DANCE REVIEW: Dances blend ballet, modern style

By Karen Campbell, Globe Correspondent, 4/15/2002

It's always heartening to see the centuries-old vocabulary of ballet being infused with contemporary energy without derivative stylistic gimmicks. Choreographer Rebecca Rice has forged a movement lexicon that fuses ballet and modern dance in a way that seems totally organic, comfortably familiar yet not routine. The foundation in traditional ballet is impeccably clear, yet her work is also just as grounded in the weighted earthiness and gestural richness of modern dance. Tending toward the abstract, it generally lacks a story line or easily perceived dramatic context, which allows viewers to revel in the movement's invention and the performance quality. The drawback is that the work is not especially memorable. The viewer must take satisfaction in the beauty and craftsmanship of the moment. Rice, who teaches at Boston Ballet, has connections to a group of superb dancers, from professionals to highly skilled students. At Saturday night's concert at Boston Ballet Grande Studio, she had the luxury of presenting three relatively big ensemble pieces. The most adventurous was last year's ''Deep Horizon,'' a dance for seven set to excerpts of Peter Schickele's lustrous ''Sextet.'' Featuring some intricate partnering and eye-catching lifts, the piece combined the sensuously liquid with the sharply gestural. In ''Paradigm,'' Rice set seven women playfully aloft to the music of J.S. Bach. Bright jetes and crisp turns articulated long-lined phrases of lyrical sweep, and expressive arm movements ranged from the classical to the semaphoric. The earlier ''Illuminations'' was less successful. More traditional, it looked more stiffly staged as well. Unisons looked messy when they were not spot on, and some of the partnering seemed awkward. Rice's two other works were actually more modern dance than ballet. The new ''Mirage,'' given a committed performance by Desiree Reese Parrott, Dean Vollick, and Sara Knight, was a tribute to those who lost loved ones on Sept. 11. There were only subtle intimations of grief or fear, however: arms sheltering the head, one limp dancer carried by another, a slow gaze skyward. Wisely, Rice let the tension and release of the movement create dramatic charge in powerful runs, leaps, and falls. ''Altis Ballet,'' a commission for Media Gallery's exhibit of Martin Cooper's Olympic Games-inspired photographs, may have been effective at the site. In a concert presentation, however, the suite of dances came across as unfocused and overly long. Designed to take up where Cooper's enigmatic, seminude photographs leave off, it read as overly stylized, filled with angular friezes and static poses. Only the last solo, exquisitely performed by young Caitlin Novero, embraced the athleticism of the context, with blistering spins, vigorous runs, and limbs that sliced the air. It could be a dazzling stand-alone if the ending didn't peter out with a disappointing fade. The concert's most vivid work was ''Sketch of a Couple'' by guest artist Viktor Plotnikov, who has turned out to be Boston Ballet's most intriguing choreographer/ dancer. A vignette illuminating mercurial shifts in dynamics between a man and a woman, it infused ballet with folk elements and a contemporary flair, with deep weighted plies, heel-toe walks, and torsos that were alternately arched and hunched over. The piece was given a stunning performance by Boston Ballet soloist Sabine Chaland on pointe and principal dancer Gael Lambiotte, who soared through brilliant leap turns of impressive height and clarity. The program was rounded out by the 1919 ''Sonata'' of Ruth St. Denis (with help from Doris Humphrey). Performed by Marion Rice Denishawn, the company founded by Rice with her sister Robin to preserve works from the historical dance repertoire, it looked painfully dated and was less compelling art than archaic curiosity. This story ran on page B8 of the Boston Globe on 4/15/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.