Dance Kaleidoscope brings a shining sheaf of premieres under winter light

Julie Russel aloft in the propulsive "Takbuhan."

 Dance Kaleidoscope premieres occupy most of the expanse of NOW, Vol. 2 "Arresting Momentum," which opened Friday night before an adoring crowd. The program was introduced by the welcome retrurn of "Restless Ordinary," a piece by Autumn Eckman which debuted last May. 

DK's occasional performances in the Tobias Theater at Newfields always carry a sense of occasion. There's a feeling of maximum wingspread when the company plays there. Upstage and downstage convey a vast perspective. 

At the start, the steady front-to-back lineup of the company, with straight arms raising in varied rhythm, conveyed the mastery of space that was to be elaborated across the five works, with movement edge-to-edge as well, like abstract expressionism in painting.

The bid for a DK seat at the big table nationally was the staging for DK of "Train" by Robert Battle,

Illustrating the title: A "Train" scene arrests momentum.

former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Of course, the modern-dance troupe's reputation had a grasp on national stature under the leadership of David Hochoy, who retired in 2023 after directing DK for 32 years. Under Joshua Blake Carter, his successor, the hold seems likely to increase along with the roster of guest choreographers.

Battle was on hand to share in the ovation after "Train" was given a stunning company premiere Friday night. Set to a motoric score by Les Tambours du Bronx, a French percussion ensemble, "Train" demanded the most of its six-member cast: four men, two women. Loud, repetitive drumming patterns are given prismatic shifts in the choreography. The pulse and the onslaught of sonority rule, but Battle's program note asserts "Train" to be "about dancers, (their) ferocious training and resilience." 

Spasmodic control and abrupt reorientations of posture and attitude are intense and uninterrupted. The effect was to show aspects of every iteration in distinct, miniature shifts. The work seemed to peer into small units of time to discover what lies within each. It was like fractal geometry set in motion. 

I was reminded of the time a newspaper colleague of mine came back from an in-person interview with the irascible master drummer Buddy Rich. When he landed the interview, Rich had warned: "Okay, but no stupid questions!" The reporter apparently passed that test when he observed in reply to one of Rich's remarks about big-band drumming craft: "There are only so many ways you can subdivide an eighth note, right?"

Any framing pattern, no matter how rapidly it proceeds, can be dissected and illuminated by an expert who understands it, and that's how Battle seems to have operated with the endlessly generative backdrop of Les Tambours. The "eighth notes" were subdivided to a fare-thee-well.

The DK rehearsal director's work set up "Train" with a choreographed tribute of his own, "i did and i don't and i do." Sean Aaron Carmon notes that he owes a major career boost to an opportunity Battle gave him years ago.  This new work, set to music by Cosmo Sheldrake that seems to blend scat singing and minimalism, puts three dancers into a cheek-by-jowl parade of competitive and cooperative movement. Ryan Galloway, Gavin Kimmel, and Carmon showed irresistible panache in the opening-night performance. It was as if the serious business of dance at a high level has its risible side as well. The soundtrack was borderline zany to fit, recalling to my old ears Spike Jones' hilarious take on "Cocktails for Two."

Nataly Nagy hands Gavin Kimmel his hat. 

The second act of the new show features a new piece by Carter. "And One for Your Dreams" has the
cheeky juxposition of musical and choreographic styles his work has shown in the recent past. In his program note, he asks a couple of questions that have occurred to many of us: "Where do we go when we close our eyes? Was it real, imagined, or something in between?" The two framing songs, between a loopy, country trio with intermittent shouts, and a solo turn with Gavin Kimmel deftly managing a stingy-brim fedora, are explicit.

"Windmills of Your Mind," as sung by Mel Torme, opens out the romantic vision of the lyrics, rich in imagery that traces the movement vocabulary at play: "a circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel, never ending nor beginning on an ever-spinning reel." At the other end, Nancy Sinatra's "You Only Live Twice" urges the melding of dream and reality under the pressure of wish fulfillment. The whole creation hangs together across a range of expressiveness, yet its place in the program floats above its more forceful companions.

"Takbuhan," a word from the Tagalog language of the Philippines, means "to run to safety or to escape," the program tells us. The world premiere by Christa Smutek is an ensemble triumph for this company. The choreography has a complex relationship to the recorded score, varying so unpredictably and unrhythmically that dancers' usual reliance on counting hardly seems a major part of the learning curve. 

But likely it was, and it's just not up to the fascinated observer to figure out how piles of people, pulling
themselves up, mingling among victims of untold disaster, likely to collapse or crawl, then resume helping and falling back into desperate interdependence, either rescuing or in sheer survival mode— how all of that can be imagined and executed according to a cohesive design. 

 Crucial to this achievement is the  spectacular contribution of veteran lighting designer Laura E. Glover, who once again is like basketball's "sixth man" in amplifying and completing the success of whatever DK and its choreographers work out in the studio. The fulfillment can be appreciated in two more performances, today and tomorrow.

[Photos:  Sonja Clark Moonbug Photography]