LYNDON, Vt. (AP) - Before he became one of the world’s most famous dancers, Moses Pendleton found inspiration growing up on the Lochlyndon Farm in Lyndon.
The nearly 68-year-old founder and director of the internationally acclaimed MOMIX dance company, and co-founder of Pilobolus dance company, returned last week to his alma mater - Lyndon Institute - to share generously of his talent and experience with students and the community.
Pendleton’s dance career began inauspiciously after he broke his leg training as a competitive alpine skier for Dartmouth College.
Once healed, Pendleton enrolled in a dance composition class taught by Alison Becker Chase. He, along with pals Jonathan Wolken and Steve Johnson, were instantly hooked.
Shortly thereafter, Pilobolus was born.
Naturally, Pendleton (the English major and skier); Wolken (the philosophy science major and fencer); and Johnson (the pre-med major and pole vaulter); named their troupe for the pilobolus crystallinus. It’s a light-loving fungus and partly a tribute to Pendleton’s formative years growing up in the Northeast Kingdom.
Pendleton’s love for nature has fueled his imagination all his life and inspires his work.
“I was born and raised on a dairy farm, it was quite a gentleman’s farm, we had some very good registered Holstein cows and I was very fortunate to be brought up on a farm, I had all that outdoor, rural experience,” said Pendleton during a phone interview this week from his home in Washington, Conn.
Pendleton lived at both the Lochlyndon Farm and at the Mountain View Farm on Darling Hill Road.
Coming back to the Northeast Kingdom brings back memories, said Pendleton, who went cross country skiing on the Mountain View Farm property on his recent visit.
“It’s quite a fascinating place. It always takes coming back to the environment to stimulate the memory.”
It also stimulates memories to perform on the same stage at LI that he performed on during high school plays. “It’s very nice to be performing on the stage where I really got my first experience outside of showing Holsteins,” said Pendleton.
“It was fun to go back on the same stage where I got my thespian beginnings.” Pendleton was often on stage at LI. both as an athlete (ski team captain), and actor. He made his thespian debut, he recalls, in “You Can’t Take it With You.”
Pendleton shared some of his early life, saying his father died when he was 12 years old, leaving the family, including himself and five siblings, “kind of abandoned at quite an early age.”
The farm was kind of shut down after his dad passed away, said Pendleton, and he and his siblings, “kind of made up our own sports,” he said.
As he was growing up, Pendleton connected with an Austrian ski team in Oregon, and they became a surrogate family of sorts for him. He said they were “wild and daring and full of mountain energy, and I really got very interested in wanting to be a ski racer.”
“When I graduated from LI in ’67, I was very much invested in athletics,” said Pendleton. He was on the school’s track team and he was captain of the ski team; he won the Vermont State Championship in cross country.
“I had a very physical education, which obviously makes sense if you’re going into dance,” Pendleton said. “I graduated from Lyndon Institute and then I got accepted at Dartmouth. On the second day of ski practice at Dartmouth, I broke my leg for the second time in a the span of just a few years.”
His first break came during a pre-ski season soccer practice, Pendleton said.
At Dartmouth Pendleton ended up in a cast up to his thigh.
“It was a difficult year,” he said.
But that accident ended up bringing Pendleton to dance.
“I took a dance class in order to get myself back in shape,” he said. He took a class with Chase, he said, and quickly found his footing.
Professor Chase became the founding artistic director of Pilobolus.
Pendleton said of his earliest introduction to dance at Dartmouth, “She got us in the beginning to create.putting an aesthetic on the athletic.” That meant Pendleton, et al. were often left to make up their own dances.
The Pilobolus dance company formed while Pendleton was still a student and the group quickly gained a reputation and was offered prestigious venues, including opening for Frank Zappa at Smith College and performing at the Lake Placid Winter Olympics.
“We became quite successful early on,” recalled Pendleton.
In 1980, Pendleton left Pilobolus and formed MOMIX with Chase.
MOMIX has been touring the world over and over for 37 years, said Pendleton, who runs the company with his lifetime partner, and fellow dancer Cynthia Quinn. She also serves as the company’s associate director.
The name MOMIX comes from a supplement given to veal calves on his family farm in Lyndon, said Pendleton.
Pendleton said his formative years in Vermont contributed to a lifelong passion for both athletics and movement and the natural world.
“My background was athletics and farming and nature, which did nurture me and I suppose had quite an influence in what I was interested in, a visual, physical theater.”
Pendleton is also a passionate photographer and avid flower gardener, said his close friend, Phil Holland, who he met at Dartmouth, and who was in the NEK in recent days as part of the MOMIX tour.
Monday evening, Holland was a guest speaker in a talk at St. Johnsbury Academy in the school’s Faculty Speaker Series. His topic was, “Moses, MOMIX, and More,” and he shared his nearly half-century friendship with Moses Pendleton with a small but deeply interested audience, most of whom had seen the MOMIX show last week.
St. Johnsbury Academy dance teacher Marianne Handy Hraibi, who has known Moses Pendleton for many years, said of MOMIX, “They represent such a history that many of us remember and cherish. But more importantly, they represent the power of individualism, the dynamic of the creative spirit, and the courage to aim high.”
Hraibi’s aunt taught art to Pendleton at LI.
At the Academy program, Holland recalled the early days of Pilobolus, and the dance company working together in Lyndon, at the Pendleton family farm, Lochlyndon, and at the Lyndon State College squash court.
Holland shared photos from the early days, and talked about the Vermont Natural Theater which Pendleton and his friends founded and performed in here, “chasing some of his family’s Holsteins. Seven years later they were performing on Broadway sponsored by Pierre Cardin.”
“They wanted to energize the world,” Holland said of the dance company’s early days, calling their work “the gospel of positive energy.”
When Pilobolus was in its infancy and the dancers were experimenting in the Northeast Kingdom, it was the late 60s, early 70s, said Pendleton, when they also began the Vermont Natural Theater. He said others were working on creative expression, too, including Bread and Puppet in nearby Glover.
“We were all escaping from the political and social realities of the Vietnam War and what was going on in the country,” said Pendleton.
One of the outdoor theater scenes featured Pendleton draped in a sheet running ahead of his family’s Holsteins, who were very curious and pursued him for the events. “On one ridge there was the audience, and on the other was myself and the black and white Holsteins.we created this running of the Holsteins.these black and white forms would come running towards the audience, a stampede of milking Holsteins, that was very new and exciting! It was in the guise of taking a 3-mile walk around the family farm.”
“There were no rules for us. We were just into exploring movement with the non-human; it’s continued to be my aesthetic, the plant, the animal, the mineral and the Holstein,” he said.
Pendleton said, “Those were the formative years and we were lucky.”
When someone connected to the Frank Zappa band saw Pilobolus in their early days at Goddard, they told Zappa about them, and they were asked to open for a show at Smith College in Northampton, recalled Pendleton.
Frank Zappa called Pilobolus “The theater of the very far out,” recalled Pendleton, and the audience loved the show.
“It gave us more inspiration,” said Pendleton and the young dancers realized rather than pursuing “.mediocre careers as doctors and lawyers and businessmen, maybe we could make a living doing this, and we did.”
Coming home to the Kingdom is always special, said Pendleton.
“I still love the area,” he said.
Pendleton said, “I always said Vermont never really wanted to be a part of the country and the Northeast Kingdom didn’t want that much to do with Vermont, everyone was very independent up there.I think that’s really our story.”
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Information from: The Caledonian-Record, https://www.caledonianrecord.com
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