Stephanie Lapis and John Beasant III seemed in desperate conversation in the second movement, echoing the music’s skittering and lingering phrases. Awaiting a reply, one of them would freeze in some improbable, corkscrewed position while the other squirmed.
The music turned romantic, and Daniel Charon, Ryan Corriston, and Eddie Taketa went off balance, fell, rolled, twisted on the floor, helped each other up, scrambled a short distance, fell. Although they were wearing white suits, they reminded me of soldiers in the trenches of a World War I movie. Desch and the other dancers joined them, and she ended the piece, running toward the audience, still agonized.
Eddie Taketa took the central role in the last piece, Lux (2006), which was set to Philip Glass’s The Light. Taketa led the full company in more twisting, sliding, rolling, gesturing, running movement. As the dancers streamed across the stage, veering into denser clusters and frenetic, pseudo-tap dances, I remembered the pristine airborne crossings and open torsos of Lucinda Childs’s Dance (1979), which also is set to Philip Glass’s music. What a lot of layers have been piled onto the minimalists’ clear objectivity since then. Whatever the audience may have inferred from Varone’s movement ordeals, the dancers were acclaimed as heroes.
