E-Mail This Article to a Friend Edge walking Doug Varone at the Majestic BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Doug Varone seems balanced on a choreographic edge between the musicality and humanism of modern dance and the wariness of expressive devices that fueled postmodern dance. CrashArts brought Varone’s New York–based company to the Cutler Majestic last weekend with three pieces in very different styles. All of them depended on music with a strong sensory effect, and they all combined beautifully crafted action with emotional implications that got quenched before they could do serious harm.

Castles, the newest dance on the program, is set to Serge Prokofiev’s lush and slightly dissonant Opus 110 Waltz Suite (pieces from Cinderella, War and Peace, and Lermontov). As the music conjures up sumptuous ballet ballrooms in your mind, the eight dancers populate the stage with what seem like the simplest of steps — walking, running, arms flung out to propel them into swinging turns. The movement visually reflects the sensuous rising and plunging of the musical phrase: driving the dancers forward and dying away, sometimes spreading through clusters of dancers, sometimes contained in individual patterns.

That’s the formal way to talk about it, but these are not abstract movements. They’re mundane actions in waltz mode: people grab one another, poke a head or an arm in the air, clump together, shove, lift, fall and slide, two-three-ONE-two-three. John Besant and Daniel Charon have a duet of approach-avoidance, affection-anger. At the end, one of them mimes straightening his tie and you flash the whole thing back as a men’s-room encounter. Natalie Desch uses Eddie Taketa as a kind of tinker toy, pushing his arm or knee into a new position just to see what it would look like. The next minute, they’re grappling in an embrace. The musical cadence seems to sweep up any unruly impulses.

The 1988 duet Home is once again made of direct, ordinary movements, these shaped to a postmodern score. A. Leroy’s string quartet repeats essentially the same phrase throughout the 12 minutes of the dance, with slight variations in the melody, harmony, and orchestration as it goes along, the phrase becoming more mysterious as it grows more familiar. Adriane Fang and Daniel Charon enact a hundred domestic incidents, using two chairs as tokens in an endless power game. He paces. She waits. He sits beside her. She gets up. He slumps over . . . Each move signals invitation, indifference, desire, denial. No response is predictable or conclusive. Their faces are blank, noncommittal. The game could go on forever.

The original Ballet mécanique was not a ballet but a Cubo-Futurist film made by the painter Fernand Léger in 1923-’24. George Antheil’s score for it, besides being too long for the film, was impossibly visionary. Until digital music came along in the 1980s, nobody could figure out how to get 16 player pianos in one room together. Antheil rescored the piece a couple of years later for one pianola, two regular pianos, and percussion (xylophone, alarm clocks, sirens), but by then he and Léger weren’t on speaking terms, so the movie remained unaccompanied.

This was all in the days when avant-garde artists were crazy about machines. Léger, anticipating John Cage, issued manifesto after manifesto calling for an appreciation of objects relieved of their meaning and their familiar settings. He thought the public would appreciate the beauty of turbines, gears, upside-down smiles if only æsthetic preconceptions didn’t get in the way. Antheil had already composed his Airplane Sonata and other celebrations of modernism.

For his Ballet Mécanique, Doug Varone used the 1927 score and substituted continuous projected designs by Wendall K. Harrington for Léger’s proto-minimalist film collage. The dancers, in blue jumpsuits, seemed to be doing patterns similar to those of the first dance, independently or in spite of Antheil’s frenetic rhythms and nervous silences, his clanging, pounding, and alarms.

Charon and Fang constituted a unison duo, separate from the rest of the group, with angular, "mechanical" gestures and giant step patterns. The projections were overwhelming, beginning with some sketchy lines and circles that soon began to move across a front scrim. Halfway through the dance, the scrim flew out, the patterns blanketed the dancers and the backdrop, and energies mounted. The designs grew more complicated and more active, at one point enveloping the dancers in a dizzying, pulsating spiral. The dance ended in a blackout as the two mechanical guards crashed to the ground, with gongs and sirens and fast projected images.

Some people think this dance is imagining the end of the world. Léger, Antheil, and their colleagues thought civilization was just beginning to perk up.