Sunday: A celebration of nature at Harbison Theatre

Like its name suggests, “Botanica,” an upcoming show from contemporary dance company Momix, is an homage to the blooming, blossoming, natural world around us.

In the production, which comes to Harbison Theatre at Midlands Technical College on Sunday, Nov. 15, dancers evoke the four seasons through avant garde costumes, fantastical props and lush backdrops.

The 90-minute work starts with winter and features more than 20 performance pieces set to music from Vivaldi to Peter Gabriel to trance.

In one piece, a dancer dons a headdress made of thousands of beads, spinning and twirling to create the image of a cobweb dotted with early morning dew.

In another, a pack of whimsical centaurs gallop across the stage, two dancers bent to form one beast.

At a certain point, several dancers twist and writhe on angled mirrors, giving them the appearance of many-legged creatures.

Props play a large part in the performance, helping create whatever illusions Momix artistic director and chief daydreamer Moses Pendleton imagines.

“You start with the prop and the image, and then see what you come up with,” he said.

Momix was founded in 1981, and “Botantica” has been touring since 2009. The company is based in rural Connecticut, where Pendleton finds inspiration in the forest, fields and lakes around his home. (The name “Momix” comes from a milk supplement his family fed calves on the Vermont farm where he grew up.)

Critics have not always reviewed “Botanica” favorably, sometimes seeing its chimerical creations as more flash than substance.

But that’s because the show is set up more to please crowds than critics, Harbison Theatre’s executive director Katie Fox said.

“I think there’s a really wide swath of what’s available within contemporary dance. Momix is on the more accessible side of it,” she said. “You don’t have to be looking at it, trying to find whether or not it depicts a dance technique. You can look at it and be moved emotionally. You can see and recognize the image of a cloud or a flower petal.”

For those reasons, she added, the show is a great introduction to contemporary dance for kids or people new to dance.

Pendleton is more interested in the image than the choreography.

“I take a painterly, sculptural approach to dance theater,” he said. “I’m interested in how to present the imagery first and then try to move it through time and space. It’s more of a visual, physical theater.”

The Momix dancers – five men and five women – have to be in excellent shape. (It takes a very strong back to form half a centaur, after all.)

For the visuals, Pendleton goes on long walks every day, “wandering the hills with my Nikon looking for mysteries.” An avid photographer, he is lately interested in taking pictures of milkweeds (“They’re very gossamer and magical”).

His explorations in the natural world are seeds for new dances. In his garden, he plants fields of sunflowers, which he encourages his dancers to come out and weed. He tells them they will find their soul in the soil.

He also grows tens of thousands of marigolds, which are arranged in orange rays coming out of a circle, like a huge sunburst.

“I thought that if I was that passionate about growing them, maybe part of that could be in the show,” he said.

They are. In the dance “Marigolds,” female dancers embody the flowers onstage, their legs delicately extending from colorful petticoat poofs.

“I can’t bring Columbia audience to my garden,” Pendleton said, “but I can take my garden to Columbia.”

This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 11:04 AM.