American Sound (and space): ICO and Dance Kaleidoscope join forces again

New staging: Vamp and title character in 'An American in Paris'

Rediscovery of the alchemical result of dance and live music together is especially welcome in the fourth collaboration of Dance Kaleidoscope and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. Opening night of "American Sound" Friday certified the partnership's strength once again at Schrott Center for the Arts.

The national theme includes a couple of pieces set to American music with the signature styles of the current DK artistic director, Joshua Blake Carter, and his predecessor, David Hochoy, making welcome returns in the company's schedule. The difference is the animating presence of the ICO, conducted with sparkle and precision by its music director, Matthew Kraemer.

Yet the real treat was to get further acquaintance with DK rehearsal director Sean Aaron Carmon in his new work, "City on Fire." The piece takes its title and the theme behind its movement from the ensemble number signaling the conflagration that climaxes the action of "Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street." 

Stephen Sondheim's celebrated musical, produced often by theater and opera companies alike for decades, in this song spreads the hysterical fear spurred by the exposure of the barber's and Mrs. Lovett's sinister meat-pie business. Community anxiety becomes in Carmon's new work the centerpiece and organizing principle of the choreography. Searching postures and gestures of random desperation, freed of Sondheim's explicit lyrics, are gathered into an emotional outburst that coheres around an excerpt of Philip Glass's music for "Akhnaten." Minimalism in music lends itself to almost any kind of initially blank choreographic canvas. Its repetitive structures of notes and rhythms are both the dynamo and the backdrop of dancing that might move in almost any creative direction. 

Carmon has responded accordingly, "taking inspiration" from both Glass' music "and the current state of extraordinary happenings in this chapter of our 'Great American Experiment.'" That program-note language is about the most diplomatic, even euphemistic, way I can imagine to address the damage the nation's current leadership is doing to us. But kudos to Carmon for keeping the meaning of his new piece away from current political upheaval. 

Making something abstractly frightening and memorable with Glass' motoric energy behind it works well here: the dancers' coordinated, repetitive pointing fingers toward some unspecified peril from above speaks volumes. The orchestration, richly rendered Friday with high definition by an expanded ICO under Kraemer's direction, spreads itself vividly across the depicted tumult.

An early minimalist classic by John Adams provides "American Sound"'s opener, titled like the composition "Shaker Loops." Carter's 2025 piece captures the ecstasy behind Shakerism's bizarre embodiment of spiritual transport in motion, as well as that religious movement's celebration of plainness and simplicity. Terri D. Moore's costumes had the right functionality and straightforward eloquence, skills that were applied toward more flamboyant expression in her designs for "City on Fire." 

With the ICO's strings playing the score, I was pleasantly surprised with how much more vibrant and intimate Carter's choreography looks compared to my first impression last year, when a recording accompanied the dancers. The performance added up to a wonderful expression of how brilliant the symbiosis of dance and music "in the flesh" can be,  particularly when the music is produced by an exhausting display of bow strokes.

The program's finale is preceded by "Down a Country Lane," a short instance of Aaron Copland's muse at its most relaxed and pastoral. The attractive miniature made its benign points as an instrumental interlude while the dancers rested and changed costumes for "An American in Paris." 

The Hochoy piece from 2014 finds the humor and urban bustle in George Gershwin's tone poem. The new staging, by Liberty Harris, adapts the piece to the Schrott stage, with the orchestra behind the dancers (as it is throughout "American Sound"), so the use of space looks as unconstrained as possible. The American of the title, a naive and receptive visitor danced this time by Manuel Valdes, does not succumb to as much loneliness as Gershwin implies, but rises to the occasion of novelty. 

The subdued or reflective moments in the score are taken in stride by the protagonist, whose energy and curiosity keep him going. Anything exotic about the Parisian scene, whether a momentary fantasy with a touch of erotic longing or brisk walking and bus-riding to absorb the city's sights and sounds, occupies him. Listeners and watchers in the audience share his viewpoints— fleshed out by Cheryl Sparks' costumes and Laura E. Glover's lighting — thanks both to Gershwin's imperishable music and Hochoy's tribute to it through the language he knows best and presented with such virtuosity via DK for many years.