Thrown for a Curve in ‘Baseball’

Here’s a riddle that sounds like it’s about sports and dance, but in fact it’s about neither--Momix’s touring show “Baseball.” This 1995 evening-long collage of images, slides and vintage baseball sound bites is a riddle because it has none of the game structure of the sport it’s named for, and few of the bodily pleasures of dance, and yet it seems to want to encompass both.

That said, the audience at the half-full Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach on Saturday night seemed happy enough to watch this series of variations on a theme. The action ranged between athletic, cute and lyrical, although once it strayed into disturbing territory--in one scene, a dancer dressed as a puffy baseball was rhythmically beaten with a bat, while references to slavery were made.

Mostly, however, it was a whimsy fest. Baseball bats that looked like giant cotton swabs were cleverly used as oars and drumsticks, or used to support small leaps and cartwheels. Momix magic made balls seem to dance and float. Dancers stretched into stylized pitches and swings, boogied in giant beer cans and draped themselves over huge rocking props to the overblown strains of “We Are the Champions.”

All of this was seen through a gauzy scrim, on which slides were projected--ball parks; newspaper headlines; pictures of Mantle, Ruth and Aaron; and endless close-ups of baseballs--lit like the moon or just giantized for inspection. So as not to confuse baseball with something that is “only a game,” there were also slides of religious art and Greek sculpture.

“Baseball” originated when Momix artistic director Moses Pendleton and his dancers were commissioned to make a short work to open spring training for the San Francisco Giants in 1992--a bold idea that evidently never caught on in the major leagues. As a genre, “whimsical homages to team sports” is still off to a slow start.