Tuesday December 2nd, 2014 - Doug Varone & Dancers presenting three works, including a world premiere, at The Joyce. The Company are celebrating 28 years of dancing, and these performances mark the final appearances with DOVA at The Joyce for dancer Eddie Taketa following his 20-year Company career.
The programme had the benefit of visually enriching lighting throughout, and the opening work Castles immediately put me in an excellent frame of mind as it's set to my beloved Prokofiev waltzes (Waltz Suite, Opus 100). At curtain-rise, pillars of light and wafting mist set the stage for Varone's imaginative use of an expansive movement vocabulary. The steps and port de bras are all familiar, but the choreographer weaves them together with compelling fluidity, throwing in the unexpected from time to time, keeping things wonderfully fresh. The dancers are vividly committed and there are many opportunites for them to shine as individuals or in tandem with colleagues. An outstanding duet for Hollis Bartlett and Alex Springer showed the approach-avoidance of male mutual attraction; the boys were endearingly awkward with each other, always on the brink of walking away but always drawn back to their unstable centering. Another duet, for Hsiao-Jou Tang and Eddie Taketa, was equally impressive, and so was the dancing throughout of Xan Burley. The work, though unsentimental and often somewhat ironic, was oddly touching.
Dancing onstage for the first time since 2006, Doug Varone performed his self-choreographed solo The Fabulist which is set to a remarkable score: David Lang’s haunting “Death Speaks”. In this song cycle, the voice of Shara Worden put me very much in mind of the classic purity of the young Judy Collins. In movement evoking personal memories and the wonderment of life, Doug dances in a dreamscape of gorgeous lighting (by Ben Stanton) that he seems to be controlling with the gestures of his hand. In this remarkable fusion of song, light, and expressive physicality, we experience a mature artist with unusual communicative powers. The work resonates deeply, the ebb and flow of memory gently charted by the soul-touching voice. A unique spell was cast over the darkened theatre by this compelling solo.
Christopher Rouse’s Trombone Concerto sets an ominous tone for the eight dancers in the premiere of Dome. Again, the excellence of the autumnal lighting (Jane Cox) was a major atmospheric element, as were the softly neutral-coloured costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung. Although the music - veering from funereal to briefly triumphant to evocations of shadowed irony - might have been skillfully pared down a bit to make the ballet more concise, the dancers carried it to success. The choreography, now taking on a more stylized aspect, was performed with a sense of quiet urgency, and featured a notable solo passage for one of Varone's most uniquely gifted dancers, Julia Burrer.