Momix Botanica, Ruth Seaton James Center for the Performing ArtsIn the vast world of the arts, Momix stands on its own.This troupe of dancers draws its audience into its futuristic dreamscapes a world which is a joyful and fun and fills its audiences with bemused delight.Momix’s reputation does precede them.Momix Botanica opened at the Bermuda Festival on Valentine’s Day, and played to an excited audience that almost entirely filled Ruth Seaton James Center for the Performing Arts for the first night of their three-performance run.Momix’s programme quotes a phrase from Maurice Maeterlinck’s ‘The Intelligence of Flowers’: “The plant strains its whole being in one single plan: to escape above ground from the fatality below; to elude and transgress the dark and weighty law, to free itself, to break the narrow sphere, to invent or invoke wings, to escape as far as possible, to conquer space wherein fate encloses it, to approach another kingdom, to enter a moving animated world.”And Momix does reflect the ever-evolving carnival of life and ambition. Moses Pendleton, who conceived and directs Momix, as well as creating the video and musical aspects of the show, has come up with a completely unique expression of existence and its evolution.It opens with a rose in full bloom filling a projection screen at the back of the stage. As the camera pulled back, it revealed a seemingly frozen foreground; the rose, floating in space, transformed into a planetary body. The landscape, a desolate scene, came to life with waves that ebbed and flowed, and then revealed emerging human figures, pressing against the waves of fabric which represented the ocean. As I saw it, in one short scene the audience is moved from a single, beautiful example of life to the sense of how small each element of existence is in relation to the universe, and finally, the emergence of life from the ocean.Indeed, the anemone-like structures which intermittently decorate the stage not only give a sense of the sea from which life itself has emerged, but because they are created from parachute fabric, give its futuristic feel as well.It is an array of swirling, evolving, abstract scenes fluorescent bobbing birds emerging in and out of the darkness. A dinosaur skeleton becomes an all-consuming dancing partner, while a performer’s movements on a slanting mirror becomes a kaleidoscope of legs and arms; disembodied limbs turn into snakes, insects and birds as well as an extravagantly costumed, fiery Latin fiesta.For the most part it is instinctively natural in terms of form and influence, from the gorgeous costumes that evolve while the scene itself evolves and dancers that appear from nowhere and then disappear. Often one is barely aware there is human being involved in the scene at all, as they are transformed to become part of an organic undulations of the unfolding scene.Momix Botanica is an experience. It stimulates the audience’s senses and ideas, and it challenges the status quo. In a highly commercialised world, it pounds our conscious with a vigorous reminder that we are, in fact, all a part of the natural universe.