April Notebook: Graham, Gibney, Varone

Canto Ostinato, with Zack Sommer, Tiare Keeno, Lounes Landri. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Seeing Gibney Company and Martha Graham Dance Company on consecutive nights in New York recently provided a snapshot of modern dance. Think of it as a big tree—with its unshakably strong trunk in the form of Graham and Lucinda Childs, plus new branches, works by younger choreographers.

The highlight was Lucinda Childs’ Canto Ostinato at the Joyce Theater, danced by the Gibney Company, which recently landed Childs as a resident choreographer for five years. Childs has worked continuously since the 1960s in opera, theater, and dance. Early on, she created conceptual pieces with the Judson Movement, and ran a company, which was disbanded in 2019. So the recent occasional Childs dance in repertory, or unique remountings, have been most welcome.

Canto Ostinato is a précis of Childs’ mesmerizing style, based on crisp body geometries and repeating diagonal phrases danced by four to music by Simeon Ten Holt. Her dances have a pared-down look, from the neat costumes by Dominique Drillot (who also designed the set and film—vertical light bars that crossed the upstage scrim), to the ethereal lighting by Tsubasa Kamei, and the result feels like the perfect amount of each element combined. I could watch this on repeat for a very long time.

The context for the dance felt a bit jarring, comprising works by Medhi Walerski (with a Euro-neoclassical feel), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (passionate and turbulent), and Mthuthuzeli November (exuberant). The sum total certainly showed Gibney Company’s stylistic flexibility and range, so key to a repertory company. But I look forward to seeing much more of Childs’ concert dance done by the multi-talented Gibney dancers. Kudos to Gina Gibney for this invaluable recognition of one of the undersung choreographers of our time.

Chronicle. Photo: M. Sherwood

At City Center, Martha Graham Dance Company’s performances were pieces in a larger mosaic of the troupe’s 100th year celebration. As with many single choreographer companies whose founders have passed, this has evolved by necessity into what is essentially a repertory company based on Graham’s rep. Her contributions to the program were Diversion of Joy and Chronicle, two of her more broadly popular dances, at least for today’s audiences. Even after seeing these works many times over the years, Graham’s maximally expressive, muscular, yet elegant vocabulary still feels absolutely fresh. It represents what the human body and spirit can achieve with determination and training. The dancers’ bodies are so strong and have undergone such extreme training that they seem like weapons themselves. And yet the sculptural shapes formed by the recombining of head, arms, torso, and legs still feel at once fresh and fundamental. Both Graham’s and Childs’ oeuvre have been marked by a certain refinement and classicism which helps to elucidate their crisp styles. How providential that we will continue to see their work regularly for the foreseeable future.

Sandwiched between these works were Jamar Roberts' premiere of To the Brink and Back, set on the estimable Lloyd Knight. Live drums supplied a simmering tension sustained as he paced restlessly between archetypal poses. It was followed by En Masse, a premiere by Hope Boykin (both she and Roberts are alumni of Ailey), to Leonard Bernstein's music. This suite included some new musical passages, but it was so eclectic and at moments dated-sounding that it distracted from Boykin's movement, which contrasts with the technical formality of Graham's vocabulary.

Diversion of Angels. Photo: M. Sherwood

Another veteran of contemporary dance, Doug Varone, popped up with his troupe at the venerable Hudson Hall, in Hudson. Fresh off of pulling out of a scheduled Kennedy Center run, Varone received a warm embrace from the audience. The smart program, hosted by Varone and performed without fancy lights or costumes, led off with a run-through of Lux, one of his best-known ensemble works. He then recruited audience members to help in choreographing something new—he scattered the eight across the stage, and directed his dancers, one-by-one, to move toward and interact in different ways with the volunteers. This group then left the stage, and the dancers performed the framework without them. In yet another section, a pair performed a duet to a Handel aria, and then the same movement (with a coda) to Janis Joplin; the result felt markedly different and showed how music affects context. In the first half, viewers were given glimpses into the various choices that go into choreographing, and no doubt ways to better comprehend the experience of watching contemporary dance—which can often be opaque. 

Doug Varone at work. Photo: David McIntyre

The company then performed a preview of No Matter What the End, set to the Radiohead album In Rainbows, that had been scheduled to premiere soon at the Kennedy Center and which will be presented at the Joyce in May. Varone noted that he rarely uses pop music in part because it is so loaded, which was the case for In Rainbows with many of us who were very familiar with it. It’ll be interesting to see it complete with costumes and lighting, and bearing an invisible badge of honor as a symbol of resistance.

Varone—Hitting Reset

Xan Burley in Dome. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

After 28 years of running a highly respected company, Doug Varone has done the unexpected. He has departed, if by degrees, from his signature style of modern dance, which is a fluid, looping, channelling of energy that looks organic but which is carefully constructed and practiced expertly by his trained dancers. In a new group work, Dome, and a solo for himself, he has created stuttering, angular phrases separated by long moments of stillness. In a sense, he has hit the reset button.

The Joyce program leads off with Castles (2004), representative of Varone's essential style. It's marked by a matrix of pin spotlights (by Jane Cox and Joshua Epstein), at times reduced to light just the stage's perimeter. The lively, danceable music, Prokofiev's Waltz Suite, Opus 110, coaxes the mood from carnivalesque to martial to grandiose. The 3/4 tempo accommodates Varone's affinity for dropping weight into the ground. Xan Burley is particularly effective in this dance—lush, boneless, muscular.

Doug Varone in The Fabulist. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu

Varone then performed a new solo, The Fabulist, to "Death Speaks" by David Lang, presumably sung by an uncredited Shara Worden, whose lilting voice imbues a folk music touch. The lighting, by Ben Stanton, plays an important part, as it does in most of Varone's repertory. Just Varone's head and shoulders are lit at the start; he is bathed in a cone of light and moves almost begrudgingly, primarily using his arms and upper body. As the lights pull apart to rake him from both sides, he expands his range, stutter-stepping, hunching, and walking awkwardly, almost as if relearning his first steps. He plops down and with some effort pushes a stray leg into position with his hands. He eventually gains power over his environs, batting away a spotlight, and finally snapping his fingers to extinguish the light. It's atypical of his extravagantly graceful movement, and an overt reckoning of his own role as a choreographer/creator. Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung's gray silk suit with sheer sleeves and pant hems seem overly fussy for Varone, who generally comes across as the super graceful pugilist-next-door.

Dome, the group premiere, builds on the angular, fitful phrasing. To Christopher Rouse's strange, at times cyclonic Trombone Concerto, it feels emotionally dark (despite Jane Cox's golden lighting) and vaguely post-disaster. The dancers read as detached from one another, in contrast to their usual cohesiveness; they move robotically, bursting into a phrase, or freezing in arabesques or beaching themselves on the floor apathetically. Hsiao-Jou Tang captures the sense of resigned doom in her elegant, economical phrasing. In a flurry of brass instruments, the eight dancers finally trundle together, each raising an arm. Dome showed some fresh approaches from an established choreographer.

Criticizing Dance: Follow the Heart or the Mind?, 3/24/11

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Criticizing Dance: Follow the Heart or the Mind?, follow up on Doug Varone post.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/criticizing-dance-follow-the-heart-or-mind/1132/

Dancers Alex Springer, Erin Owen, Julia Burrer and Ryan Corri in 'Chapters of a Broken Novel / Photo by Phil Knott

Last week’s post on Doug Varone’s Chapters from a Broken Novel received a number of comments, with many reacting to the work’snegative review in The New York Times. In fact, as consistently praised as Varone’s work is among informed acquaintances of mine—those working in the field as presenters, writers, dancers—his work has been largely ill-reviewed in the Times, if not (to quote Claudia La Rocco, the latest to take aim) “steamrolled,” making the critics sound like philistines and Varone like a talentless novice. Clearly his work has tremendous merit. So what’s the deal? Is it as simple as listening to one’s heart, versus one’s mind?

Backing up a little, this raises some questions about reviewing modern dance—lyrical, form-oriented dance—that isn’t necessarily post-modern, or conceptually based, or that is narrative or unironic. I’ll admit that personally, it is far more difficult to write about this kind of modern dance, because it often isn’t in opposition to something, whether it’s the status quo, or ballet, or beauty, or the lack of health insurance. It’s not exploring some new or indigenous form, like voguing or flamenco or tap. It is for the most part universally understood dance that largely stems from the love of movement, pure and simple, and often expresses something basic about the human condition, dark or light, or through simple narrative lines.

Doug Varone and Dancers’ Broken Novel, 3/17/11

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Doug Varone and Dancers’ Broken Novel, at Joyce Theater

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/doug-varone-and-dancers-broken-novel/1113/

Julia Burrer and Alex Springer. Photo by Phil Knott.

Now in its 24th season, it’s difficult to think of Doug Varone and Dancers as a young upstart company. But this month alone many established modern companies are coincidentally having engagements in New York. They include—in order of longevity—Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Mark Morris. Toss in Paul Taylor’s recent run at City Center, and those are some impressive years, collectively. Varone’s premiere, Chapters from a Broken Novel (through this weekend) includes elements that lend a fresh snap to this established artist’s grounded, muscular, expressionistic choreography, performed to a score by David Van Tieghem, who contributes percussion live.

The most immediately striking, element is the set by Andrew Lieberman—a simple sheet of silky white fabric, suspended from two pipes, draped over the stage. Lit from above, it becomes a luminous cloud that transforms the Joyce Theater. The pipes raise and lower to form a shed, or to compress the space. The titles of each section are projected onto it, pacing the 75-minute work and providing food for thought. Varone culled the subtitles from various sources—conversations, films, books—often poetic: “The Ghosts of Insects,” “Erased by Degrees,” “Ruby Throated Sparrows.” Others are more descriptive: “Target Practice,” in which Alex Springer dodges a chasing spotlight; “Funeral;” and “Tile Riot” (Erin Owen lets loose in a make-believe bathroom, revealing a sweet humor not always associated with Varone’s penchant of examining the human condition). In tension with this highly literate sense, Varone’s choreography is one of the most visceral and emotional styles around, a sort of connective tissue between pathos and literature. His dancers have conversations using movement, but it’s the thoughtful mediation of gut feelings that position it as a very human, pre-verbal means of communication.

Alchemy and Ghosts, 2/24/09

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Brian Rogers' redevelop (Death Valley) at Chocolate Factory and Doug Varone's Alchemy at Joyce Theater.

http://www.thirteen.org/sundayarts/blog/performance/alchemy-and-ghosts/677/

Watching a dance can sometimes leave me wondering why the choreographer created it. Often it’s during a “pure dance” work that doesn’t offer anything new, even if the technique is solid and the dancers are skilled (as is nearly always the case in New York City). Sometimes, form is enough, sometimes not. But two programs – redevelop (Death Valley) by Brian Rogers, andAlchemy, by Doug Varone – focus on important subjects that provide much context to work with.

Redevelop, at the intimate Chocolate Factory(where Rogers is artistic director) in Queens through Feb 28, concerns myriad ideas of gentrification and the inexorable displacement of longtime residents. The primary set pieces are modular plastic sheets suspended on wires by hooks, reminiscent of the building’s industrial roots. The semi-translucent panels obstruct, catch images, and are removed to allow us to see the action beyond. The work begins with a video of a man discussing local life from decades ago. The performance is like a poem comprising all different elements — hardware/building bits are illuminated slowly and magically; mysterious and mostly obstructed movements repeat; sounds, like wind chimes, haunt the air.