The first half hour of Doug Varone’s To My Arms / Restore had me baffled at the connection between music and dance (and wondering if costumes had gone astray.) Nothing but admiration for the heroic dancers and their phenomenal recall of a choreographic thicket of heavily constricted movement that looked improvised but of course wasn’t.
Part I of this evening-length work – which opened in Purchase and will travel 30 miles south for its New York City premiere next weekend – is set to a series of gorgeous Handel arias and duets, collectively titled To My Arms.
To a recording of Renée Fleming singing the trouser role of a Greek king combing the woods for the huntress he adores, Courtney Barth and Ryan Yamauchi appear to be fighting a losing battle against gravity. She drags him along the ground; he spins around with her collapsed over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
They later find themselves in a tender, sensual moment from Semele’s satirical world of problematic liaisons between Olympian gods and mortals. Yamauchi sprawls on his back while Barth clasps his head between her knees. The pair kiss. Yet, as elsewhere in Part I, there is little eye contact between dancers. Connections are fleeting, perfunctory, protective; fear and a battle against physical adversity seem to drive the action.
Brad Beakes and Jake Bone stumble around and prop each other up, to an aria of seduction from Giulio Cesare. Leaning neck to neck they manage impressively to rise, hands-free, from the floor. The rest of the company enter and they, too, invent cool new ways of getting on and off the floor. They also appear to be stomping out bugs.
In contrast to the quietly devastating resignation that underpins the aria “Convey me to some peaceful shore,” Beakes dances a solo of a broken body that will not brook defeat.
The spirited “Scoglio d'immota fronte” describes a love as steadfast as a rock that remains unmoved amid raging waters; to this, couples grapple, spinning at various heights off the floor, elbows flying, torsos spiralling. Heavy footfalls contrast with breakneck spins that finish with arms outflung.
Post-intermission, the company seem to have found a portal to a new dimension in the multiverse. And costumes: minimalist, gauzy loungewear in jeweled hues.
In the dynamite second half, titled Restore, Varone dials up the tension onstage to 11. A row of uplights, like airport runway edge lights, shines eerily through a skift of haze. Handel’s bracing setting of the psalm ‘Dixit Dominus’ receives a make-over from DJ and composer Nico Bentley, who weaves in club beats and synths to propel an already propulsive score in an industrial, 80’s sci-fi direction. Singers’ voices fade in and out, or are abruptly cut off – somewhat diminishing the power of the war-like libretto whose punchy Latin text wields harsh syllables like hammers and rapiers, threatening to “shatter skulls,” “fill places with dead bodies” and “make thine enemies thy footstool.” (Reportedly written to mark a coronation, ‘Dixit Dominus’ reminds us that monarchy is sustained by violence, and by claims of direct ties to a vengeful God.)
The whump-whump of beats intensifies as the dancers tumble onstage, reacting to synths as if they’d stuck a finger in an electrical socket. They spring into the air with sharp twists of the torso, bounce with stiff recoil, fall impressively out of backbends, training their gazes skyward. There is breath in their movement, air under their wings, the entropy of Part I a distant memory. Fighting the forces of evil, these dancers make a formidable opponent, firing on all cylinders. Cryptic gestures executed in unison exude the crispness of a military drill and movements executed in canon evoke a never-ending source of energy.
The sound of crackling static communicates a warning. The dancers brace themselves in a wide stance and shift their weight from side to side – slowly at first then more briskly, arms pumping furiously, driven by the beats, till their bodies seem to blur in vibration.
Daeyana Moss scales a ‘mountain’ formed by the dancers in a huddle; apparently alarmed by what she sees, she tumbles down and races backward in a virtuosic burst, to be rescued by her comrades.
Wreaths of smoke and the sound of steel on steel herald an attack. The dancers fall. But Handelian voices seem to re-energise them, as does Yamauchi who in a fit of mad whirling sets everyone else off whirling. They rush around with widespread arms, like angels on errands. This is the final “Gloria” after all.
To My Arms / Restore, the name ripped from Semele’s bewitching aria, played at the Skirball Center in New York City the following weekend, with live music that further ramped up the intensity and complexity of this mighty work. In Part I, singers Emily Donato, Liz Lang, John Easterlin, Benjamin Howard and Jake Ingbar shone alongside the New York Baroque Incorporated orchestra in the pit. Alone onstage, the dancers appeared to be negotiating barren, inhospitable territory. Yet the crisp and agile sounds of period instruments and the achingly gorgeous soloist voices – miraculously woven together by Ted Sperling at the podium – underscored the poignancy, lightness and occasional touches of humour and wistfulness in the dance. In one moving passage, Ingbar’s gravely soaring countertenor in “Ombra mai fu” seemed to send a message of courage to dancer Thryn Saxon, who gestured as if she were looking out of a fortress aperture, dreaming of freedom, claiming space with sprawling movements. She seemed not to see Marc Anthony Gutierrez who crawled abjectly across the stage, performing the reality of her oppression.
In Part II, the soloists were embedded in a minimally lit chorus of 100. Wedged tightly together, they formed a dark, forbidding ‘wall’ onstage behind the dancers. This scary wall was literally made up of humans. Who sang like angels. In their black robes, holding their scores, turning pages, they also resembled judges, administering laws, passing sentences. The added electronic scrapings, whooshing, pounding and pinging in the score only heightened the sense of foreboding. All in all, a stunning affair.
