INTERVIEW: Doug Varone and Dancers celebrate 30 years with BAM performances

Doug Varone is a creative person unbound by conventional categorization. He’s associated with the world of dance, and his company, Doug Varone and Dancers, is one of the preeminent groups based in New York City. However, the choreographer is a multihyphenate who is at home in the arenas of opera, film, fashion and theater.

He’s a movement artist, and perhaps that’s best way to describe his creative efforts.

In 2017, Varone and his company will celebrate 30 years of dance. Audience members, both newcomers and alumni, can experience some of this longevity at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater March 29 to April 1. The evening will feature three works, all expertly curated to showcase the past, present and future of Doug Varone and Dancers.

“We’re celebrating our 30th anniversary, which is a huge milestone, I think, particularly in the dance world, and I think that what we’re presenting is a really beautiful cross-section of a lot of what has gotten us here,” Varone said recently in a phone interview. “It includes a major revival entitled Possession. … It includes a new duet entitled Folded and also a new large group work entitled ReComposed, and I feel as if the evening itself is a beautiful mixture of the kinds of work I’ve created over time and am still interested in creating into the future.”

Varone’s continued choreographic exploration with Possession allows him to take a trip down memory lane in order to reconstruct the piece for 2017 audiences. To remount the piece, he investigated what his original impetus was for creating the work, and he also explores the imagery of the piece, its original cast members and what the movements were in 1994. Possession is inspired by A.S. Byatt’s century-spanning novel of the same name, and it covers such themes as solitude and desire.

“I also feel like the thing that’s so beautiful about the art form is that it lives and it breathes, so every time we reconstruct something, it’s different in some way,” he said. “Not that the choreography is different, but that what the dancers of every new generation bring to it is completely different, and it’s beautiful to watch that unfold.”

Varone wouldn’t classify Possession as a difficult piece to pull off for his current company, but it does allow them to dig deeper on his unique dance vocabulary. When Possession was first created in 1994, Varone was still coming into his own as a master choreographer. He was developing and investigating his vocabulary, which has now become codified.

“So it was in its very early stages, and I think that that’s the exciting and challenging part for my current company is to look back at a piece that’s 23 years old and to see movement vocabulary that was in its nascent form and to figure out how to let it become new in their bodies again,” Varone said.

When Varone was a professional dancer, he was always choreographing on the side, and then when he stopped dancing, he started to think about a permanent company to showcase his movement.

“I began the process of creating dances and creating evenings of my work that felt as if they were a personal voice and not someone else’s,” he said about those early days. “It took me a while to figure out who that was, what I wanted to say, and I was very careful about not allowing the momentum of having a company take over from the quality of the work that I was creating. I think that’s really easy to do, so it was a very, very slow journey in the beginning, very much about the craft of the work. And then the company began to build the momentum.”

Thirty years later, Varone said he’s still inspired by the art form, and those three decades have seen their fair share of accomplishments and performances. Varone’s work has been commissioned by Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Rambert Dance Company in London, Martha Graham Dance Company, Dancemakers in Canada, Batsheva Dance Company in Israel, Bern Ballet in Switzerland and An Creative in Japan.

His other work has been equally celebrated and varied. He has been represented at the Met Opera with Salome, An American Tragedy, Le Sacre du Printemps and Les Troyens. He choreographed the off-Broadway musical Murder Ballad and even the Patrick Swayze film One Last Dance.

“I’m still challenging myself to try and find new things to say and new ways to say it,” he said. “I think it’s really easy to become stale as an artist, and you’ve got to constantly dig deep to figure out new ways of reinventing what you know. And I feel like that’s been my mantra all along — how do I look to the past, learn from it and then move forward.”

Varone’s life isn’t only made up of art and dance. He also needs to contend with the necessary evils of heading a dance company. That means after he’s finished choreographing, he needs to work with the executive director in many administrative roles, and, of course, fundraising and grant writing are extremely important. “There’s a business side of it as well that needs to be honored in order to make sure that all the moving parts are in place and remain in place, so I do have an active part in overseeing that as well,” he said.

He added: “Our educational component is very active. We have a summer workshop that we hold every year that we’re almost about into our 20th year of that. It’s a three-week workshop that we hold. This year we’re holding it at Purchase College up in Westchester, and it is for pre-professionals. And we actually get a lot of professionals returning to work with us. I also began mentoring a series for emerging choreographers, which I hold here in New York and hold a workshop for them and then mentor them through the process of building a new work, and that’s been really, really satisfying for me as a choreographer at this point in my career to give back to the next generation of dance makers.”

Varone’s love for dance goes back to when he was a child. He started tap dancing when he was 5 or 6 years old, so the art form has always been a part of his life. “I always thought that I was going to move into musical theater and went to college to do musical theater, and it was at that point in time that I was drawn to contemporary dance and how you can say really potent and beautiful things with your body through the choreography,” he said. “So I began to make that shift and had a dance career and as a young dancer began to explore a choreographic voice. I’ve really kind of been taking the ride. It always feels like it’s going to end, and it never does. I’m happy to still be around.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Doug Varone and Dancers will present three works at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre March 29 to April 1. Click here for more information and tickets.