My third Fringe day: A peek into Dance Kaleidoscope's future

As a way to showcase the choreographic visions of its dancers, Dance Kaleidoscope's annual visit to the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival always offered insights into the company's wealth of creativity. This time around, with the transition to new artistic directorship having just taken place, the public is afforded a bridge to the future. 

Introducing himself artistically to the public, Joshua Blake Carter also spoke engagingly to the audience Saturday afternoon in the Athenaeum's Basile Theatre. Having been in Indianapolis just a month as the DK's artistic director, Carter shares the program's content with retired artistic director David Hochoy and associate artistic director Stuart Lewis. The message of continuity is complete in "Diva Feva," which has two more performances next weekend.

The divas of the title are vocalists brought forward in the works selected, one of them indirectly. "How Long Has This Been Going On," the Gershwin classic about love in the discovery stage, is a piece set by Carter for Giordano II, part of Chicago's Giordano Dance, the new AD's most recent, well-honed professional association. The recorded performance, by Rufus Wainwight "in the style of Judy Garland," thus sneaks in under the divas umbrella.  

Joshua Blake Carter comes to DK with extensive Windy City experience. 

This duo for two men (here, Bo Brinton and Cody Miley) presents Carter in an intimate mode, tender yet strenuous at times. We are clearly in the embrace of an aesthetic that, stereotypically perhaps, seems to represent Chicago. This is the brawny metropolis Indianapolis never was, and I see in Carter's work the embodiment of Carl Sandburg's famous evocation of the "stormy, husky, brawling City of the Big Shoulders."

When the ensemble mood strikes him, as in "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)," the intensity spreads undiluted among the bodies involved. This aspect rose to the fore in "The Best" (to Tina Turner), in which erotic neediness and its rewards are celebrated with apparent abandon. Carter lays out a partnering vocabulary that embraces striking cling-and-fling interaction and lifts that are less balletic but equally demanding of poise as what we're used to from Hochoy.

That's the penultimate glimpse into Carter's creative world, which ascends into "River Deep, Mountain High" (Celine Dion is the recorded diva), where the exuberance seems to be on the brink of punishment for the dancers. The threshold is reached in rapid head-wagging passages that might have the average, less supple attendee wondering how even well-prepared bodies can do such things without injury. But wonder is essential in experiencing Dance Kaleidoscope, and when it occupies that world as it does in this work, the company's flourishing seems assured under its new leadership. 

lEarlier, Hochoy's legacy was celebrated as "Diva Feva" opens with  two excerpts from "Ella." The diva in question could be none other than Ella Fitzgerald, who's represented by "Cry Me a River" and the scat-singing extravaganza "Lady Be Good." The former song drew from Hochoy the lyrics' mixture of regret and revenge served cold, expressed with particular expressiveness by Paige Robinson among the three dancers. One of Hochoy's elegant solo pieces, "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" (in Annie Lennox's recording) was given statuesque pathos by Holly Harkins. 

The program's other piece, "Tryin' Times" (Roberta Flack) offered a preview of a Lewis focus during the 2023-24 season. It had his characteristic immediacy of dramatic suggestion in the way the dancers gather individually and slightly at loose ends, then coalesce in an affecting misery-loves-company scenario. 

H