![\"Doug](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/AJ-Varone-all-141202_Doug_Varone_doom_003.jpg\")
<\/a>Doug Varone’s Dome<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n What strikes me first about Doug Varone\u2019s new Dome<\/em> is the amount of stillness in it. This most musical of choreographers is at home with maelstroms. In his 2004 Castles<\/em>, which opened his company\u2019s program at the Joyce Theater, architectural and social structures form and dissolve and re-form like elaborate sand castles washed over by waves. Arches, bridges, chains, towers, mel\u00e9es, clusters, games surge and vanish in the swirl and fanfares of Prokofiev\u2019s Waltz Suite, Op. 110 <\/em>(music drawn from the ballet Cinderella<\/em>, the opera War and Peace<\/em>, and the film Lermontov). <\/em><\/p>\n Dome <\/em>is bleaker and harsher. The sputter and blare and crash and drum rolls of much of its accompanying music\u2014Christopher Rouse\u2019s startling Trombone Concerto<\/em>\u2014suggests a post-apocalyptic world in which sweet melodies live short lives. Jane Cox\u2019s splendid lighting backs the dancers for much of the time with a glowing, orange sky that hints at distant fires. The dancers enter the stage gradually, like survivors returning to a demolished home. But Varone is not telling a story, only showing a society crumbling and rising, in response to dangers they don\u2019t fully understand.<\/p>\n Doug Varone’s Dome<\/em>. (L to R): Hsiao-Jou Tang, Hollis Bartlett, and Julia Burrer. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n These people wear an assortment of layered, rough-textured garments in beige, brown, and black (by Reid Barthelme and Harriet Jung). They are: Hollis Bartlett, Xan Burley, Julia Burrer, Casey Loomis, Alex Springer, Eddie Taketa, Hsiao-Jou Tang, and Brandon Welch. As in Castles<\/em>, they are superb in their ability to move like silk in the wind one moment and turn twitchy and gawky the next. They can hurtle across the floor or crash to it, as Springer does in one startling entrance into a world where everyone else, at the moment, is curling and uncurling in slow motion.<\/p>\n In response to an outburst by the trombone and cymbals, those on stage erupt into a frenzy, then freeze momentarily. Whatever is driving these people beside the music does so in jolts. Their athleticism and loose-limbed grace keep hitting an invisible wall. They set each other off too; one explosion or its response travel through whoever\u2019s around. Once, they all drop to their knees with an audible thud. Often they collapse to the floor. After one such collapse, they grope into motion, each in his\/her own way, while Burley, on her knees, remains motionless amid them; Springer falls beside her like a boat bumping a pier.<\/p>\n Alex Springer and, in the background, Hollis Bartlett in Dome<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n They recover as an ensemble, stand and raise their arms, while Cox returns the backdrop\u2014which has become gray\u2014to its orange glow. The front curtain rises extremely slowly at the beginning of the piece, revealing performers\u2019 feet and legs moments before we know who they are. Now, at the end, it descends equally slowly on this world of heat and ice. Going. Going. Gone.<\/p>\n The disastrous dramas that Rouse\u2019s music suggests and the pent-up, then released rhythms of the dancing give Dome <\/em>some of the tensions of a thriller. Varone\u2019s own new solo, The Fabulist<\/em>, is more of an ongoing flow, even though it intersperses springy, expansive steps with small jerks, shudders, and gestures that suggest he\u2019s pushing heavy curtains out of the way and bolting through them. Sometimes he seems to be shaking the dance off himself like a dog come from the river. At other times, his surroundings press against him, make him cave in. Varone, a brilliantly distinctive dancer is no longer a young one, and The Fabulist<\/em> is not a young man\u2019s dance, however powerful he is as a performer. The title is apt; he might be telling his own history\u2014or making one up.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>