Perhaps in response to France’s burgeoning fascism, its choreographers have been obsessed with inventing a rite that might unite not just their own contentious people but all of humanity. For the Algerian-born Dalila Belaza’s recent ensemble work Rive (Shore, or Bank), the unity rite is reduced to a single step, the ubiquitous, inconspicuous pas de bourrée. As in bourrer: to stuff or fill. Belaza imagines this stuffing as filling the gap between extreme states, between opposite shores. The bonding move is so unassuming that it escapes piety and slips into the everyday. —Apollinaire Scherr