Journeyman

Review: Doug Varone at the Annenberg Center

by Janet Anderson

DANCE REVIEW

Doug Varone is a shape-shifter. His dance is as much about creating images as it is about technique. The movement he makes is serious and weighty, experimental yet accessible. No one at Annenberg last week needed to know about his honors — the Bessies, the Obie and a Guggenheim — because his choreography and beautifully trained troupe said it all. 

The mood was set by a dark stage and a tiny moon resting at stage level that slowly moved upward to hover over eight dancers tumbling, shoving, flowing, sliding and reaching for one another. The propulsive surge and flow of Philip Glass' minimalist The Light seemed as much participant as score. Varone described this dance before the performance as "like watching stars move in space, and being amazed that they never bumped into each other."

Varone tossed in a couple of small works, a reminder that he likes to fiddle around and have fun as well as thinking big. Home, a duet featuring Ryan Corriston and Natalie Desch, was actually a choreographed quarrel. Seated on straight-backed chairs, the duo punched the air, banged their chairs around, turned their backs on each other and in every way imaginable expressed dislike. It's an odd bit of theater with an edge not found in his other work.

Polonaise #44 is a lyric two-man piece set to lilting Chopin, which perfectly accompanied the dancers' loose, swinging movements. Wearing white suits, Varone and Daniel Charon looked splendid sailing around the stage together. Varone has gained some weight and lost some hair since we saw him 11 years ago, but has lost nothing when it comes to performing.

The finale, Boats Leaving, is a masterwork. Arvo Pärt's magnificent Te Deum with resounding dense chords, and choral voices rising and falling throughout, were the perfect musical setting for a movement poem that suggests refugees fleeing disaster, caught in a war or, perhaps, journeying from life to death. Smoke wafted across the stage; dancers stopped in freeze-frame. Between the glorious music and the surging stage assemblages of eight dancers coming together, falling, rising, moving forward, it was anyone's guess whether they were creating images of boats, or falling into heaps of despair, or pushing onward. Finally they simply walked offstage one by one, entering a shaft of light leading them inexorably into the wings ... and gone.

(j_anderson@citypaper.net)

Doug Varone and Dancers, Dec. 5, Annenberg Center