Varone Takes High Ground.

Doug Varone and Dancers Joyce Theater New York, New York December 11-16, 2001

Doug Varone's new Approaching Something Higher began with the dancers walking onto a stage filled with hazy clouds of light and standing still in artless formation as the first notes of Brahms's lush, romantic Trio No. 1 in B for Piano, Violin, and Cello filled the air. Later in the piece, all nine performers stood still at the front of the stage, their backs to the audience, looking straight ahead. While in both cases the piece quickly returned to the propulsive, fluid, arm-swinging, body-swirling movements that characterize Varone's choreography, it was hard not to see these frozen instants--a group arrested in time--without thinking of September 11.

In part, this is because all of Varone's work is concerned with the social, collective aspects of life. Even though his dances are abstract, his dancers are never simply vehicles for the transmission of movement but rather seen as more deeply human through that movement. Approaching Something Higher used the fragmentation of a central cluster of dancers as its motif; again and again, dancers peeled away from the group into solos, duos, and trios, only to return inevitably to one another. In the final moments, the dancers whirl forward in a gold-hued light, flinging their arms up on the final notes of the music--a community triumphantly sustaining and comforting itself.

Ballet Mecanique, set to George Antheil's famed 1926 score of the same name, which the company premiered earlier this year at Jacob's Pillow, was, at first glance, a very different affair. Dressed in bright blue "worker" costumes (by Liz Prince) and dramatically lit (by David Ferri), the dancers moved with delineated, synchronized movements in a sound universe of sirens and machinery, airplanes, bells, and strident percussion, framed by Wendall K. Harrington's photographic projections on a transparent scrim and backdrop. The geometric, mostly black-and-white images suggested nonhuman worlds of mathematical forms and industrial vistas, but the dancers never entirely succumb to their context: Patterns of Rubik's Cube-intricacy suddenly dissolved and coalesced in organic, more random units; sequences of frantic, compulsive running and patterned walking were offset by brief solos and duos. If this group didn't surmount its environment, as did the ensemble of Approaching Something Higher, it nonetheless remained defiantly human within it.

Possession and As Natural As Breathing, two of the other works on this program, offered more of the pleasures of Varone's choreography; the first to Philip Glass's irresistibly dance-y Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, the second to an equally compelling mix of jazz and blues. In both pieces, the dancing was beautiful in its luxuriance--dancers leaped into and away from one another, turned, fell, and rose, pulled together and spun apart with a rapidity that was often oddly gentle. No step was obvious in technical terms; the dancing seemed to breathe through the dancers' bodies almost independently of their volition. Like Trisha Brown, Varone has a fondness for an uninflected lack of emphasis, creating kinetic waves of motion that seem to have a life of their own. But Varone also knows how to pace and shape a piece: As Natural as Breathing contains a solo danced by the choreographer himself, with both humorous and darker undercurrents as a series of partners came close and then retreated. These personal, quieter moments were woven into almost all of the works, movement as much about relationships to others as it was about the composition of dance.