The Stage

Lunar Sea

Published Wednesday 15 November 2006 at 17:00 by Katie Phillips

After last year’s visual spectacle of glowing, morphing desert creatures in Opus Cactus, Moses Pendleton brings his high impact circus/dance/visual theatre company back to London with Lunar Sea, fresh from touring the USA.

Pendleton once again uses his remarkable powers of imagination and vision to combine the planets and an underwater world in this luminescent visual spectacle of levitating moon beams and psychedelic jellyfish, amongst a variety of other fascinating creatures.

Opening scenes of illusion prompt the auditorium to burst into whispers of “perhaps they’re models” or “they must be using wires”. Once you get it, you’re in on the secret and that’s what makes the Momix experience so delightful, the fact that the company constantly offers you gems of visual intrigue and excellence from their mystical box of delights.

Dancers morph into one another, their foreheads pressed together, bodies rippling in clever physical illusion to become ghosts flitting through the night, ethereal mermaids swimming across the dark stage, ice skating planets, glowing, shunting, whirling and spinning mid-air.

The brilliance of the company can be seen in that they do not only rely on the spectacle created by costumes and props but by the shapes that can be created by the body and that powerful tool - the imagination. Give them a shower curtain and an umbrella and you get jellyfish. Give them a pair of stripy Camden market tights and you get a carnivorous spider or two.

Aquarium like music accompanying the dreamy revellers as they perform rolling hypnotic movements on a dark stage is as relaxing as it is enchanting.