Man Animates Machine in Varone’s ‘Ballet Mecanique’

What an unlikely pairing to have Doug Varone choreograph a work to George Antheil’s best-known composition, “Ballet Mecanique,” of 1925. But when his poetic heat met Antheil’s brutal and unsentimental ice in the world premiere of Varone’s “Ballet Mecanique” at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara on Friday night, the place steamed.

Doug Varone & Dancers spent the past three weeks here at Summerdance, where the new work was mostly made and co-commissioned. Varone also serves as artistic advisor to Summerdance, now in its fifth year as a festival, school and home for contemporary dance. He has performed twice before, in 1996 and 1998. His presence means something to an audience that clearly now knows and embraces him, yet still can be stunned.

It probably could be no other way for a choreographer using early Antheil. “Ballet Mecanique”--with its sirens, airplane propellers, hard staccato striking on the piano and angry transitions--was intended to imitate the noise of big machinery.

“Mecanique” made him a darling of the Ezra Pound, Joyce and Yeats set. Later they didn’t look so kindly upon him. But the point remained that his sounds put one almost physically inside an industrial factory, and the experience resonated with their modernist reality.

Varone took up the challenge of creating a dance that further fools you into thinking you’re in a machine. Aided by the gigantic, black-and-white scenic projections designed by Wendall K. Harrington, he attached his dancers to as abstract a language as his visceral nature would allow. Their arms and palms fully extended, they were girders and steel suspensions. In the background, a close-up view of what could have been the Eiffel Tower’s interior compounded the feeling of the dancers as architectural devices.

But, why then, did the sight of Adriane Fang and Daniel Charon hurling themselves into fully prone dives on the floor stir such an emotional thrill?

Varone’s work for couples consistently addressed survival. Machines can’t do it without humans, and humans need each other, he seemed to say. As if to emphasize this biological imperative, Harrington’s stark images actually moved and pulsed, and their content became progressively more related to the animal rather than mineral kingdom.

Varone’s own evolution as a master of pairs (most memorably himself with Faye Driscoll, Cria Merchant and Larry Hahn, Eddie Taketa and Fang) could be fully traced on the satisfying program that included “Possession” (1994) and “As Natural as Breathing” (2000).