Sun. Jan. 27

  Moses Pendleton – choreographer, former dancer, co-founder of the famous Pilobolus Dance Theatre in 1972, founder of MOMIX in 1981 – is well-known for his unique approach to dance. He’s achieved a measure of fame over the years, too, by choreographing the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980 and rock videos for the likes of Prince. He’s choreographed the opera “Carmen.” A Dartmouth College graduate with a B.A. in English Literature and an ardent Red Sox fan, Pendleton was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1977. With MOMIX, he’ll mix acrobatics, dance, lights, props and ambient music, often by Peter Gabriel or Brian Eno. He’s been long identified with the avant-garde.
     It’s a term the 58-year-old Pendleton ponders, thinking back to his early work. “It was avant-garde,” he says. “Now, it’s neo-avant-garde. I mean it’s been around for a while. That’s always the pressure: What do you make that’s really avant-garde? I do the things I’m interested in. I spend a lot of time in garden doing research. Call it avant-gardening. I shake the sod off and root around for a new dance. Every year, I have early new recruits for MOMIX. I have two acres in Connecticut in the shape of a giant sun, in need of weeding, so I encourage the recruits to find their soul. Of course, I m getting my garden weeded. You’ve read ‘Tom Sawyer.’ It’s hard to find to good help.”
     MOMIX currently has 45 people employed in three different countries performing three different shows. What Pendleton does says – considering the large body of work created over the past 27 years – “is try and maintain old and make the room and energy to think of the next piece. You go game by game, step by step, and we’re only as good as our next piece.” In development now is something called  “Botanica.” What MOMIX is bringing to the Cutler Majestic Theatre for a three-show performance wrapping Sun. Jan. 27  is a “Best of MOMIX” production.

     The Boston show, presented by CRASHarts, has eight dancers, who Pendleton says, “require physical strength, and the ability to create a very sculptural, l visual kind of dance – modern, ballet. It requires very well-trained, athletic, dynamic dancers.” The dancers range in age from 19 to 53.
           The nearly two-hour “The Best of MOMIX,” says Pendleton, takes various selections from five different MOMIX shows and puts them into a show he likens to a ‘compilation album.’ The idea of the mix is to create a visualization of an album, short, dynamic pieces, 3-to-5 minutes. It goes back to almost to intimate, almost surreal, vaudevillian acts. There’s no logic to the show, or maybe it’s the logic of illogical. But there’s a curve to the evening. Expect the unexpected. Musically, the pieces line up. Imagination-wise, they go all over the place. MOMIX is a mixture: physical, visual theater, acrobatics, gymnastics, lighting and sound.”
     Does this remind anyone of the the hugely popular Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based dance-theater group that constantly has shows traveling around the world, not to mention two stationery ones in Las Vegas?
    “We were around a long time before Cirque du Soleil,” says Pendleton, “ but there certainly is a connection to their non-literal dream kind of theater, using music and lights, I think we’re more dance-oriented than Cirque, but they’re both a type of physical theater. They moved it into mainstream. I don’t knock it.” (A longer version of the piece is up on the revamped www.newengland.com site.) The Sunday show is  at 3 p.m. Tickets: $50-$40. We saw Friday's performance - it was a complete rush. Sensual, elliptical, ethereal. A wonderful evening of beauty and escape, art and illusion.

219 Tremont St.,617-876-4275  www.worldmusic.org