Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: A sense of wonder pervades "Botanica," the visually stunning two-hour show by the Momix dance company that opened the Pittsburgh Dance Council season on Friday night at the Byham Theater, Downtown.
Momix, like the Pilobolus company of which it is an offshoot, amazes its audiences with novel uses of its dancers' bodies, especially in combinations of dancers in pairs or trios. It's not only the initial combination but the way they are used that makes the show so much fun to experience.
2 comments:
The dancers in the production sound very well trained and convincing in their art. Often in the industry dance is put aside as puff pieces, and I'm not going to say that's entirely wrong, but there is an amazing power that dance has on the audiences. The fact that this show seemed to have made new ways for dancers to come together and perform as one says a great deal about how much poetic licence there is in dance, and how original intricate dance pieces are commonly created by good dance choreographers.
This style of dance, using the physical bodies of dancers to create larger images or ideas, has gained recent popularity thanks to the TV show America's Got Talent, where a similar group of dancers did quite well with the middle-American audience by creating national monuments and questionably clear storylines of childhood and innocence. It is impressive that Botanica is able to sustain a full 2 hour show with this style of dance without the novelty of the spectacle wearing off. Moreso, although there doesn't necessarily appear to be a traditional story arc, much like a Cirque show the characters often stand for larger ideas and it is the interplay of ideas that captivates the audience's intellect while the sheer spectacle of the event stimulates our senses.
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