American Dance Festival DOUG VARONE AND DANCERS Review

American Dance Festival Performance Includes Memorable Post-Show Discussion

During My Arms/Restore, we could hear the troupe’s heavy breathing during strategic moments of pause in their marathon performance. These were fleeting oases in their full-tilt 90 minutes (with intermission) presentation of choreography set to a string of Handel opera arias, followed by Handel Remixed, where the baroque sounds feel as if they just swallowed LSD.

Seemingly restored from their second Act called Restore, the dancers sauntered on to the stage with the comfort most of us only get when we are in our PJs prepping a binge watch in the privacy of our living room. As they introduced themselves, a commonality jumped out. Each would say, “…I’ve been with Doug since 20xx…”. Indeed, even the post-performance moderator began the talk by referencing his time “…with Doug..”

How fitting, thinks this reviewer.

These are words we could also use to express our experience as the My Arms/Restore audience. We learned from Varone of the work’s very long gestation. Started during the COVID lockdown with attempts at ensemble inputs via the likes of zoom, the work’s development continued into the post-pandemic phase of disappointment. Varone shared that he had thought—like many of us— that with the pandemic behind us, all would be a glorious celebration— but then it wasn’t. He also explained how his omnivore music tastes led him to these arias during the lockdown, and later how he found the new work by Nico Bentley, Handel Remixed, that so aptly bottled his unsettled feeling.

When the commanding voice of Renée Fleming swirled on the stage we were totally with Doug. Our senses and the hall both were filled with the power of the human voice . We are with Doug, hearing how the pandemic’s isolation gave these arias about loss and longing new meaning. For this reviewer, Handel’s grandeur initially made it difficult to focus on the choreography.

Focusing on music alone was short-lived. We are snapped to attention by the surprise of intentional drop foot moves adding a punctuation mark in phrases that otherwise flow or do millisecond pauses into evanescent statue poses. These intentional insertions of feigned klutziness are sometimes seen in transitions, for example by a dancer doing a crawling Quasimodo to exit stage left. The music is always there, which the dancers especially remind us of when the sync up with coloratura.

Looking back, it seems that these purposeful anti-elegant moves in Act I were harbingers of the more ensemble oriented Act II. There, the collaborative aspects of the troupe’s work seems more apparent. While composer Bentley laces stately Handel sounds with electronic moans and whines, the dancers find each other repeatedly. Maybe they seek shelter from the storm of cacaphony sneaking into the baroque calm. We do know that it feels unstudied, but it is quite the reverse.

In the post-show discussion an audience member commented how Act II felt like purgatory. She asked Varone if he was making a religious or spiritual commentary. It was THAT totally non-pretentious answer that put him, in this writer’s opinion, in the winner’s column of an imagined contest to choose the choreographer you’d most like to be with on an abandoned desert island. His eyes widened as he heard the question, as he threw his head back. Then Varone assured her that he thought it was a good question, but that he really didn’t know the answer. He explained that he usually figures out where he is going with each work years after it is launched.

Giving us this invitation to his interior world just like ours— so full of question marks— you too might have relished his person as so human, so accessible, and so likable. No wonder his associates lead with how and when they came to be with Doug.

Doug Varone and Dancers are likely to return to future American Dance Festival performances. They are a clear audience favorite. To keep posted, bookmark the American Dance Festival website.