DOUG VARONE AND DANCERS
Doug Varone and Dancers, a company based in New York, was in Chicago for two weeks before last weekend’s concerts for a residency sponsored by the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council, and the National Performance Network. It featured classes, workshops, a lecture-demonstration, parties, a press conference, an open rehearsal, and a premiere, Force Majeure, jointly sponsored by the Dance Center, MoMing, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. I heard Varone talk about his works and saw two of them before the concert itself. Why not go whole hog? I thought, and saw two performances, too. So I saw each of the three works at least twice, and one of them–Home–four times.
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Varone has a uniquely conversational style of dance: his dancers look as if they’re talking in movement. (In fact, Varone often composes by fitting gestures to words.) Home could be a single 12-minute conversation–it looked to me at first like a director’s wordless blocking of a crucial scene–or it could be months or years of conversations, whole huge cycles of rejection and rapprochement telescoped. What you see, no matter how you interpret them, are layers and layers of anger, yearning, hurt, brought out by Varone’s unusually lyrical and metaphoric use of body language. Fidgeting–plucking at one’s pants, pulling one’s ear–is what you do after an especially painful exchange, a way of filling up time. Touching your own torso expresses hurt and withdrawal; because this zone is so intimate, allowing someone else to touch your stomach is dangerous. Copying your partner’s movements can be a threatening or a sympathetic act–or both at once.
Whatever wallop Home packs is due largely to the dancers’ immersion in the work–both casts managed to make feeling as fleeting and monolithic as it is in real life. The older couple–Varone and Mary Govern, Home’s original cast–buries the dance’s feelings more than the younger couple, giving a greater sense of problems accumulated over time and now impossible to budge. Varone captures the macho man’s springy, self-absorbed jungle ethic, while Govern has a granitelike stoicism–though you can imagine her chewing over past wrongs. The younger cast makes the feelings more immediate. Matthew Cazier is turned in and sensitive, his bouncy walks around the periphery of the couple’s space more meditative than self-assertive. Bonnie Wong, a superbly sumptuous and merry dancer, is vital and transparent where Govern is intriguingly opaque.
Of course the expanded scope of Force Majeure is what makes it so impressive, but that great scope creates even more problems in the work’s second half. Some dark shift occurs at about the middle of the dance–perhaps when the dancers start marching, perhaps when they “fall asleep” and begin their nightmares–that culminates in such monstrous greed and sorrow and murderous violence that no explanation for the change could possibly be sufficient (and none is offered).
