REBECCA RICE: Firmly anchored in the mid 20th century.
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Rebecca Rice is a Boston-based choreographer with a very different personal history. Her grandmother, Marion Rice, performed with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in the early years of the 20th century, when the couple were inventing an American modernism ripe with mythic appropriation. Rice also studied with Bill Evans in Utah, at the Limón School, and with Cunningham dancer Viola Farber. Her aunt is Carolyn Brown, a famous Cunningham dancer of the same ’60s generation as Farber, and photographs of Brown (a dancer I never saw live) convey clarity and passion. Rice’s Bank of America Celebrity Series performance at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center — a plum, and a gift the series gives back to the local dance community by showcasing the work of local artists alongside its A-list attractions — presented a repertory spanning almost 30 years. The earliest piece was from 1978; everything else was choreographed after 2000.
Rice’s æsthetic is firmly anchored in the mid 20th century. Her dancers are poised, not messy. Dissonance is a chance to indulge in some post-Balanchine foot flexing. Fall and recovery, the action at the center of Humphrey/Limón technique, creates a steady, metronomic pulse that pulls the dancers into some unspecified state of delight. Rice’s choreographic strategy is at its most refreshing when she throws in inversions — turns that go inward instead of out, arabesques that impel the dancers backward — but her repeated happy skips and smoothed-over turns grew eye-glazingly similar over the course of the evening.
Rice has gathered a troupe of ballet-trained, coltish women, most from the Boston Ballet School, where she has taught and choreographed for many years. In Arian George she has a young dancer with a talent for stating a shape and then letting it continue to grow: with more experience and confidence on stage, and practice raising her eyes from the floor, George will be even more compelling. In the big ensemble piece Deep Horizon (2001), which is costumed in handsome red halter-necked gowns by Kelly Kerrigan and set to the unexpectedly unironic Safe Sextet of Peter Schickele, she was partnered by Ty Parmenter. His role was a little hackneyed — hey, we’ve got a boy on stage, let’s have him lift all the girls up in the air! — but Parmenter, who trained at Canada’s National Ballet School, is a teen girl’s dreamboat, a dark-haired guy with floating arms, a soft jump, and an attentive manner.
Live music, however, is what set Rebecca Rice Dance’s performance apart from that of so many local dance makers presenting their own work on local stages this month. Cello e Basso, the intriguing duet of cellist Emmanuel Feldman and bass player Pascale Delache-Feldman, accompanied many of the works. Feldman manages to stress percussive effects as persuasively as melodic line even while flashing through the runs in Bach’s solo cello suites. Delache-Feldman is a gifted colorist. Their interpretations sounded thoughtfully worked out, a meeting of unthreatened equals.
