Home (1988, acquired in 2000)
This week we look at another landmark work by American choreographer Doug Varone, the duet Home. Peggy writes:
I no longer remember if Doug Varone suggested the duet Home to me, or if I asked him about the possibility, but certainly by the time I learned it in 2000 I had seen it performed many times and admired it unreservedly. Home brings us into a domestic space shared by a couple, into the interior lives of each of them, and into the complexity of their faltering relationship. Doug scrupulously avoided dance movement within the choreography, instead mining the qualitative nuance of gesture, timing and proximity. The superb music for Home was composed by Dick Connette, a person dear to me as someone closely linked to my personal life in New York throughout the 1980s. The incredible resonance between the music and the choreography achieves a kind of perfection that has made this work timeless. Home is a touchstone in Doug’s repertoire; it is absolutely foundational to his body of work.
I have been fortunate to perform this superb duet many times over 20+ years, including the debut for my company shared with James Kudelka, whose tenderness and humility touched me very deeply; unforgettable performances with Doug at American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival; and most frequently with Larry Hahn, whose extraordinary gifts as a performer were honed through his long tenure with Doug Varone and Dancers. PB
Doug adds: There are few works in my repertory as cherished as Home, partly due to the timing of its creation early in my career. The exploration was to craft a simple, unadorned narrative work that employed very little discernible dance vocabulary, embracing only a human everyday quality of movement. This was essential to my trajectory as an artist and the dances that have spilled out of my brain since. I’ve often called the work a theater scene set to music and as the dance has matured with time, I have continued to strip away any further artifice from the choreography. This process began 12 years after the dance was originally made when Peggy acquired the work, and followed discussions we had about pairing it down further to reveal a physical truth that felt authentic to our age as performers. We explored time and gesture with a radically different approach, allowing for the subtlest of movements to speak volumes in ways they hadn’t before. It was a turning point for the dance and perhaps myself as an artist, to understand the great value of re-evaluation. This was not only true of the physical acts that drive the work, but also of the narrative itself to be more truthful and equal in its character’s journeys. Peggy brought a new depth to the work and in doing so asked essential questions of its integrity. That affect has been lasting in a work that has stood the test of time.
