Collaborative magic: ICO and DK concert includes two dancer/choreographer farewells

A sentence in Rainer Maria Rilke's "Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" resonates for me on many levels, and Sunday it seemed especially applicable to Joshua Blake Carter's new setting of one of the most durable short pieces in the classical repertoire. 

The Dance Kaleidoscope artistic director's new work was one of two premieres on a program combining the modern-dance troupe and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra at their highest level of achievement.

In his only novel, the German poet wrote: "The room next door is the only one that is always completely different from what you think."

Cody Miley and Julie Russel in "To Meet Again"

In the capacious house of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings," the room my mind goes to is home to a celebration of erotic mystery and attraction. It sits next door to the larger room the piece inhabits for most people today: a place of lamentation, with music appropriate for bereavement. 

Hanging crepe on Barber's marvelous slow movement has gotten to be a cultural habit that I've never quite understood. My room is completely different from others'. 

"Adagio for Strings"  has been  played to process the shock of the Kennedy assassination (the slow movement from Beethoven's "Eroica"Symphony, which I heard as a college freshman on a Kalamazoo radio station  that  awful day, has always seemed more apt). "Adagio for Strings" has also drawn tears in concert commemorations of the victims of 9/11. It was featured in the searing Vietnam War film "Platoon" (1986). And the beat goes on.

What's love got to do with it? Well, lots — in Carter's view and, supporting from an admiring distance, my own. Titling his piece "To Meet Again," the choreographer brings forward two dancers, one initially walking down each side aisle at the Schrott Center for the Performing arts, reconnecting visually as they approach each other onstage. 

Cody Miley and Julie Russel are another one of DK's historically validated, perfect duo partnerships, it turns out, and to no one's surprise. They seemed an inevitable choice Sunday afternoon, their skills supporting a consistent emotional investment in their assignment.

Their strengths match well; their physical proportions have no evident difficulties of belonging in such an intimate scenario. As the ICO strings enunciated Barber's score with tenderness and passion at the back of the stage, the dancing gave substance to Carter's title: these lovers were enacting a renewal of love, resolving memories of their earlier relationship's highs and lows.

The sadness that so many listeners overemphasize in Barber's music of course has a worthy role to play in Carter's pas de deux, but it is not dominant. It is part of a process the music lays out. The quietness with which "Adagio for Strings" ends is given the form of the couple's resolution of difficulties. They have built sturdily on their past together.

Along the way, Carter's characteristic manner of designing unconventional lifts and holds is fully exploited. This involves movement that may be nearly self-contradictory, with reaches upward that sometimes almost collapse in a kind of grappling, only to coalesce toward steadiness. There is no roughness in such transitions; they work with the naturalness of every intimate relationship's ebbs and flows, tensions and releases.

He has the dancers use the middle space around them. A brief episode of alternatively placing hands stacked in the air between them cleverly mimics how we used to choose who batted first in childhood softball games. Competition has its place in every stage of progress toward the satisfaction of compromise and mutual respect. 

We will all be thrust into funereal occasions often enough as we age. As for me, with respect to "Adagio for Strings," I'll take romance — and Joshua Blake Carter's suave apprehension of it in "To Meet Again."

The other world premiere in "New World," this weekend's season-ending concert for both organizations, is Stuart Lewis' "A Leaf's Devotion to the Sun."

The departing associate artistic director says farewell to the company with a virtuoso setting of Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in E minor ("From the New World"). Lewis' title privileges the importance of nature imagery and human attention to natural growth. The context is the devotion of the community to that growth and the responsibility to nurture it as well as one another.

In the midst of a dazzling exhibition of ensemble dancing, Lewis has fashioned a farewell vehicle as well for retiring dancer Paige Robinson. Her character establishes loving regard for the symbolically budding leaf at the auspicious start of the first movement. The joining of such regard by a flowing mixture of companions who both challenge and nurture her is the overarching business of the choreography. 

Highlighting an expert solo dancer in the midst of ceaseless ensemble activity could well have resulted in a mishmash of choreographic intentions, but it never does. That's largely due to the deftness of Lewis' assertion of theatrical values, a staple of his artistry ever since I can remember. His gestural language is always enfolded in dance itself. He shifts and varies the dancers in combination, never throwing creative opportunities away just to keep pace with the score. They are similarly costumed by Erica Johnston, with some attractive individualistic touches in the torso designs. Lewis responds to the music at all points. He even charmed me by the way he set a repeated phrase in the last movement that's identical to "Three Blind Mice." Three dancers briefly circle their own eyes with their fingers. It's a gesture that creeps to the edge of "mickey-mousing" the score without springing traps on itself. After all, the cheese stands alone.

On the whole, Lewis has larger points to make. The Czech composer's advice to Americann composers to work the cultures of Native Americans and African-Americans into their music is a delicate, respectful feature of his own work here. Lewis picks up on the thumping episodes in the symphony to suggest American Indian ceremonial dancing. In the famous Largo (with its English-horn solo beautifully rendered Sunday by Pamela Ajango) Dvorak's inspiration in black spirituals evokes for Lewis the forced labor and thwarted opportunities imposed upon the enslaved, as well as those who have to earn any of nature's rewards by the sweat of their brows.

Triumphant in final appearance with company during Dvorak finale 

Most crucial, however, to "A Leaf's Devotion" is the performance of the solo role. Robinson's theatrical flair has long been a feature of her DK history. She defines character with a striking clarity and malleability of facial expression, supported by her dancing. An idle fantasy of mine sees her properly cast as one of Chekhov's disappointed aristocrats, but the theater of language is not her metier, and I'm sure DK fans are fine with that. I certainly have treasured her eloquence as a dancer tout court. In this role, she projects the anxiety of the unnamed soloist as well as her joy. She is both a learner and a teacher: Do I fit in among these people, and what can I contribute that goes beyond adjustment to them? Robinson's dignified, intense performance brilliantly illuminated the emotional spectrum in depth and breadth. 

Holly Harkins and Paige Robinson in "A Leaf's Devotion" 

Interaction with two others in the Largo suggests both the exhaustion of manual labor and the promise of the harvest. Holly Harkins, a worthy successor to the "sprite" function in DK performances once filled by Jillian Godwin, danced a leafy trimmed figure of encouragement to the soloist; Marie Kuhns, a more ethereal presence in need of the strength Robinson's character acquires. 

Those two spend several moments in a "Pieta" pose, calling up an echo in my memory thanks to the usual aptness of Laura E. Glover's lighting. It reminded me a little uncomfortably of the similarly spotlighted view of Michelangelo's "Pieta" that I and thousands of others enjoyed from a moving sidewalk at the 1964 New York World's Fair. Yet that cradling tableau seemed quite justified here, and its spiritual side was fulfilled in the celebratory energy of the finale.

It was a satisfying sign of Dance Kaleidoscope's connection to its past that the show opened with "Afternoon of a Faun,"  artistic director emeritus David Hochoy's 2008 setting of Debussy's masterpiece 

Cavorting provisionally in "Afternoon of a Faun"

of the late 19th century. The Faun is danced in this production with superb control by Cody Miley, representing the figure's idle self-absorption with a large white ball, both held aloft and sprawled upon as the creature whiles away the steamy hours. Three nymphs (Holly Harkins, Marie Kuhns, and Julie Russel) appear, and, as in Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography for the original, soon dismiss the boy as too much in his own orbit for their tastes. 

Hochoy's version displays his wit as well as his gift for complementing everything about how things look in isolation with how they look in motion. When the nymphs come back holding large veils, they enchant the Faun, and there's some close encounters and tossing about of their smaller balls, proving there's nothing that connects better, even in a mythical setting, than simple play. Naturally, at the end, the Faun seems satisfied to be by himself again with his large ball, and the piece ends with an autoerotic thrust.

Guest conductor Andres Lopera guided the ICO deftly through the challenging accompaniments to all three pieces. In a period of respite for the dancers between the Hochoy and Carter works, he conducted the orchestra in the Overture to Mozart's "Magic Flute." Lopera displayed such an invigorated, well-proportioned mastery of the score and brought so much out of the orchestra that from then on in the rest of the program, I kept guiltily stealing glances from the dancers to check out the invited maestro's work. That took some doing, as the dancing was worth my undivided attention. So was everything about this concert.

[Photos by Lora Olive]