“Child of the pure unclouded brow / And dreaming eyes of wonder” wrote Lewis Carroll of Alice Liddell and her sisters, who cajoled the mathematician into spinning a fantastical yarn on a summer boating trip. ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ have held generations in thrall with their mix of whimsy and menace, and an adventurous seven-year-old protagonist who tackles questions about reality and identity, and stands up to tyrants.
The laws of physics are thrown into chaos, bodies grow and shrink amid surreal surroundings, playing cards are trapped in a feudal society and a hookah-smoking caterpillar interrogates our heroine. The proto sci-fi saga of Alice seems tailor-made for the MOMIX treatment: illusion-driven, technology-forward, bodies often transformed by costumes, props and video projections.
Moses Pendleton's ALICE premiered in 2018 and has returned to the Joyce to inject some much-needed magic in dispiriting times. It is beautifully framed: the opening and closing scenes in particular are triumphs of expressive ingenuity. We first meet Alice (Seah Hagan) as she drifts in mid-air, perched on a ladder flown from the grid on nearly invisible cables, engrossed in a large book with “ALICE” calligraphed on its cover. A young man, presumably a stand-in for the author (Derek Elliott Jr.), steers the ladder from the other end using his weight as a counterbalance. Together they ride the westerlies in exhilarating fashion.
Alice nods off and when she wakes, she is yanked by a trio of her lookalikes into an off-kilter world in which all the Alices repeatedly fall into and clamber out of cylindrical tubes that resemble white dustbins. They balance on the rims of the bins, loll on top like old-time bathing beauties, then collapse into them, a sight made all the funnier when a random arm or leg sticks out. Rather than staging the voyage of a single Alice down an interminable rabbit-hole, Pendleton has four Alices tumble a few feet down a tube and resurface in various contorted postures to start all over again. It’s an artful, low-tech and uproarious device.
The closing scene achieves a near-mystical serenity against the hard-driving acid-fueled lyrics and the piercing vocals of Grace Slick’s iconic “White Rabbit”, that root Carroll’s Wonderland in late-60s psychedelic culture. One Alice ascends in a straight vertical fly as kaleidoscopic tie-dye colors wash across her billowing white skirt; two others cling to its hem and race around in a spiraling vortex.
Costumes, lighting and projection designs (by Phoebe Katzin, Michael Korsch and Woodrow F. Dick III, respectively) recreate the sensory distortions associated with hallucinogens and with Alice’s surreal encounters. In at least half of the 22 episodes that make up the 90-minute work, however, they are the main elements that leave an impression, as the choreography often feels like a placeholder for a dance that is still waiting for further inspiration to strike.
The dance vocabulary is thin, save for a cracking woodland double pas de deux for Hagan, Elliott Jr., Adam Ross and Madeline Dwyer – acrobatic and witty, evocative both of trees competing for light and of sensuous forest spirits presiding over their domain. Set to a trippy EDM score, the episode flaunts the dancers’ steeliness, deft weight shifts, and striking lines as the women branch onto the men in mutable configurations. In one sequence they hang upside down, strap themselves on like backpacks, and blithely tap the men’s heads with their feet.
Elsewhere, clever props and costumes that can not disguise the lack of movement ingenuity include skateboards, giant floating roses which obscured the faces of female dancers in a manner reminiscent of Magritte, and stretchy shrouds which turned dancers variously into stained glass panels, floppy playing cards and ghostly humpbacked creatures.
Invention soured further in an aerial bungee dance number straight out of Vegas, and in a primitive burlesque for a quartet in nude undies and oversized baby-face masks. Set to a famous Bollywood song about blossoming romance, the latter pairing of song and dance seemed only to mock the genre’s high-pitched vocal tradition, rooted in Indian classical technique.
Key sources of Wonderland’s absurdity and tension have also been diluted or discarded. The Caterpillar—Carroll’s central authoritarian, lecturing Alice on fixed identity even as he undergoes metamorphosis—has been reduced to a chorus line of athletes bouncing on Swiss balls. Equally puzzling is the absence of the sham trial of the Knave of Hearts, Carroll’s satire of tyrants who pervert laws and deny truth, replaced instead by an ineffective parade of shrouded playing cards and a video projection of cards being swept to the ground.
Ultimately, for all its magical moments and the bulletproof performances of an indefatigable cast of nine, ALICE barely illuminates Wonderland’s core: the coming-of-age of a young girl who challenges false authority, resists bullies and trusts her own judgment.
