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He missed a stellar experience, one quietly stunning me. Doug Varone is one of the comparatively few contemporary choreographers possessing his own very muscular, visual voice. Varone surveys contemporary life, its dissents, its intimate searches, its domestic tensions exacerbated by God knows what, but melded into a striking visual display capturing the essence of a theme. In the process the nine members of the company, Varone included, subjected themselves to intense physical explosions and explorations. I had never seen the company before; I hope never to miss the ensemble again.

Lux, Home and Boat Leaving comprised the evening’s works, set to Philip Glass, Dick Connette and Arvo Part’s Te Deum respectively, Home providing a pas de deux for Varone and Natalie Desch. With the singular contribution of Eddie Taketa in Lux, these three elicited distinction in what otherwise were studiously collective works. The three pieces seemed centered around the themes of meditation and a frenetic exaltation; domestic tensions and individualized collective reactions to an inevitable journey.

Glass must be difficult to choreograph, not only because of the length of his pieces but of the recurring crescendoes at the height of his development;it seems to go on forever. Taketa opens and closes the work with circular running movements, an upraised hand with two fingers pointing as if indicating a religious message. The ensemble engaged in primarily circular movements arms swinging, bodies flinging much like the forward bent Russian folk barrel turns, spectacular, dangerous-looking, unending. Both music and choreography thundered upon the appropriate senses.

After a pause, Home started with Varone and Desch on chairs downstage center, angled towards each other. The curtain up, they sat there unmoving; then Varone’s left hand twitched slightly. Shortly after, Desch’s the fingers of her semi-open left hand flutter. Varone reaches for her;she remains seated. What follows when they stand up is a push pull, Varone grasping her roughly, Desch collapsing backward from the hips in his arms. There are repeated attempts by Varone to get her to look at him. When they sit the body language of Desch is aversion, shrinking, a fragile resignation. She is small-boned, slender, blonde. Varone’s size would find approval in a football lineup minus regalia. It seemed an imaginative study between Stanley and Stella after Blanche’s consignment to an institution. The pair danced against the edgy music until, for all her frailty, Desch was able to assert herself. The curtain came down as Varone went behind her chair, his inarticulate frustrations,his bullishness spent; he quietly laid a hand on Desch’s shoulder.

Boats Leaving seemed at the outset to evoke the U.S. immigration saga. Where Lux used a circular quality in its arm flinging, This piece to Arvo Part’s Te Deum seemed much more staccato; therefore more secular, despite the music's theme. Varone has an amazing ability to create movement exaggerating body language when people speak; here every pro and con related to whether one goes, stays and under what condition seemed fully explored, within immediate circles, outside the intimacy of basic groups. Depending upon whether one felt this the secular passage to The New World or the struggles of the dying against checking out, the controversy, individual or collective, regarding that mysterious threshold provoked tension in the body, wondering why the ensemble didn’t get on with it before remembering that the music imposed its length on the invention. When the end came, each individual managed to set aside their flailing, exiting simply at upstage left, two dancers standing on either side of the purported gangplank, until finally only Eddie Taketa remained, departing as the curtain fell.