Retrievals
Rebecca Rice keeps moving BY MARCIA B.
SIEGEL
TABLEAU: eventually, Rice's The Altis Ballet blasted apart the idea of women as models, fashion plates, harmless objects of our gaze.
TABLEAU: eventually, Rice's The Altis Ballet
blasted apart the idea of women as models, fashion plates,
harmless objects of our gaze.
The Altis Ballet, which concluded Rebecca Rice’s program last
weekend at CambridgeMulticulturalArtCenter, at first suggested some tableau from an
Egyptian tomb. In succession, the imagery seemed to shift to that of ancient Greece, native America, and India. One of the satisfying things about Rice’s choreography is
that it doesn’t end up in the same
place where it began.
The Altis Ballet (2000) started life as a kind of animated
photo shoot. Some slides of oiled, seductive female bodies from the original Martin Cooper exhibition (to be shown
in full at CMAC June 18 through July 18) were projected dimly on a screen.
During most of the dance, three women (Michelle Machon, Sara Knight, and Marissa Gomer) languished and posed in
scanty but fussy costumes, holding props that seemed to imply vigorous
movement — bows but no arrows, metallic discs, long curved feathers, wands, or swords.
Martin Cooper, a fashion designer
as well as a photographer, seems to have a pretty conventional idea of
women, and I thought Rice was humoring him in the first four scenes of the dance. I started to think of those heroic
displays of comradely athleticism that Ted Shawn made for his
bare-chested Men Dancers back in the ’30s — Shawn used idealized physiques to
counter the wimpy reputation of male dancing at the time. Rice turned the voyeuristic indulgence around by introducing
Caitlin Novero in a vigorous, even furious running solo to end the piece. The other three women, still nearly immobilized,
provided a kind of backdrop for her as she powered up all the aggressive implications they’d kept contained. Possibly Novero’s "
Run " was an afterthought, but it effectively blasted apart the idea of women as models, fashion plates,
harmless objects of our gaze.
With an unusually eclectic
background, Rebecca Rice draws from thetheatricality
of Denishawn dance, the extroverted skills of ballet, and the physical investment of modern dance. Her work
makes me feel I’ve seen those dancer bodies working at their maximum capacity. Equally satisfying is her
understanding of form. She doesn’t wander or make you feel the dance can stop any time it runs out of things
to do.
Rice supplied program notes for all
her dances, encouraging us to see them as metaphors, not just designs. In Array
(2003), three women share a movement language of speed and impulse,
weighty gestures and resistance to the pull of gravity. Despite this common lexicon, they seem very individual. In fact, it’s because they speak the same dance language that you notice their individuality. They encounter one another in confidential pairings that don’t extend
into intimacy, and in the end they’re turning and spinning through the space on their own trajectories.
Rice tells us that Array is
about the " uncertainty of aloneness " and the " strength that comes from relationship.
" It seems the solidarity of a group drawn together by common movement or a common spatial
pattern doesn’t necessarily spell comfort. In Deep Horizon (2001),
Darrius Grey partners one woman in particular (Arian George) among seven
others. When they’ve all danced their separate ways and the group suddenly drops to the ground, Grey and George are left standing —
but facing in different directions.
Grey and Adrina DeVitre work as a
duo, in counterpoint to Sara Knight,
almost all the way through Mirage (2002). Knight seems
drawn to them at times, and for a moment even seems to be caught
by them, but the two entities remain separate. I wondered if the two women could have been alter egos. Rice
made the piece in tribute to the families of those lost on 9/11; perhaps they were sisters.
The other thing that lends choreographic sense to Rice’s
dance is her relationship to music. She used an excerpt from Arvo Pärt’s Psalom
for Indigo, a new solo for Sara Knight. Pärt’s two-part phrase repeated in a kind of
question-and-answer motif, with small variants but no conclusion. Knight,
in a skirt made of long satin ribbons, swept around the space as if searching, never settling anywhere
either physically or emotionally.
The opening piece on the program, Paradigm (2000), set to one
movement of Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Strings in C Major, was
all composition. Seven women, led at different times by DeVitre, George,
and Novero, spun and shifted in inventive patterns as the music evolved. The designs were so harmonious
that only at the end, when Novero took center stage, was I
aware that the group was asymmetrical.
