Pam Tanowitz, Caroline Shaw and Sarah Crowner, Pastoral, Barbican Theatre, October 1
The Pam Tanowitz dancers in Pastoral. Photo: Maria Baranova
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.
A scene from Pam Tanowitz’s Pastoral. Photo: Maria Baranova
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.
The Pam Tanowitz dancers in a scene from Pastoral. Photo: Maria Baranova
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.
The term ‘mixed bill’ generally refers to a grouping of separate works on the same program that highlights the diverse artistic vision of the company presenting it. The New York City Ballet’s Mixed Bill presented at Sadler’s Wells certainly does that — whatever one might make of the artistic vision — but also mixes a surprisingly disparate level of choreographic craft and technical execution. It is difficult to understand the artistic decisions that led such a prestigious company — a company built by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine with fabled dancers and an equally fabled repertoire of works by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins — to come to London after a 16-year absence with such a very mixed bill. The one token work by Balanchine, Duo Concertant, danced by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley, serves as a salutary reminder of what had made the company world class. Balanchine gives equal emphasis to Stravinsky’s score for piano and violin (played by Elaine Chelton and Kurt Nikkanen) and to the dance. Fairchild and Huxley listen to the opening movement while standing behind the piano, and when they dance it is as if they are improvising in the moment to what they are hearing. Gestures are clear, shapes are clean, and the dynamic is in perfect accord with the music.
Of the three other works on the program, at least Pam Tanowitz’s Gustave Le Gray No. I has a strong sense of identity. Set to Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray for solo piano, a quartet of dancers perform an uncompromisingly austere reverie in flowing scarlet costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung that immediately call to mind winged beings. Like Duo Concertant, it begins with the dancers grouped behind the piano and as pianist Stephen Gosling plays the first four repeated chords the dancers move away one by one to begin their mysterious ritual together. The weightless, timeless style of Tanowitz’s choreography is so far from Balanchine’s that the dancers — Naomi Corti, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Ruby Lister and Mira Nadon — seem ill at ease. Moving the piano across the stage at the end while Gosling follows on foot as he continues playing is a gag that does little to resolve the mystery of the work but gets some laughs.
The evening opens — we have waited 16 years for this moment — with Daniel Ulbricht lying supine on stage in Justin Peck’s Rotunda: the returning hero washed up on a foreign shore. It’s a fitting image, but rather than allowing us to indulge in it for even a moment, Peck has Ulbricht scamper up with a romantic gesture of longing towards the audience as soon as the curtain is up. It’s almost as if he’s embarrassed to be discovered napping. His friends arrive and form circles from which solos, trios and ensembles evolve to a commissioned score by Nico Muhly, played by the Britten Sinfonia under Andrews Sill. The costumes, like Balanchine’s but without the formality of black and white, are pastel-coloured tights and leotards, and the overall sense of the work is relaxed bonhomie. The fabric of the choreography seems in danger of falling apart in one especially intricate solo which is just the wrong side of being, in principal dancer Sara Mearns‘ characterisation of the company’s approach to performance, ‘spontaneous and in-the-moment’. Ulbricht’s tightly executed and rigorously musical steps stand out but it’s not enough to save a lacklustre opening work.
If there’s already a sense of programming disorientation by the second intermission, the final work of the evening, Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle) to a recorded selection of songs by James Blake, heightens it further. If William Forsythe hadn’t already used tracks by Blake to create a whole new aesthetic and a scintillating physical technique to display it in The Barre Project: Blake Works II for a group of New York City Ballet dancers and friends during lockdown, Abraham could be forgiven for setting his choreographic colours to the same mast. But where Forsythe had made the score integral to his choreography, Abraham has simply pasted a romantic notion of classical shapes and steps on to tracks by Blake that makes them unsuited to each other. Dressing his dancers in designs by Giles Deacon serves only to widen the disparity of the collaboration.
Perhaps there are unseen technical, logistical and financial circumstances that have limited the company’s repertoire choices at Sadler’s Wells, not to mention injuries and substitutions to the casting, but we in the audience can only react to what we see. If, as the New York Times states, the company’s repertoire is the envy of the world, it is unfortunately not evident on this visit.
Pam Tanowitz, Song of Songs, Barbican Theatre, 11 October
Pam Tanowitz dancers on the set of Song of Songs (photo: Maria Baranova)
When Pam Tanowitz’s father died in 2018, she wanted to honour his memory with a new work. As a means to not only return a debt of gratitude to her father but also to explore her Jewish family heritage — her very identity — in choreographic form, she made what was to become Song of Songs. Co-commissioned by, and premièred at, the Fisher Centre at Bard where Tanowitz is the first choreographer-in-residence, Song of Songs was presented at Barbican in October. Its choreography has the expansive feel of a devotional elegy, complemented by David Lang’s score based on the Biblical text and by the architectural environment in which it is set. Each element of the work is consistent with the others, a result, no doubt, of the singular focus Tanowitz brings to its creation. While she is credited with the choreography, she is also part of a team with Harriet Jung, Clifton Taylor and Reid Bartelme who are responsible for the theatrical setting and costumes: a white stage hung on three sides by alternating strips of black and white material that leave a corridor between them and the wings, while at the back the vertical strips descend to the height of a small area set up for the musicians. On the inside of the vertical strips are gently curved moulded benches in a luminous teal tint that define the shape of the stage and match in colour and material a wide circular platform just off centre. It could be the setting of an art gallery before the paintings have been hung.
In a way, Song of Songs is, from the moment we see the setting, a work of spatial art, one to be contemplated as we wait for the performance to begin. Those vertical black and white stripes can, on one popular cultural level, suggest a grayscale image of a seaside Punch and Judy booth, but on another, given Tanowitz’s desire to research her Jewish history, it is not impossible to imagine those same stripes as the pattern and colour of concentration camp uniforms, here transposed to a space of celebration and respect through which time and the dancers can move freely.
Lang’s lush, carefully modulated score for two sopranos, alto, viola, cello and percussion starts off with an acapella voice, luring into the spatial setting the element of dance. Meile Okamura begins her opening steps, opening up in her fragile and almost translucent flow of movement a world of the spirit that is nevertheless robust, an indivisibility of strength and ethereality that underlies Tanowitz’s inspired realisation.
From silence the music builds, and from silence the dance evolves. The aural component of Song of Songs floats on the air, while Okamura’s limbs and torso seem to draw on it. The entrance of Melissa Toogood, slipping silently like a shadow on to a bench at the side, is masterful, and when she moves, her shading is darker than Okamura’s, more visceral, but builds on the contours of Okamura’s lightly stretched, diaphanous movement. Zachary Gonder presence reflects the sensuality of the text, with his smooth jump and pointed foot like playful, barely perceptible punctuation, while Kara Chan has an almost hard-edged clarity. In this way Tanowitz weaves the qualities of her eight dancers into finely tuned duets, trios, and ensembles. Within such a spatial setting, at once material and immaterial, the way the dancers move pulls the performance towards one of two qualities: overt traits of personality or training that remain in their movement are reminders of the secular world, while the apparent absence of personality — the pure merging of the dancer and the choreography — speak of a world remembered, without weight, silent.
Tanowitz’s research takes in, quite naturally, Jewish folk dance, beautifully transposed in Song of Songs into her own choreographic forms, playing out an eloquent sense of community, of tradition, of ties that bind. The raised and angled hands have a naïve, uplifting quality while the legs keep their earthy contact with the floor. All the surfaces are used, transforming the art gallery-like setting into a theatrical stage. When the vertical strips at the back descend to hide the musicians, the music stops while the dance continues, but for the duration of this divorce we can neither hear the dance nor see the music. Each element of Song of Songs is so well balanced with the others that to lose one is to lose them all. But when they support and enhance each other, they together produce a transcendent sense of limitless time and space.
