'Vinyl Visions': DK dancers cast their choreographic visions back over decades of recorded music

Professional dancers get the chance to display their creative chops in an attractive once-a-year format — no reason it shouldn't be a recurrent hit. The Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival tradition for Dance Kaleidoscope is to present an hour-long showcase of its members' works. It's an anthology of carefully cultivated bounty.

Separation by circumstance and anxiety ini "Unending Waves."

The 2022 assignment from artistic director David Hochoy was to focus on a recorded song or two from a decade of the choreographer's choice. As has long been the case, it's a treat to see how dancers realize their choreographic visions through the hard collaborative work of their colleagues.

Most  of the decades chosen represent the heyday of vinyl records. The term has attained almost a kind of sanctity in our digital, streaming age. And it's not just for alliteration's sake that the title fits a program comprising original works by seven DK dancers. Unless the chosen music is recast in a fresh, danceable form, its endurance rests on audio appeal. The bonus is that each choreographer presents a brief statement about his or her choice before it's performed.

There are two more performances (Friday and Saturday) at the festival's Venue 6 in the Athenaeum, and "Vinyl Visions" should not be missed. I saw Sunday's matinee, and was struck by the range of expression, from engagements with history through the cultural scene to personal statements about the trials and rewards of intimate relationships.

The party/club scene lifted up in Marie Kuhns' "Let's Get Loud" (after the Jennifer Lopez song) matches the music's energy in costuming and movement. The feeling is that anything can happen if the fun is foremost. The suggestions of untrammeled behavior were nicely held in balance by the choreographic design.

Of course, small groups of people forging closer connections can result in "eternal triangle" kinds of tension and release. Such was an occasion for the amusing thrusts and parries of the threesome in Cody Miley's " 3's a Party," as well as for the haunting, nostalgic tug of Holly Harkins' "Three's Company."

 Sometimes the third character is more abstract: the passage of time and the difficulty of dealing with loss was  poignantly brought forward by Paige Robinson and Manuel Valdes in Kieran King's "Just the Same."

Manuel Valdes' "Human" illustrates division as well as unity.

The present day is the focus of the finale, created and costumed by Valdes. "Human" brings the other ten participants onstage, costumed in loose red trousers, for a four-section piece using mostly the recordings of Labrinth. The import of the choreography, as Valdes expressed it in his introduction, is the ongoing importance of recognizing the full humanity of everybody, whatever the palpable differences that sometimes erect barriers and support alienation. 

A focus on costuming as an essential dance element also gave structure to Robinson's "Unending Waves," with its representation of the geographical and emotional separations forced upon Americans, almost uniquely spared the direct impact of war, by World War II. The way natural and human forces of division and yearning were integrated had extraordinary poignancy. 

The benefit of the  "decades" theme in bringing these young dancers out of their time frames was immediately emphasized in the show opener, "Welcome to the 7 O'clock News," by Sarah Taylor. The focus on the 1960s, when I emerged from childhood, gave the choreographer lots of choices, most of them of turbulence and distress, reflected in  musical choices crowned by the thematically apt "7 O'clock News/Silent Night" of Simon and Garfunkel. That was almost too much recollection for me (the recent death of songwriter Lamont Dozier implanted in me the daylong earworm of "You Can't Hurry Love"), but it amounted to an alluring way into "Vinyl Visions."

[Photos by Freddie Kelvin]