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DANCE REVIEW: Doug Varone and Dancers at Jacob's Pillow
8.13.09
Doug Varone and Dancers company members in Castles at Jacob's Pillow this weekend
[photo by Christopher Duggan/courtesy Jacob's Pillow]
JACOB'S PILLOW
Doug Varone and Dancers
Ted Shawn Theatre
Becket, Mass.
August 12-16, 2009
Review by Seth Rogovoy
(BECKET, Mass., August 13, 2009) – Based on the group's performance last night at Jacob’s Pillow, Doug Varone and Dancers gives the Mark Morris Dance Group a run for its money as an eclectic collective of dancers specializing in precision-based ensemble choreography that adheres closely to the dictates of the music.
The company's three-dance program offered a good sampler of Varone's many strengths and few weaknesses. The evening kicked off with the remarkable Castles (2003), in which the full company danced to Sergei Prokofiev's "Waltz Suite, Opus 110."
The six-movement piece eschewed its familiar references to the ballet Cinderella, and instead functioned as a showcase for Varone's mastery of ensemble choreography and signature vocabulary. With stunning light design by Jane Cox and Joshua Epstein that played as strong a part as the music and the choreography, giving an architectural sense to the stage with shafts of light and a gauzy scrim in front, the ensemble fluidly morphed from one place to another, assuming new and different tableaux.
Different movements, built on traditional ballet but solidly planted in the world of modern dance – functioning as much as commentary upon or even parody of ballet – included duets, solos, and small group pairings, interspersed with full-ensemble moments.
Natalie Desch and Netta Yerushalmy were standouts, but a duet between Daniel Charon and Alex Springer featuring head butting, hand-holding, hugging, and butt-slapping, all done within the overall guise of an ersatz Russian ballet (as was the entire piece) may have been the strongest set piece of this precision-engineered dance.
The aptly titled Short Story (2001), in that it seemed to go by in less than ten minutes or so, was more like a poem than a story. Danced to Sergei Rachmaninoff's quintessential, if not downright overwrought Prelude in C, the duet, featuring Daniel Charon and the fabulous Natalie Desch, was a subtly danced reenactment of a couple experiencing emotional dysfunction and repair.
Perhaps wisely, Varone let the music do most of the heavy lifting, while the dancers merely came together and broke apart, and otherwise gently danced in and out of each other's embrace. Ultimately, however, they were overpowered by Rachmaninoff's Sturm und Drang.
The evening concluded with Lux (2006), choreographed to Philip Glass's relentlessly upbeat composition, The Light.
Within Varone's concept of executing gestures that were the movement equivalents of music – the characteristic he most shares with Mark Morris, while maintaining a distinctive vocabulary – the dancers in this ensemble work with break-out sections for soloists seemed to offer the dancers the most freedom of personal expression in fitting with Glass's ever-progressive, propulsive, eminently cheerful, uplifting score.
While the dance was such a brilliant evocation of the music that at times one wondered if Glass wrote the music to correspond to the dance rather than vice versa, it lacked the stunning impact of Castles, in that work's tightly controlled but masterfully wrought choreography.
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living's award-winning editor-in-chief and critic-at-large.
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