Given choreographer Moses Pendleton’s penchant to thrill and enchant his audiences worldwide with dance performances “blending illusion and acrobatics with a sense of whimsy and wonder,” according to the Cal Performances website, it’s no wonder the founder and artistic director of the Connecticut-based dance company MOMIX chose “Alice in Wonderland” as the inspiration for his latest production, Alice.
The show uses contemporary dance, acrobatics, masks, imaginative props, puppetry, and improvisation, along with projected imagery, inventive lighting, and a genre-crossing soundtrack, to create an alternate reality with many curious illusions.
Alice is slated to make its Bay Area premiere at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley on Saturday and Sunday, November 29–30, as part of Cal Performances’s 2025–2026 season. A troupe of just eight “dancer-illusionists” will create all the many characters in the production.
Moses Pendleton, who just received the prestigious 2025 Richard Brettell Award in the Arts, was one of the co-founders of the groundbreaking Pilobolus Dance Company in 1971. He then went on to found MOMIX by himself in 1981. The company is known worldwide for its wildly imaginative and visually thrilling productions, and Pendleton has been the driving force and visionary artist who has brought them all to life with innovative panache.
When asked if Alice was different from previous Momix shows, Pendleton replied, “There’s been a huge leap in what we can do with projections and lighting. I’ve always been intrigued with light and image, but Alice definitely takes that side of MOMIX to another level. You’ll see props and ideas that are unique to Alice, illusions we built especially for this world.”
“We are constantly changing who we are,” said MOMIX dance captain Seah Hagan, who joined the company 10 years ago at age 18. “Whether we are a rabbit, or the Queen of Diamonds, or Alice, the actual mental shift between those types of characters happens in a split second as you change your costume and change your mindset.”
Hagan explained that one of the most distinctive things about MOMIX is the use of multiple props in their performances, an uncommon technique in classical ballet or modern dance.
“It becomes the addition to your body, the thing that you are bringing to life on the stage, almost like puppeteering,” she said.
She added that for this show, she had to learn to use some new props — a bungee apparatus and rigging for flying among them — which was a huge learning curve for her.
Alice premiered in 2019 and is Pendleton’s fifth production for MOMIX. But Hagan explained that they always manage to keep their productions fresh.
“Momix shows are like living, breathing organisms; they don’t ever stay the same,” the dancer said. “So, if you saw Alice in 2019 and you came back now and saw it again, the show would be vastly different.”
The troupe is constantly polishing and growing the show, and dancers cycle in and out over the years, so nuances and details change or become more refined.
The show’s many fantastical illusions often leave the audience wondering how they were done, a credit to the performers who have to work hard to be in good enough shape to pull them off authentically. And MOMIX is proud to claim that all of these special effects are indeed created by the dancers themselves.
The musical score for Alice, also chosen by Pendleton, adds yet another layer to the rich multi-sensory mix.
“We use music to break down inhibitions, to let the dancers slip into the unconscious and discover images they didn’t know they had,” said Pendleton. "So the music starts as ignition and ends as atmosphere.”
Hagan said she believes there is a huge psychedelic element to the 1865 Alice in Wonderland novel by Lewis Carroll, which is enhanced in MOMIX’s own interpretation — although Alice does not necessarily follow the original tale.
Pendleton agrees, especially since he was living in San Francisco in the late ‘60s, in the heart of the hippy/ psychedelic era.
“I’m a child of that era,” recalled Pendleton. “And before I ever founded a company I was doing free-dancing in Golden Gate Park for Quicksilver Messenger Service. In a way, I learned to follow the rabbit hole right there in San Francisco, so it’s a homecoming of sorts for me."
When asked if Alice is MOMIX’s most “fantastical” show, Hagan replied that in its own way, she believed it was.
“We took such a loose interpretation of Alice in Wonderland itself,” the dancer said. “And it took a lot of inspiration from of course the [original] story, but also from the John Tenniel illustrations [in the original book], and also from [Salvador] Dalí’s interpretation, so it’s an abstract Alice. It’s a really imaginative and fantastical show — a spectacle, and we’re really excited to be coming.”
