MOMIX – ALICE
Mimi Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square
Cleveland, OH
October 11, 2025 (2 & 7:30 pm)

By Steve Sucato

Using Lewis Carroll’s famous 1865 novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as a jumping-off point, MOMIX founder Moses Pendleton’s dance version of the iconic tale appeared to follow more of the hallucinogenic inferences in Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 song “White Rabbit” along with the surrealism of Salvador Dali’s 1969 Illustrations for a special reissue of Carroll’s novel. 

Presented by DANCECleveland as part of its 69th season, Pendleton’s visual and physical theater troupe, last in Cleveland in 2022, returned to Playhouse Square’s Mimi Ohio Theatre this past Saturday to wow audiences with their trippy 2019  production, ALICE.

The nearly 90-minute show in two acts and 22 scenes was set to an eclectic soundtrack, including music by Danny Elfman, Franz Ferdinand, Gotye, Grace Slick’s aforementioned “White Rabbit,” and many others.

While Carroll’s well-known characters appear in MOMIX’s production, his book’s storyline is fragmented, nonlinear, and incomplete. Characters appear in multiplicity, including four or more different Alices and ten rabbits. The production’s wonderfully inventive scenes, many of them familiar and some not in the novel, came at the audience like a fever dream: spurious and jumbled. Several were humorous and visually captivating, while some contained the stuff of nightmares. 

A founding member of Pilobolus in the early 1970s, a dance company best known for its non-traditional partnering and highly physical, sculptural movement, Pendleton took that approach to movement and married it with a grander theatricality to create MOMIX in 1980. That formula has led to a number of popular productions, including Botanica, Opus Cactus, and Lunar Sea.

Act one of ALICE began rather pastoral, with Alice sitting on a giant swing, set against a projected backdrop of a summer meadow and stream, and reading a book called “Alice.” A character reading a book about themselves and turning it upside down as she went was the first clue that this version of her tale was going to get curiouser and curiouser.

Highlighting the act were the many Alice’s repeatedly popping up and falling back down rabbit holes in the form of giant barrels. As they wooshed down, their dresses flew up around them. In another scene titled “A Trip of Rabbits,” ten dancers in rabbit masks creepily moved as if in a horror movie. Dark-eyed stares fixated on the audience as some rabbit heads turned, as if assessing weaknesses. 

Humor followed in “The Tweedles” as four dancers donned giant Gerber baby-like masks and fancifully moved about the stage to the delight of the audience. 

A lobster quadrille, images of seemingly bodiless mad hatters, a battle between the Queens of Clubs and Spades, followed, before act one ended with “Cracked Mirrors,” where specially angled mirrors were used to create the illusion of performers dancing with and partnering themselves.

Act two continued with the bizarre and beautiful, including a scene in a jungle forest, one of the Alice’s being transformed into a giant spider, a scene within a church with stained glass windows, apparitions, and the vibe of an Exorcist film. 

Alice concluded with the last of several scenes showing the many Alices growing shorter and taller. Here, Alice, surrounded by her counterparts, was raised up toward the rafters in a long, growing gown, as if ascending the rabbit hole in her mind back to the place where all her adventures begin.