Dance Kaleidoscope ends season sketching artistic director's short history here

With a tease that attaches a label to Dance Kaleidoscope's season finale, "Under the Covers" directs attention to something that might seem a little more spicy than gracefully intimate.  Yet the world premiere of a work of that title by artistic director Joshua Blake Carter has different
points to make. 

Joshua Blake Carter

The title puns upon the term for pop hits that are recorded by other interpreters, originally called "covers"  in the 1950s because the record industry meant such releases to present marketable white singers in versions of previously released material recorded by blacks. Covers are now a common practice that presumably has no purpose of obscuring one set of musicians for the sake of another. 

The British singer James Blake, recording in his own voice and minimalist style hits by Billie Eilish, Beyonce, Roberta Flack and others, pours a soothing oil of falsetto-topped vocalism over well-known songs.  Carter has taken six of these covers, and with one to three dancers apiece, made distinctive sketches. 

He creatively sets to one side the sauciness and jagged athleticism that have become familiar in his other works performed here since he succeeded David Hochoy in 2023. In its place is a lyrical flow and poignancy, with gestures of hesitation, that he also commands with ease. 

British singer James Blake

Each song becomes a sketch akin to the fragmentary narratives familiar to many readers in the literary fiction of Raymond Carver. Terri D. Moore's thin, satiny, silvery costumes suggest a dream world quite fitting to such songs as Stevie Wonder's "Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer," with Julie Russel and Manuel Valdes, and "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," featuring Nathan Rommel and, in his farewell performance, DK veteran Cody Miley.

"Under the Covers" preceded illuminatingly "Edge of the Sky," its second-act companion, the ensemble piece from 2023 that introduced Carter to the modern-dance audience here. With its restless, coordinated sweeping movement across the Tobias Theatre stage at Newfields, "Edge of the Sky" made a fine conclusion to the season. The host of new company dancers evoked the way Carter put his stamp on the troupe he inherited two years ago. 

The way I described the piece then could serve the same turn today: "Individual movements suddenly incorporate something else. Balletic twirls emerge out of thin air; arms can be spread in graceful arcs or drawn in reflexively. You never know how a jump and lift, female to male, is going to end; the grip may be around the woman's middle. The horizontal is thus posed as a counterargument to the vertical, which is so much of the exhilaration of dance. There's sometimes an element of the spasmodic that seems less an interruption of the flow than a way of adorning it."

Inspired new partnership: Russel and Galloway

A fondly remembered piece from last year, centering musically on the heart-grabbing vocal style of Brandi Carlile, shed light on another part of the Carter spectrum. "Stories from the Corner Bar" seems to balance the abstract pizazz of "Edge of the Sky" with the characterizing richness of "Under the Covers." 

Five Carlile songs survey a popular watering-hole atmosphere from happy hour to closing. The party raucousness breaks up occasionally to focus on intimate pairings and spates of loneliness. One of the pieces, "Turpentine," in this production offers the opportunity to appreciate what may be the next super-compatible DK duo partnership: Ryan Galloway and Julie Russel. That song yields to a hard-rocking ensemble paean to devotion, "Wherever Is Your Heart," which in due course shrinks to "Party of One," with Marie Kuhns eloquently singled out. 

It was fun to see this piece revel in the wider space of the Tobias, which made the shuffling and placement of chairs and tables more amazing to watch amid the exuberantly moving dancers. The broadening of the canvas admittedly made this production less corner-bar-like than the work looked at its premiere in Butler's Schrott Center, but the venue after all was properly subject to Carter's imagination.

The show got off to a bracing start with another world premiere, "Restless Ordinary" by guest choreographer Autumn Eckman, a colleague of Carter's in his former milieu of Chicago dance. The ensemble generally stuck to the upright postures of people in ordinary life, restless to the extent that people in groups are both individualistic and collective in their behavior.

Eckman has the DK dancers crisply blending the tendency we all have to rein in our individualism even as we occasionally dare to express it. On the whole, the tendency to conform is an irresistible force, and we are all iron filings moved by a magnet we are largely unaware of. I liked how Eckman made a piece emotionally neutral about this fact of life; this was not a dance about either punishing or rewarding departure from the group, but simply showing how any variation  succumbs, usually without strain, to being ordinary. It was kind of an amuse-bouche before a wonderful Joshua Blake Carter feast.

[Production photo: Lora Olive]