Troupe movements

For Doug Varone, modern dance can be found in the motions of our everyday lives: the way we walk, the gestures we make.

By CAMILLE REYES

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 12, 2000

All week, Doug Varone, a titan in the world of contemporary dance, has been sharing his art with University of South Florida dance students and teachers through a series of workshops. On Saturday, Doug Varone and Dancers, a critically acclaimed nine-member company, will expand the audience with a public performance.

At a glance Doug Varone and Dancers, 8 p.m. Saturday, May 13 at the University of South Florida's Theatre 1, on the Tampa campus. Tickets are $10-$20. Call (813) 974-2323.

Varone's work is not the stuff of pink tulle and tights.

"His movement speaks to you on a gut level, as if it were deja vu. You immediately connect with it," said USF dance professor Gretchen Warren.

Yet it appeals even to those who insist they don't like modern dance, such as Warren's own mother.

Varone's style is born of the motions of our daily lives.

"What intrigues me about dance is that we all do it," Varone said last week. "Walking is dance. Every gesture is dance. Although my work is highly technical, it blurs the line between technical and pedestrian. They are real people being, not dancing."

In keeping with his vision of movement, Varone's company defies standard notions of body type and age; rather than presenting only uniformly youthful sylphs, his company also includes a few older and broader dancers. The works themselves also depict many tones.

On Saturday, the company will perform four works: Varone's signature piece, Rise (premiere in 1993, music by John Adams); Tomorrow (premiere in 2000, set to Belle Epoque love songs by Reynaldo Hahn); a Varone solo titled After You've Gone, to the Benny Goodman song of the same name (premiere in 1995); and Sleeping With Giants (premiere in 1999, music by Michael Nyman).

USF dance department chairman Timothy Wilson helped orchestrate Varone's residency. The seeds were planted when Varone adjudicated and performed at the American College Dance Festival Association, which USF hosted in 1992. The dance faculty agreed to take a large portion of the department's endowment for visiting artists to bring Varone back to campus this year.

"We felt the innovation and reputation of his company was worth the expense for the community to see," Wilson said.

Before he formed his own company in 1986, Varone danced with the Limon Dance Company and Lar Lubovitch. As a choreographer, he has worked in a variety of mediums, including opera and a Broadway musical. He was chosen by Patrick Swayze to choreograph dance sequences for a film about concert dancers, Without a Word, which is in pre-production.

Speaking by phone last week from California, where he was conducting a residency at the University of California-Irvine, Varone was energetic, despite having just flown to the West Coast from New Jersey, where he opened the musical The Night Governess. Varone's schedule shows how much he is in demand. But what may be even more remarkable is that he also is a gifted teacher.

"He has successfully taught his rich, innovative style to his dancers, which is a tribute to his skill as an artistic director," Wilson said.

Varone's distinct style originates from the spine. He uses no forced positions such as port de bras.

"You'll see lots of arms and legs slashing through the air with energy starting from the middle of the spine. The back must define the position of the arms," he said.

Varone equates his movement to a giant swing ride at an amusement park. The limbs of the dancer become the cables of the swing as the centrifugal force from the spine pushes the cables away.

A self-described "knowledge vampire," Varone finds inspiration in everything he encounters, be it books or movies. Sleeping With Giants, one of the pieces on the USF program, contains imagery from two chilling stories, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and William Golding's The Lord of the Flies.

In what Varone, 43, calls a "bizarre generation split," he recently hired two former students to join the company.

Perhaps one of the aspiring professional dancers at USF will catch Varone's eye and land an audition. At the very least, Varone's residency offers USF dancers the opportunity to work with a master, and the public gets the chance to see cutting-edge modern dance.