Moses Pendleton remembers well his first taste of live performance. He was an elementary school kid when his father -- a dairy farmer in northern Vermont -- hired his young son to show off his prized Holstein cows at the county fair. "My job was to walk the animals around and make them look good in order to win the blue ribbon," says Pendleton, 55, artistic director of the U.S. dance company Momix. "I called it cowography."
His use of bovines as spectacle didn't stop there. During the late 1960s, while an English major at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., he expanded on the idea by setting up a stage on a hillside farm near his home. The show was simple: The budding dancer just draped himself with a white sheet and ran down a long slope toward the audience followed by a herd of 15 cows.
However, by the time Pendleton had cofounded the dance company Pilobolus in 1971, he had scrapped his live cow act to pursue a more serious and radical style of modern dance that pushed the physical limits of human body movement and fired the imagination. In 1980 he founded Momix (coined from "Moses' mix") and began to assemble a highly skilled group of more than 30 dancers from diverse backgrounds -- not only from classical ballet and modern dance, but also from areas such as gymnastics and rock climbing. The result was a physical style of dance-theater that fused near-Olympian acrobatics, circus-like stunts and all the dynamics of a contact sport. The sheer physicality of the Momix dancers -- combined with their shows' visual orgy of lights, mammoth stage props and loud music -- has enabled this group to enthrall even the most dance-illiterate of crowds, everywhere they go.