Pam Tanowitz, Pastoral, Barbican Theatre, October 1, 2026

Pam Tanowitz, Caroline Shaw and Sarah Crowner, Pastoral, Barbican Theatre, October 1

Billed as the UK première and the third co-commission between the Barbican and Pam Tanowitz Dance, Pastoral is, at its creative heart, a co-creation between choreographer Pam Tanowitz, composer Caroline Shaw and visual artist Sarah Crowner. Davison Scandrett’s beautifully lit stage transforms The Barbican Theatre into a gallery space in which seven dancers in Reid Bartelme’s diaphanous pastel colours negotiate Crowner’s pastoral screens, curtains and a swathe of green cloth with hushed precision to Shaw’s luminous, playful score. The collaboration is so intimately conceived that there’s a sense of seeing and hearing figures at an exhibition who are themselves the subject of the exhibition. When the dancers move around and between Crowner’s canvases, those canvases take on a dynamic life of their own, and Shaw’s score, a dialogue conceived between Beethoven and three musicians who are seated in front of the stage — Dana Jessen on bassoon, Bill Kalinkos on Clarinet/ Bass Clarinet and Andrew Nogal on Oboe/English Horn — forms a contemporary pastoral that in turn affects the choreography. Alongside the musicians, Shaw presents Beethoven’s most familiar phrases from his sixth symphony in diverse recordings and interpolates the sound of cicadas, the hum of traffic, or the clatter of someone washing dishes. It’s like hearing snatches of the symphony on the kitchen radio or while driving in an open convertible. Throughout Pastoral new life is constantly pulsing in an out of each collaborative art; Tanowitz’s choreography takes on sometimes the flatness of the picture plane and at others the sinuous play of Shaw’s score. That is the nature of a true collaboration.

The choreography is nevertheless the most alive of the collaborative elements in that it is always in real time. Crowner’s canvases are already in place and can be moved mechanically or by the dancers, and while the musicians are also playing live, they are interacting with a recorded score integrated into Justin Ellington’s sound design. But the dancers have to deliver their movements in the moment on the stage. Marc Croussillat, Christine Flores, Lindsey Jones, Maile Okamura, Caitlin Scranton, Stephanie Terasaki and Anson Zwingelberg display a variety of techniques, with classical training in varying degrees and the influence of Merce Cunningham very much in the mix. As figures in the exhibition, they carry equal weight over the course of Pastoral, as complementary and unified as colours on a canvas, but clearly Tanowitz choreographs on the strengths and talents of each dancer. She does not hold back from choreographing deceptively simple steps that require great strength and balance, but any virtuosity appears without a note of drama; it comes across as almost nonchalant or as part of a game. It’s not too much to describe Tanowitz’s choreography as sampled in similar fashion to Shaw’s score: there are references not only to other ballets — Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune and Paquita — but to painting, where one grouping seated on the swathe of green cloth suggests Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Like Shaw’s sound interpolations, Tanowitz’s visual allusions meld effortlessly into the movement.

For the most part the dancers’ facial features are neutral, dispassionate, their gaze throughout Pastoral staying within the stage frame, engaging with the space created by Crowner’s sets rather than directly with the other dancers or the audience. This creates the impression not of a story that we can read so much as a series of aleatory rituals or games whose rules are known uniquely to the participants. Only occasionally does one of the dancers take a stance directed at the audience, inviting us into their secret. Scranton draws our attention with her statuesque stare, and Croussillat at one point looks as if he’s trying — with the same success as Nijinsky’s faun — to catch the attention of one of the women, but generally the intentions behind the dancers’ dynamic shapes taking inspiration from Crowner’s designs and Shaw’s score remain inscrutable.

With our attention moving freely between the three art forms, there is nevertheless an emotional reading of the whole. Watching from the outside you can’t help feeling deeply involved in the work, like spending a concentrated time in front of a painting. Pastoral is a work that quietly demands further viewing so as to reveal itself over time. Whereas it is possible in this age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction to see Crowner’s art and to hear Shaw’s score, we are less likely to see Pastoral in its full collaborative setting. That is a shame. Having transformed the Barbican Theatre stage into a gallery, seeing it on screen would not be so much different from seeing it in the theatre.

Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends at Sadler’s Wells

Tiler Peck, Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends, Sadler’s Wells, March 9, 2023

In William Forsythe’s The Barre Project, Blake Works II, which concludes Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends, Peck works out the choreographic problems with such elegance and clarity that inherent in her response is the quality of the challenge that provoked it. Forsythe is a brilliant innovator of the use of classical technique in the way George Balanchine was; it is perhaps not surprising that Forsythe found in Peck, who trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and rose to principal in the New York City Ballet, a dancer who knows instinctively how to absorb such innovation into her own technical repertoire and deliver a scintillating interpretation. Peck is joined in The Barre Project by fellow NYCB dancers, Lex Ishimoto and Roman Mejia, while Brooklyn Mack completes the quartet. Created during lockdown, entirely over Zoom — like some kind of haptic online surgery — The Barre Project, to the music of James Blake, took three months to conceive and a matter of days of studio work at CLI Studios to bring the four dancers together for its initial digital performance on March 25, 2021. Forsythe wrote at the time that, ‘Irrespective of genre, a dancer’s irrepressible capacity to summon fierce joy through their work gives testament to the resilience of the human spirit.’ He could have been talking not only about The Barre Project but of the entire evening Peck has devised and delivered to Sadler’s Wells audiences. 

Turn It Out with Tiler Peck & Friends highlights Peck’s love of producing, of finding works from other choreographers that challenge her own way of dancing and at the same time that accord with her vision of a show. And this is very much a ‘show’ in the Broadway sense: a unity of vision formed of diverse numbers. Peck, who according to Michelle Dorrance, ‘lives at the intersection of so many dance forms’, is clearly the source for this unity. The different numbers include, in running order, her own choreography in contemporary classical style; a philosophical duet by Alonzo King; an exuberant collaboration in tap and ballet for the full ensemble by Dorrance, Peck and Jillian Meyers, and Forsythe’s blindingly lyrical paean to classical ballet. What flows through the entire program is a palpable sense of consummate musicality. 

The only reason Peck does not dance in the first piece, Thousandth Orange, is that she expressly choreographed it on six colleagues while recovering from a herniated disc. Used to choreographing on her own body, the work reflects a certain reticence in dynamics while focusing on the fluid continuation of form and, one can’t help feeling, a desire for healing. The dynamic that permeates the movement, derived from Caroline Shaw’s exquisite quartet of the same name, played live on stage, is one of precise, sensual form reacting to the rippling of the wind.

Peck was drawn to the philosophical approach of choreographer Alonzo King by his belief that ‘dance is thought made visible, just as music is thought made audible.’ Inspired by his reading of the Upanishads, King created Swift Arrow for Peck and Mejia to the piano solo of the same name by Jason Moran (played on stage by Shu-Wei Tseng). The swift arrow of the title is ‘the disciplined mind’ fixed on its objective of oneness, and Peck translates this lucidly in her opening solo of sinuous lines and forms while the bare-chested Mejia looks on. Peck’s dynamic strength, however, is in marked contrast to the unseemly force Mejia employs when he comes to string his own bow: the disciplined mind of classical technique has been deflected in the gym, leaving King’s goal of uniting the two spheres tantalisingly unfulfilled. 

Time Spell, with choreography by Dorrance, Meyers and Peck ‘in collaboration with and improvisation by the dancers’ (not to mention assistant choreographer Byron Tittle) has a subtitle that captures its spirit and the post-pandemic environment in which it was created: ‘subdivisions of time and space, and intersections of isolation and community, longing and joy.’ Layered around the superb a cappella voices of Aaron Marcellus Sanders and Penelope Wendtlandt, Time Spell builds up an intense sense of community and brings the house down. On the way home on the bus I asked a lady clutching her program if she liked the show. ‘Oh yes’, she replied, ‘but I thought the third piece should have closed the evening.’ She has a point, from a purely theatrical perspective, but The Barre Project also sends out a consummate signal that the benchmark of ballet has been irrevocably raised.