Shaping Sounds tells a profound story in dance

Shaping Sound, the contemporary dance company and show, aims to tell a story. A story without words, or special effects. A story, as company founder Travis Wall said, told “with lighting and movement and bodies.”

The story they will tell when they bring “Dance Reimagined” to Spokane on Friday is an important one. It deals with domestic violence, and finding one’s way out of it.

“The show is about this girl who is in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship,” Wall said. “You see her in the beginning walking through the city and she is obviously broken and shattered, and you realize why when she goes home and has an interaction with the person she’s supposed to be in love with, and it’s not healthy.”

The heroine goes to sleep that night, and dreams a different world. It’s in her dream state that she’s able to see what love is supposed to look like, Wall said by phone from Los Angeles, where hours before he and Shaping Sound had taped an appearance on “Ellen.”

“She learns … what is love, actually, and the beginning stages of love. The progression of love. And what love actually is. Then she realizes that’s not what she has,” he said. When she wakes up, “it’s how she can take what she learned and apply it to her own life.”

Heavy stuff for a contemporary dance show. But it’s a really relatable story, Wall said. Part of it is drawn from his own life as one of five sons raised by a mother who had a couple of husband but never really had deep, true love.

“She always says to me now, with the relationship I have, ‘I’m so happy for you. I wish I had that.’ ”

Wall, who burst on the scene as runner-up on season two of “So You Think You Can Dance,” won an Emmy earlier this year for his choreography on an episode of that longrunning Fox series. His choreography has appeared in the Kevin Hart-Josh Gad comedy “The Wedding Ringer,” and “Justin Beiber’s Believe.” The creation of Shaping Sound was captured in the 2012 reality series “All the Right Moves.” He’s off to New York in 2016 to work on a movie, he said, and has plans to choreograph a Broadway show after that. It’s all part of his busy creative life.

It’s certainly a good time to be a dancer. The popularity of shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Dancing With the Stars” has opened the doors for a lot of young performers. It’s more than that, he said.

“Not only getting the opportunities, but some of us are making the opportunities,” Wall said. “We built this dance company from the ground up. Thanks to the exposure from ‘So You Think,’ I’ve had audiences want to come see my work live. … But we had to make the opportunity. I wanted to create a stage so I could dance with my best friends everyday. And we did that.”

“Dance Reimagined” features a variety of dance styles and music genres. It’s the music – swing, pop, alternative, classical – that drives how the 14 dancers move on stage.

The company has been touring the show each fall since 2012. But the show hasn’t remained static, with much of the change dictated by casting.

“Cast changes a lot, so a lot of things in the show change. We have a lot of duets,” he said. This year, for instance, one of the women he typically danced with landed a gig in a Broadway show. Joining the cast this year is Ricky Ubeda, who won the 11th season of “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2014 (and who was in the ensemble of Broadway’s revival of “On the Town” this spring).

“We were just like, why don’t the two of us dance together,” Wall said. “So we made a male duet. And that kind of changes the shape of the show.”

Still, despite all the revisions and evolutions of “Dance Reimagined,” there are a couple tried-and-true routines still in the lineup.

“If you saw the first version of the show, there’s still one number that’s in there. It closes the first act, and it gets the audience really excited,” he said. “There are numbers like that we really can’t take out of the show because people would be upset if we did.”