‘Dense Terrain’ Has World Premiere at Carlsen Center
Johnson County Community College |
Search the New York ticket.com sites for May, and you’ll find Doug Varone’s Dense Terrain listed on everything from BAM to Theater Mania. Not going to New York? No problem. Dense Terrain will have its final technical rehearsal and premiere at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 5, in Yardley Hall of the Carlsen Center, Johnson County Community College, 11 days in advance of its opening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City.
Doug Varone and Dancers celebrates its 20-year anniversary season with creative momentum in high gear. Varone’s new work, Dense Terrain, co-commissioned by the Carlsen Center, reinforces the choreographer’s reputation for kinetic and profoundly emotional dance.
The evening-length dance/opera has an original score by art-rock and film composer Nathan Larson and was inspired by Lives of a Cell, a book by scientist Lewis Thomas. An exploration of our impulse to pair and communicate, the work reveals how words, gestures and movement are equally potent aspects of language.
With its eerie and transporting original score by Larson (Boys Don’t Cry, Velvet Goldmine), the work for 10 dancers and three vocalists layers body, language, text, dance and scenic design into grandly cinematic yet intimate work. A unique spoken language, declared in bold monologue and glimpsed in torn letters scattered on the stage, serves as a metaphor for how we are all interconnected. An accumulation of emotions are played out, fractured, realigned and replayed.
The work incorporates live instrumental and vocal music and multimedia projections. The stunning articulation and integration of form, function and scale is startling, wrenching.
Running time is 1 hour 30 minutes. No intermission.
It is anticipated that the entire creative team (Varone; Allen Mower, set design; Blue Land Media team, video; Jane Cox, lighting design; and Liz Prince, costume design) will be in residenceat the Carlsen Center April 29-May 5 for technical and dress rehearsals. The creative team will be available for a May 5 post-performance Q&A.
Varone also will be on campus as part of the Carlsen Center’s Creativity to Innovation program, which integrates arts programs into the general classroom. Varone will discuss his creative process with JCCC students in English, psychology and early childhood classes.
The Carlsen Center has had a seven-year association with Doug Varone and Dancers, co-commissioning Approaching Something Higher (2001), Castles (2004) and Dense Terrain (2007).“Charles Rogers and the entire staff of the Carlsen Center have been incredibly generous with their support of my work, and I am continually humbled by that,” Varone said. “BothApproaching Something Higher and Castles were turning points in my creative career, and I feel the same way with our new work, Dense Terrain. Without champions like the Carlsen Center in the foreground of commissioning, the dialogue between the art we make and the lives it can affect is endangered.
”From its first performances at PS 122 in 1986, Doug Varone and Dancers has earned worldwide praise. Varone's unique artistic output has earned the company numerous honors including eight New York Dance and Performance Awards (Bessies), the American Dance Festival's Doris Duke Award for New Work and three National Dance Project Awards. The company's dances have been commissioned by such leading institutions as Jacob's Pillow, The Joyce Theater, Whitebird (Portland, Ore.), Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts (College Park, Md.), Summerdance, Santa Barbara, and the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts.
In recent years the Company has partnered with opera companies and presenters to bring a new dynamic to the staging of opera, theater and song-cycles. Last season the Company partnered with Lincoln Center on the world premiere of composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s Orpheus and Euridice for the Great Performers and American Songbook series (Elizabeth Futral, soprano) and the Aquila Theatre Company on H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. In the spring of 2006, the Company partnered with Minnesota Opera on the American premiere of Laurent Petitgirard's Joseph Merrick: The Elephant Man.
Tickets are $30 and $25, available by calling the Carlsen Center box office, 913-469-4445, or online at www.jccc.edu/CarlsenCenter.
