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Rewriting histories

By DEBRA CASH  |  May 12, 2006

Over the years, many local choreographers have advanced in unexpected ways by investigating what happens when they put instrumentalists center stage. I remember with pleasure Susan Davenny Wyner conducting the dozen members of the New England String Ensemble interspersed with the nine dancers of Anna Myer’s company, Marjorie Morgan in seemingly telepathic improvisational communion with trombone experimenter Tom Plsek, and Ruth Birnberg in her dancing days cavorting with fearless pianist Stephen Drury.

But Delache-Feldman was completely wasted in Rice’s Inside. Her playing of Frank Proto’s Ode to a Giant produced an entire range of orchestral effects, but Rice ignored both her sculptural presence and the eccentricities of Proto’s score. Cydney Nielsen ran around, picked up a book, hollered for a taxi, and struck melodramatic poses. Absurdism should have its own internal logic, but Inside was merely absurd.

John Harbison’s Deep Dances, which was commissioned by the Celebrity Series and got its world premiere, is a meandering conversation between two instruments in which their timbres join and spark into contrast like marquetry. Rice’s setting, Shortstories, doesn’t listen deeply enough. Where the cello and bass voices climb up and down the scale with lucid exploration, the dancers (Michelle Machon and Nielsen) were plain perky, though in a lovely, symmetrical Art Deco gesture, they ended the piece seated on the floor in opposite directions, palms out, each dancer leaning into her own preferences.
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ARTICLES BY DEBRA CASH
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