DANCE REVIEW

Rice's artistic quirkiness elevates her classical style

By Thea Singer, Globe Correspondent, 6/2/2003

Choreographer Rebecca Rice makes serious, intensely musical dances that are full of promise. Firmly rooted in classical ballet, her movement style exudes an earthiness and a sweep that recalls the ethos of modern-dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as that of Jose Limon, who came along in the 1940s.

The geometry of her dances is sensible, often inventive, and tight. And the performers in her troupe, Rebecca Rice Dance, are glorious. Yet her work begins to penetrate only when she goes beyond that, allowing her own iconographic quirkiness to hold sway. Rice's work sings when she raises her own voice.

Ironically, she does that most earnestly in the one piece on the program Thursday night at the Cambridge Multicultural Art Center that was a collaboration. ''The Altis Ballet'' is a five-part multimedia work Rice choreographed to accompany the 2002 opening of Martin Cooper's photography exhibit. The exhibit, the program notes, depicts a fantasy wherein women of ancient Greece participate in the Olympic Games.

Sans the printed interpretation, the dance - with its backdrop of photographs of women bearing now a feather, now a bow - reads as an homage to the power of Native American women. But the interpretation of the images doesn't matter. What does is how Rice plays the stolid nearly hieroglyphic shapes against one another, against the ghostly projected photographs, and against the sound score by Martin Case and her. The three primary dancers slip into configurations that shadow, reflect, and oppose one another, carving an intricate architecture in space.

Conversely, ''Paradigm'' (2000) hews closest to Rice's beginnings. It's an unapologetic music visualization of a Bach piano concerto, and the seven dancers soar and spin and wigwag their knees through the notes. In canon, unison, and counterpoint, they morph from quartets to duets to septets. At one point, they melt in a diagonal in descending order, limpid as a cascading brook down a hill. The dance is fun but hasn't got the originality of ''The Altis Ballet.''

''Deep Horizon'' (2001), set to excerpts from Peter Schickele's ''Sextet,'' and ''Mirage'' (2002), set to excerpts from Sofia Gubaidulina's ''Ten Preludes,'' are the only two of the six offerings that bring a man into the action.

Rice's use of partnering is remarkably clean but not thrilling. Like much of her choreography, it resonates because it's organic, not because it's innovative. The trio ''Mirage'' - a tribute to those suffering from the events of 9/11 - is oddly unmoving, despite its cupped palms and fist-covered eyes.

The two premieres, ''Array,'' to music by Case and Anugama & Segastiano, and ''Indigo,'' to music by Arvo Part, stick with you more for their performances than their choreography. The latter is a solo for dancer Sara Knight, former soloist with the Kirov Ballet. Knight is so articulate and strong that you can almost hear her muscles etch designs in space, even as she executes as straightforward a movement as a plie.

Rice is a pro with a wonderful sense of theater. We need to see more of her work. She needs to show us more of her quizzical mind.

Rebecca Rice Dance

Cambridge Multicultural Art Center,