A wink and a nudge beyond: Indianapolis Ballet helps launch 2025 IndyFringe

"Beyond Ballet," a production refreshed yearly for presentation at the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival, continues to be an eagerly anticipated feature of the annual performance panorama centered in the Mass Ave cultural district. The festival is now celebrating its 20th anniversary, running through August 25.

Indianapolis Ballet gets the opportunity to showcase shorter works placed with savoir faire in

an intermissionless program that stretches somewhat beyond the stipulated hour format. On the first night of the 2025 festival, just a day after the preview appetizer, the current "Beyond Ballet" had the feel of launching the festival. Something both novel and familiar was promised, and the promise was fulfilled attractively Thursday night in the first of three company performances on the District Theatre's main stage.

It was fun to make reacquaintance with "Scherzo Appassionato" right off the bat. Kristin Young Toner's setting of the substantial Scherzando movement of Rachmaninoff''s Sonata for Cello and Piano blossomed immediately. The range of expressiveness in the music suggests many avenues for the choreography, which ranges across passionate lyricism centered on the cello through the Russian composer's most driving and canvas-filling way of writing for both instruments.

The three couples are costumed by Victoria Lyras with  a romantic flair that serves the ensemble and the duo episodes equally well. The choreography enfolds virtuosity into the scherzo's breathtaking episodes. It's well-joined to the piece's expressive contrasts, which address the more tender passions pinpointed by the title Toner chose for her piece.

Lyras, the company's inspiring artistic director, is represented in the program by her exquisite pas de deux, "Oblivion," to a piece of the same title by the tango icon Astor Piazzolla. Of its three "Beyond Ballet" performances, Yoshiko Kamikusa and Luzemberg Santana perform two of them, the second this Saturday afternoon (Aug. 16). The partnership seemed perfect in all respects Thursday.

Among the works by invited guests, Dance Kaleidoscope emeritus artistic director David Hochoy was well represented by "Farewell," a title that says it all about the interaction projected by three dancers, centered on Kamikusa, who performed with a stunning blend of transcendent spirit and well-modulated adherence to projecting what bodies endure in real-world love relationships. The apt music is the mostly wordless soprano aria, with cello ensemble accompaniment, created by Heitor Villa-Lobos for his "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5." 

Human connections always come through when dancers are more than adroit, as difficult as that can be. Kamikusa works here with Logan O'Neal and Trevor PinterParsons, and the effect Thursday evening was magical, with imploring gestures of clasped hands and outstretched arms conveying an abundance of feeling without being overstated. Ambivalence, as so often in close relationships, plays a distinctive role in moderating the intensity of loss.

A more blithe approach to human interaction, with a kind of guarded but searching intimacy, came with Charlotte Westman's "Spirals." The seven dancers trace rounded patterns shaped to music that has both a fiddle-tune zest and the repetitive structures of minimalism. 

"Dance for Five Twos" is an ensemble piece celebrating the tension of boy-girl mutual assessment in couples. There is a mixture of sauciness and competitive zeal in Francis Veyette's choreography. The stock-taking that's inevitable in getting acquainted is wittily represented: The men strut suavely with some finger-snapping, and elsewhere the women are open-mouthed, then covering their mouths with hands, as if to express astonishment at being elegantly lifted. In a few places, there's a plethora of movement along the floor in a departure from ballet's vertical norm. The music, by the father of the Classical era, Joseph Haydn, stands in ironic counterpoint to such controlled abandon.

To conclude, William W. Robinson's "Intersecting Surprises" wears its quasi-academic title gracefully, to music of Sufjan Stevens. It's a study for ten dancers (one of them male), whose white, diaphanous skirts hint at making a serious gesture toward romantic ballet without conveying the deep passions that often go with the genre. It had a certain stylish unpretentiousness to put it over. It gave the dancers a lot to do without making much of a to-do about the abstract procedure. As the show's finale, it confirmed the overall joie de vivre that "Beyond Ballet" has focused upon since Indianapolis Ballet's festival debut six years ago.