Defying gravity, and celebrating it

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff  |  May 8, 2006

Rebecca Rice Dance
With Cello e Basso
Presented by Bank of America Celebrity Series
At: the Tsai Performance Center, Saturday night

The Bank of America Celebrity Series confirmed and advanced the status of Rebecca Rice Dance, choreographer and company, by presenting a substantial program of 10 dances Saturday night. Six of them were performed with live music by Cello e Basso, the husband and wife team of cellist Emmanuel Feldman and bassist Pascale Delache-Feldman. Not just a presenter but a patron of the arts, the Boston Marquee series commissioned a new work from composer John Harbison for Rice to choreograph for this occasion.

Rice has worked in Boston as a teacher, dancer, and choreographer for more than 20 years, and it was easy to see why she has become a local phenomenon -- her work whirls entertainingly back and forth across the border between ballet and modern dance. It both defies gravity and celebrates it. Her musical taste is eclectic (from baroque to jazz, Arvo Part to Peter Schickele), and her choreography exhibits musical and dance intelligence. The 13 dancers she fielded Saturday night exhibited admirable discipline, energy, stamina, and style.

The women tended to follow the Betty and Veronica prototypes -- bubbly blondes and more complex brunettes. The most striking dancer was a Veronica, Sara Knight. She had an apparently narrative piece, ''Indigo," haunted by some Martha Graham solos, set to music by Part. In the dance, a Jocasta- or Phaedra-like figure cradles a child but soon gets into a complex psychological situation; like Lady Macbeth, she washes her hands but the stains will not clear.

It was also possible to see why recognition on the larger stage has been so slow in coming. For all of its vigorous eclecticism, Rices's vocabulary seems restricted, repetitive, and applicable to just about any music. Mirror imagery dominates nearly every piece, predictably so in ''Nuances," her dance to the Pachelbel Canon. Much of her choreography feels confined by the music, because it seldom goes faster or slower than the music, or phrases across it.

That's why the exceptional moments were so enjoyable: the looser ''Busy Blues," to jazz by the Jonah Jones Quartet, with Jillian St. Germain wearing a tux top but no trousers to show off spectacular Cyd Charisse extensions of her legs, and ''Inside," danced to a solo bass piece by Frank Proto, with Delache-Feldman center stage and dancer Cydney Nielsen circling her, extending the bassist's urgent physical and emotional gestures into dance movement punctuated by frantic cries of ''Taxi!"

Both Feldmans unite passion with elegance. Emmanuel Feldman was superb in the Bach solo suites and contributed an intense score, ''Enigma," to which Rice devised a solo, ''Terra Mystique," danced by the quicksilver Ann-Marie Cofield. Harbison's new duo for bass and cello, ''Deep Dances," is dark, haunting, and beautiful, asymmetries giving way to order. Rice caught this in her choreography, and there was an interesting touch of silently ticking clockwork in it to bridge the contrasts.