Roll up for the Magical Decades Tour: Dance Kaleidoscope showcases the Beatles and dancers' choreography

DK dancers salute Beatles in "Magical Mystery Tour."

Feeling pop culture in your body is a common denominator to help explain its power. Dancers, and those who create work for them, have the luck to transmute the catchiness of popular song into physically expressive art. Who wouldn't want to do that — to picture "The Fool on the Hill" in idiosyncratic motion, or to animate "All You Need Is Love" with embracing gestures of community?

That's the fun and wonder behind Dance Kaleidoscope's "Magical Decades Tour," a show that runs through Sunday on the One America Mainstage of Indiana Repertory Theatre. Choreography by outgoing artistic director David Hochoy holds up the iconic strength of the Beatles, "a rock band from the last century," as Hochoy waggishly put it in remarks from the stage before Friday's performance. 

His tribute mostly revives "Magical Mystery Tour" from 2007, then sets two other Beatles songs in a brief epilogue, framing "Vinyl Vision." That's a collection of works created by company members and introduced at last summer's Indy Fringe Festival, launched with a flavorful, highly spiced stew from the 1960s — "Welcome to the 7 O'clock News," by Sarah Taylor.  The piece, set to three songs, suggests the range of "Vinyl Vision," from light-hearted to disturbing. 

Two pieces with similar titles show some of the range. Holly Harkins' "Three's Company" was a reflective study with a daring admixture of silence around a recording of Dvorak's "Songs My Mother Taught Me" as sung by the soprano Nellie Melba more than a century ago. It was an understated response to a time-tested sentimental favorite for dancers Julie Russel, Kieran King, and Taylor. Making something friskier out of the "eternal triangle" theme was Cody Miley's "3's a Party," incorporating a teasing mixture of attraction and repulsion among a comically gifted trio: King, Marie Kuhns, and Manuel Valdes.

Anti-division: Kieran King and Marie Kuhns  in "Human."

Elaborate statements of the wide world's interruptions of human connection had different means of expression in Paige Robinson's "Unending Waves" and Valdes' "Human." The latter was usefully placed at  the end of "Vinyl Vision." The broad ground it covers, set to an astonishing variety of sound sources, was expansive choreographically, and with its protest credentials well expressed. Still, it struck me, as it did last summer, as being in need of some editing. The intensity and focus remain intact, but might have made greater impact with some tightening.

 

"Unending Waves" presented a continuum of costuming and props in the form of flowing cloth on and around six dancers, two of them representing a couple separated by distance and circumstance during World War II. The sea-colored fabric vivified the geographical barrier, as the American home front regarded the two theaters of war from an aching distance; the use of Billie Holiday's recording of "I'll Be Seeing You" was especially effective.

In King's "Just the Same," Robinson and Valdes put the time warping of a close relationship under scrutiny, with a deft exhibition of the effects of personal change on each partner, including strong hints that some kind of bond endures in spite of everything. To convey this through dance, where partnering is typically more up close, was impressive. Marie Kuhns designed her own costumes for the seven-dancer extravaganza "Let's Get Loud," to the song of the same title by Jennifer Lopez. The ensemble spectacle included a virtuoso solo riff by Miley that drew cheers.

As for Hochoy's choreography, there's a sense that longtime DK fans are seeing a prolonged farewell tour during his last season, which is also the troupe's 50th. He's often understandably revived his past work, because there are always new dancers to set a piece upon. As executive director Kim Gutfreund told the audience, he has justly had the company's premium donor fund named for him, putting aside the more remote tribute to Isadora Duncan, the modern-dance progenitor whose illustrious name it has carried up to now.

With stunning costumes by Barry Doss, whose imagination is closely matched by another longtime collaborator, lighting designer Laura E. Glover, Hochoy's "Magical Mystery Tour" extends the unshakable Beatles legacy in its own genre. The way the central figure in "Fool on the Hill" is estranged from his community, and undeservedly isolated, got a vivid impersonation from Stuart Lewis. Bringing that character back at the end of the show, a new "Epilogue," Lewis returns in the perpetually lamenting "Yesterday." The costumes are in glowing pastels, however, that evoke the message of acceptance in the company finale, "Let It Be." 

 In the rest of "Magical Mystery Tour," what stood out was the way Hochoy renders the boldness of some aspects of the Beatles. They were honed early in the raucous atmosphere of clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg that form part of the Fab Four legend. The magnetic force of mutual attraction, nicely highlighted by the two men in cowboy garb (Adrian Dominguez and Miley) who zero in on the women (Emily Dyson and Robinson), gives a special buzz to "Something." Juxtaposed, the unmistakable let-it-all-hang-out message of the Sixties sharpens the edge of the song in the work's middle, "I've Got a Feeling." Typically, Hochoy has a way of representing physical and emotional abandon that always finds a thrilling aesthetic form that looks both controlled and spontaneous. "Magical Mystery Tour" is among the pieces by which we will long remember this potent wizard of contemporary dance.

[Photos by Lora Olive]