SARATOGA SPRINGS -- Part dance, part magic act, part light show, Momix performed "Botanica," its current spectacle, in its Saratoga Performing Arts Center debut Thursday night before a large, appreciative crowd. This fantasia about the natural world displayed the ingenuity of its creator, company founder and director Moses Pendleton, and the dash and precision of Momix's 10 members, cleverly costumed by Pendleton, Phoebe Katzin and Cynthia Quinn.
All works of art create illusions of some kind. In dance, the performers may literally run, leap, balance and spin, but those gestures create a larger illusionistic realm in which the dance unfolds, with or without a story.
In this symbolic world, a prince might fall in love with an enchanted swan, or a soloist magnetize her corps de ballet. The physical actions our senses actually perceive onstage mark just the beginning of the symbolic feelings our imagination understands.
Momix, which calls itself "a company of dancer-illusionists," follows an entirely different method, in which much that we see is already illusory. Under dramatic lighting, bolts of fabric rippling over the floor become ocean waves, with hidden dancers forming peaks and troughs. Suddenly the fabric turns into snowdrifts, blanketing human forms that materialize and disappear.
Such metamorphoses make up Momix's standard strategy. As a woman performs lying atop a mirror, she and her reflection create crustaceans, insects and complicated flowers. Black-light illuminates portions of invisible dancers that start as paramecia, divide, and evolve into sharks, nesting geese, cobras and, ultimately, leaping ballet dancers. A 10-dancer centipede divides into five two-dancer centaurs.
One of "Botanica's" most striking evolutionary threads shows five women beginning as orange-and-pink sea anemones, their hands projecting through feathery flounces to form the creatures' mouths. Popping their heads out, the women grow into strange flowers. They lower their flora to their hips, where they ride like tutus. Gathering them to their breasts in front, they strut and scratch like chickens. Finally, they lower the flowered bands near their ankles and end the segment as whirling flamenco dancers.
"Botanica" also uses large-scale puppets by Michael Curry, most remarkably a triceratops skeleton that encounters an Eve figure while her Adam slumbers. She rides the dinosaur, kisses and fondles it, and pops her head in its mouth. It grows enraged, devouring her, and in a rather juvenile joke, she then emerges from a pile of prehistoric poo.
In most dance companies we notice individual performers, even in ensemble works, identifying dancers we especially admire. In Momix, everyone remains anonymous, working together as the cogs in an illusionistic machine.
"Botanica's" 10 brilliantly functioning cogs therefore deserve recognition: Dajuan Booker, Jonathan Bryant, Simona Ditucci, Morgan Hulen, Jenny Levy, Elizabeth Loft, Nicole Loizides, Graci Meier, Matt Schanbacher and Jason Williams.
Nevertheless, despite Momix's prodigious talent and visually arresting style, "Botanica" proceeds episodically instead of creating dramatic tension. While often dazzling moment to moment, the 90-minute work doesn't build to emotional climaxes or imaginative revelations, and the evening of illusionistic spectacle starts flagging as some episodes run overlong.
For an encore, though, the cast cuts loose in a brightly lit, percussive dance that bristles with dynamism. As they wave long, corrugated plastic tubes to form fresh sea creatures and shoot solar flares, it is gratifying to see these hardworking performers' faces at last.
Dance critic Jay Rogoff is an author and professor at Skidmore College.