As he heads uptown for his dance company`s afternoon rehearsal, Doug Varone looks like any number of men walking to lunch from the showrooms and cutting rooms of the nearby garment district in New York. He wears plain cotton trousers and an unremarkable T-shirt, moves with a slight stiffness in one knee and brushes a hand over unruly, graying hair. Nothing about him attracts attention, a first impression that Varone is quick to second.
”I was born in Syosset, N.Y., 33 years ago, and I spent the whole year I turned 4 watching `I Love Lucy,”` Varone says with an infectious laugh. ”On the weekend, I buy bagels, read the Sunday New York Times, visit my nephews. A fairly normal existence, I think.
”I started taking tap when I was 6. When I went to the State University of New York at Purchase, I went with the intention of being a dance major and finding my way into musical comedy.”
Varone`s appearance is in sharp contrast to his work. Few choreographers make dances so brutally honest, dark and emotional.
”Seduced by life, by art,” as Varone puts it, he first joined the Jose Limon Dance Company and later the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company.
He began presenting his own choreography in 1980 and established Doug Varone and Dancers six years later. In the process, he has received choreographic fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harkness Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has been produced by the Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122 and the Riverside Dance Festival, all in New York.
Doug Varone and Dancers, making their Chicago debut, are here for two weeks of performances, lecture demonstrations, classes and workshops in an unprecedented collaboration with MoMing Dance and Arts Center and the Dance Center of Columbia College, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Funded by the Illinois Arts Council and the NEA, the Varone dance tour culminates its Chicago residency with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday at the Dance Center, 4730 N. Sheridan Rd. The performance time for the Edwardsville visit is 7:30 p.m. Oct. 25, at the SIUE Communications Building Theatre.
Critics praise the clear musicality and exuberance of Varone`s choreography. His dances-and his dancers-are unmannered and unaffected, and Varone`s idiom is a unique amalgam drawn from ballet, modern and pedestrian vocabularies.
His ”Oscillating Thirds,” for example, is a journey in and through the bare bones of dance.
”It`s my most abstract work,” Varone says. ”It`s based on a vocabulary that`s very linear, very different from the work that we normally do. I was interested in creating a piece that used the dancers` abilities in a different way, challenging them and myself. The work is an exploration of geometric patterns and space formations, and changing the stage around to view it in different ways.”
Varone`s easy manner in talking about his work doesn`t always find its way into his dances. They are dramatic, disquieting and disturbing. The dancers sway smoothly and gracefully one minute, and erupt in wrenching changes of direction and graceless lifts the next. Unison ensemble movement is scarce. Simple gestures change color with repetition. One dancer`s raised forearm may threaten, embrace or plead with another; a hand brushing across a forehead may suggest fatigue, a moment of meditation or just a dancer in need of a haircut.
Varone relishes this ambiguity: ”There`s a wonderful story that Martha Graham used to tell about the premiere of her `Lamentation.` When she created it, she had a definite idea in mind. When she premiered it, a woman came backstage and said, `Everything you did made me feel, made me release so much emotion. My son just died in a car crash, and that`s exactly what I went through.` Later on, another woman came up to her and said that she had just had a miscarriage, and that`s what she felt.
”I view art that way, and I view my dances that way. I go into the studio and I have a very clear idea of what I want to create; if that`s not what comes across to any particular viewer and they choose to accept something else-whatever that is-and gain something, that`s absolutely valid. I want them always to feel something from my work; that`s the reason I create. I`m not interested in putting dance steps together to make pretty dances; I`m interested in taking people on a journey.”
Choreographed in 1988 for Pennsylvania Dance Theater and set to a score by A. Leroy, Varone`s ”Home” journeys through a disintegrating relationship. ”It`s a duet for a man and a woman who have been together for a while and aren`t really sure that they have much of anything left to share. It`s a wrenching duet, sometimes painful. It`s the piece we always have to present before intermission so people can recover from it. More than any other work I`ve choreographed, it`s the piece that`s really touched people in one way or another because it`s a topic that`s universal.”
Varone began his ”False Majeur,” a 45-minute work for six dancers commissioned especially for the company`s Illinois debut, after reading Herman Broch`s novel, ”The Spell.” The new dance is rife with small, repeated gestures with overtones of social intercourse and ritual. According to Varone, ”We tried to create a very unique society, using mannerisms, dances, songs that reflect this society. A group of people that really don`t exist anywhere, not in the United States, not in the world as we know it, not on Earth.”
Watching the dancers rehearse, seeing their characterizations of these fantastic but unquestionably human individuals, is more like spying on neighbors than an exercise in anthropology: One is protective, one intrepid, another out of touch. Their conflicts feel surprisingly real, their folk dances and social dances simultaneously foreign and familiar.
”Even after our performances in Chicago and Edwardsville, I`ll come back into the studio to make changes,” Varone says. ”There`s a lot of time invested in this, and I know we`re going to keep picking at it. It`s exciting because it`s a very big step choreographically. It`s the largest work I`ve done, the largest scope in ideas, in length.
”A lot of the theatrical elements and a lot of the physicality that`s been gnawing at my work over the past two years has finally culminated in this work. Bumping into this novel set my mind booming about possibilities.”
