It is always significant, if not encouraging, when the most recent entry on a single-choreographer concert is the finest of the lot. Who knows why Doug Varone left the 2006 Boats Leaving undated in the program when the company returned to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater over the weekend? But, here in this 30-minute company work, you will find the essence of the New York-based dancemaker’s thematic obsessions more deftly explored than in the earlier pieces on the program. Fittingly, Boats Leaving, set to a recording of Arvo Pärt’s haunting "Te Deum," came at the end of the San Francisco Performances presentation.
This work, as well as the less convincing Lux, also made in 2006, both probe issues of group identity, elucidated in often powerfully surging eddies of movement, cadenced by chilling interludes of immobility. This full-company work may possibly be telling us that it takes events of momentous import in life to transform us into a single organism. Those events seem to include a funeral, a portrait sitting, interludes of bent-knee supplication and, even a chilling thought, total annihilation.
At the beginning, the dancers at Sunday’s matinee (April 20) circle the stage in twilight. They come together with the marvelous fluency one relished in Varone’s previous visit to this city and break out in diagonals and clusters. The tableaux do not always hold and when stasis arrives, the tension in the theater is palpable. Group forays yield to solo outings, with duets arriving and dispersing in an instant. You marvel at Varone’s fluidity, which sometimes becomes an end in itself. Although eminently appropriate, the music for voices and instruments is a mite too extended for the movement; after a while, one tires of dancers, all in military grays and greens, dashing in from the wings, hurtling on to the floor, recovering and flying off.
Still, how wonderfully Varone capitalizes on the prowess of his eight barefoot dancers, an assemblage of disparate body types and sensibilities who seem to risk everything in every appearance. At the end of Boats Leaving, the performers retreat to the perimeter as shadows again descend. They have completed a life cycle.
Varone remains one of our most musically sensitive modernists (I still remember vividly the Prokofiev waltz piece his company imported on its earlier SFP gig), so I am mystified by his choice of Philip Glass’ score, "The Light," for Lux. To be charitable, this is not one of the iconic minimalist’s most intriguing effusions. The bland washes of melody and chugging arpeggios now sound alarmingly dated and Varone’s rigorously structured opus reflects the lack of musical inspiration.
Eddie Taketa’s lengthy solo at the start yields a vocabulary strong on weight shifts, rotating arms, perilous balances and squiggling torsos. In time, the other dancers submit to similar maneuvers, spicing them with furious beats, jogging transitions and episodes of punching the air that suggest an aerobics class. They also swirl in vortices that, ultimately, signify very little. Again, praise is due the performers (Natalie Desch and Netty Yerushalmy outstanding), whose silken attacks can be riveting. But there’s no inevitability, no trajectory in this dance. One hesitates to cite other choreographers (notably, Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp) who have channeled the Glass energy and aura to more memorable, if not visceral effect. Varone skates on the surface of music, which, not surprisingly, reveals nothing but surface.
To separate the group pieces, Varone revived his early duet, Home, created in 1988 when his company was still in its relative infancy. As an experiment in non-dance dance, this study of a deteriorating, but still inflammatory relationship, which pairs the choreographer and Desch avoiding each other’s gaze for 15 minutes, will do quite nicely.
She sits and fidgets in a chair at the beginning. He hovers nearby, his body language conveying a mixture of guilt and solicitude. She rises, he avoids, and, in context when he sneaks up and places his hand on her shoulder, the gesture has the effect of the earth moving. Hands and backs communicate volumes here. The pace is episodic and halting, but our expectations ignite the moments in between. The performers want nothing in expressivity. You know the couple is bound together through eternity, yet the narrative keeps us riveted.
The problem with Home is Dick Connette’s string score, a minimalist number that glazes the dance with a coating of sentimentality that feels both intrusive and manipulative. Somehow, I feel that Varone’s rueful parable could stand eloquently on its own. Following the Glass music with the Connette without a separating intermission induced a sensation of queasiness. I would have given much for a single dissonance.< br>
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