Mostly Moses: touring the "Best of MOMIX".

In 1971, the ingenious, irrepressible Moses Pendleton took a dance class at Dartmouth College, decided not to go to business school, and instead formed a dance company with friends. They named it Pilobolus. A decade later Pendleton created his own company, MOMIX. Now 35 to 40 MOMIX dancers tour the world in two different squads, presenting Pendleton's zany, imaginative evenings.

Having just celebrated their silver anniversary, MOMIX dances into their 26th season, performing this month in Philadelphia at Dance Affiliates and at New York's Joyce Theater with a "Best of MOMIX" program--or, as Pendleton says, "The best we can do at the moment." The show includes excerpts from Lunar Sea, Opus Cactus, Baseball, and MOMIX in Orbit.

It was 29 years ago that Pendleton bought a 27-room Victorian house in Washington, Connecticut. It remains the company's base of operations, where he lives with Cynthia Quinn, MOMIX's associate director--"a morn and pop enterprise," Pendleton calls it. (The couple's daughter, Quinn Elizabeth, dances with Staatsballett Berlin, under Vladimir Malakhov.)

The company rehearses in a nearby horse barn, which was converted to a rehearsal space when Pendleton was choreographing the closing ceremonies for the 1980 Winter Olympics. It's a complex business running one of the few for-profit dance companies in the U.S. "For part of every day," Pendleton says, "I have to be Mr. Reality, Mr. Red Bull. We don't have a board of directors. But I do have dinner with Cynthia every night and we talk, go through the problems, make decisions. Candlelight, wine, fire and the nice dinner she prepares. It's not terribly corporate."

From the brief mixed-bag numbers with no storyline of the early MOMIX, often utilizing props such as skis or balls, the company's work has morphed into evening-length works, beginning with Passion, then Baseball, Opus Cactus, and Lunar Sea. Pendleton is working on a new evening for early 2008. Ever the nature lover, he says, "It will definitely involve itself in the botanical kingdom in some dreamlike way."

His most recent work, Lunar Sea, uses black light to create a picture that "erases the means of support to create more magic and illusion, like ballet on the moon." Pendleton says the dancers, who perform behind a screen wearing goggles, find the separation impersonal and prefer to dance in the bright lights.

Pendleton says of Pilobolus, "A lot of things weren't very nice to do, but if the audience liked it we put up with it. You had to have that outside eye, believe in the images the show was creating at the expense of having a cathartic, ecstatic dance experience."

While he retains the sense of collaboration that he learned from the Pilobolus period, Pendleton says he has never lost the "maniacal energy, that drive of student days." The private life beckons as well: "At some point you want to sit in the afternoon light and read your Baudelaire and disappear."

Pendleton describes his dance/theater as a secure environment. "A lot of really talented, organized, loving people have helped me gain this kind of freedom," Pendleton says. "MOMIX gives me a base to go into those dangerous areas of fantasy. You need that umbilical cord. Otherwise, you're just lost in space, totally insane, never coming back again. I've always needed that kind of security."

Is Pendleton still performing? "Mostly for fish. I swim ritualistically in the local lake. I'm skiing better than ever," he says. "If called upon, I would come and do my part."