synthesized passion, it’s hard to tell.