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New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Pastoral' Review: Sampling Beethoven at Bard
The experience of attending a performance at Bard SummerScape in the Hudson Valley is not confined to the theater. For someone traveling from New York City, as I did on Saturday, there's an entire preshow of escape into the country: the car or train ride along the blue stripe of the Hudson River, the calming effect of dense green forests. This is partly the subject of 'Pastoral,' the latest work by the choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Partly, because the pastoral in art is not a return to nature but an idealized view of it, a substitute following a separation. This 'Pastoral,' which ran Friday through Sunday afternoon, is very much in conversation with the past. The décor by the painter Sarah Crowner — green floral shapes as clean-edged as Matisse cutouts — invokes swathes of Western art history, as do the group tableaus in Tanowitz's choreography, as if taken from scenes in paintings by Nicolas Poussin. Caroline Shaw's score samples from and playfully remixes Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the one called 'Pastoral.' These elements — along with Reid Bartelme's gauzy costumes in a sherbet color palette and Davison Scandrett's subtly imaginative and color-sensitive lighting — combine in such fresh and delightfully unpredictable ways that it's distorting to discuss them separately. Nevertheless, let's start with the music. Shaw switches among a live woodwind trio and several recordings of the Beethoven, both recent and more than a century old, wax cylinders with the scratchy sound of the distant past. The recordings fade in and out, sometimes eddying in stuck-record loops that toy with the tension and release of classical musical grammar. The live musicians behave like samplers, too: erasing bits of Beethoven, stretching, slowing, accelerating the tempo. The woodwinds are all reeds, among the most pastoral of instruments, and on the low end of the section. The bassoonist Dana Jessen croaks like a frog and extends duck calls into song. Alongside these mimetic games, Shaw adds real field recordings of frogs and crickets but also of trains and traffic, the urban environment that creates the pastoral perspective. One of Shaw's wittiest touches is to bring out the similarity between a bouncing triplet figure in the Beethoven and a car horn. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Pam Tanowitz's ‘Pastoral' Weaves Beethoven, Art and City Traffic
What exactly is the pastoral, that tradition from about Virgil to Wendell Berry and beyond that devotes itself to nature? And can it even exist in a honking, smoggy metropolis? The choreographer Pam Tanowitz welcomes questions like these in her latest work, 'Pastoral,' which premieres on Friday at the Fisher Center at Bard College. In her signature blend of classical ballet and free-form modern dance, it is set to a reworking of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, nicknamed the 'Pastoral,' by the composer Caroline Shaw, with décor by the painter Sarah Crowner that puts nature front and center. All three of these artists live in New York City, and while 'Pastoral' draws from Beethoven in name, it pulls equally from their daily work and lives. It is also, for a dance, uncommonly engaged with the vocabulary of visual art. One late spring morning, with the fog low and cow daisies high in the Hudson Valley, Tanowitz strode into rehearsal with a book under her arm of Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century French painter of allegorical and historical scenes. 'We have two tableaus in this dance,' Tanowitz said, describing scenes in which her dancers arrange themselves into a particular formation and hold it, facing the audience. 'And this is what I want those moments to feel like,' she said, flipping to Poussin's 'A Dance to the Music of Time.' In that painting, four youthful figures frolic in a hillside clearing. They are mid-hop, the hands joined into a maypole ring, backs to one another, togas billowing in colors not too far from the lavenders and combinations evoking pink lemonade and smoked salmon that are used by Reid Bartelme, the costumer for 'Pastoral.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Miami Herald
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
A nonconforming ballet heats up Miami City Ballet's ‘Winter Mix'
Speaking from her New York home base in January, choreographer Pam Tanowitz—currently held in the warmest of embraces by critics and knowing audiences—lamented the weather, confessing, 'I can't wait to come to Miami.' As the Northeast shivered through an arctic blast, she looked forward to returning to put the finishing touches on 'Coincident Dances,' the world premiere commissioned by Miami City Ballet as a red-hot component for its 'Winter Mix,' also including re-stagings of George Balanchine's 'La Valse,' a glamorous and mysterious whirl to Maurice Ravel, and 'Walpurgisnacht,' devilishly dynamic to passages from Charles Gounod's opera 'Faust.' The program opens at the Arsht Center in Miami, Friday, Feb. 14 through Sunday, Feb. 16. 'Winter Mix' continues at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday, Feb. 22 and Sunday, Feb. 23 and then at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Saturday, March 8 and Sunday, March 9. It's not that our subtropical climate sets the temperature for 'Coincident Dances.' But that concept amuses Tanowitz. She notes, 'Weather is like dance—ephemeral.' The choreographer further recognizes how surrounding elements seep into creation, saying, 'Life is messy, and everything can be in there.' In her case that includes motherhood and a divorce, her Jewish heritage, museum haunts and French cinema—and, yes, the environment. She references her choreography for 'The Seasons,' an opera to premiere at Boston Lyric Opera on Wednesday, March 12, the libretto by Sarah Ruhl springing from Vivaldi's concertos to tell of artists in a retreat disrupted by the weather. The collaboration, along with her concurrent MCB commission, is among the many high points on the choreographer's creative landscape. Sought-after by prominent dance companies in the United States and abroad, Tanowitz continues to head her twenty-five-year-old troupe, Pam Tanowitz Dance. Film work and a professorship of professional practice at Rutgers University extend her resume, which certifies Tanowitz as one of the busiest dance makers on the scene today. 'Though I don't need any more work, I'd feel stressed out if people stopped calling,' she admits. 'With every opportunity for me to make a dance, whether it's modern or ballet, I feel so, so lucky.' Small wonder she's mindful of self-care, faithfully putting in time at the treadmill. 'I have to do it every morning,' she says. 'It helps me focus for rehearsals.' She's been steadily holding that focus, wide and deep, to great results—two Bessie Awards, a Jacob's Pillow Dance Award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship among her honors, all especially meaningful to a self-confessed late-bloomer. 'I'm now 55. In New York since I was 23, I'd been choreographing for a really long time before people noticed me,' points out this Westchester, New York, native and MFA holder from Sarah Lawrence College. 'I had a totally different path. I wasn't a dancer in a company who then decided to be on my own. And my company is project-based, the dancers freelance.' Various modern dance figures have informed her work, with mid-twentieth century luminary Merce Cunningham looming tall. 'I love his technique, the clean lines,' says Tanowitz. This connection comes by way of the late Viola Farber, a founding member of the Cunningham company and a force of her own, 'She was my mentor at Sarah Lawrence,' says Tanowitz about the director of dance at her college. 'She challenged me and retaught me how to dance. She changed my life.' Considering Tanowitz's trajectory, many observers single out 2019 as a wonder year. A career upswing then raised the choreographer's visibility to a starry firmament, with commissions from Martha Graham Dance Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company, New York City Ballet, and Britain's Royal Ballet. Contacted for the current premiere by MCB artistic director Lourdes Lopez over two years ago, Tanowitz came by degrees into the company fold. At the end of 2016, to inaugurate the Faena Forum on Miami Beach, Tanowitz made 'Once With Me, Once Without Me,' a site-specific work joining her company with advanced students from MCB School. In May 2019, the same month that New York City Ballet staged 'Bartók Ballet'—its first Tanowitz piece— 'Gustave Le Gray No. 1,' a quartet created for Dance Theatre of Harlem and Miami City Ballet, featuring a man and a woman from each company, premiered as part of Ballet Across America at the Kennedy Center. Tanowitz explains that 'No. 1' uses ballet slippers while a 'No. 2,' for her own troupe, has the same movement base adjusted for bare feet. Tanowitz's exploration of pointe work, to be on view in 'Coincident Dances,' takes this balletic hallmark into her own territory. 'A lot of younger choreographers,' she considers, 'come into ballet to make a dance they think audiences want to see. I don't do that. I make what's interesting to me, and I always question things—an arm position or a head tilt. And I believe that's also interesting for the dancers.' MCB soloist Satoki Habuchi agrees, empowered by the choreographer's openness to contributions from the interpreters. One of seven men who, alongside eight women, make up the cast of 'Coincident Dances,' he participated as an MCB School student in the Faena project. Now more experienced in contemporary work, he's extended his talent adhering to Tanowitz's dictum 'to be a neutral version of myself. We don't have to make things bigger.' Still, even at their most natural, MCB dancers can be quite an eyeful. Habuchi tells how after Tanowitz saw him do an impactful jump in a studio class, she decided to incorporate it into her dance, labeling it the 'Satoki Special.' Principal Hannah Fischer, whose wide range in contemporary dance dates back to her days at National Ballet of Canada, appreciates how Tanowitz encourages 'honest intention.' This jives with the ballerina's belief that her art form is about mindset as much as physical exertion. 'Pam has a plan when she walks into the room, but she also lets us feel comfortable in the unknown. It's fine if we make a mistake because she might end up liking it,' she notes. Defying gender expectations, Tanowitz at one point asked if Fischer felt okay with circling the stage in a type of manège with traveling jumps usually reserved for men. Glad to take this on, the ballerina turned the opportunity into an off-the-playbook burst of excitement. Tellingly, both she and Habuchi point to a male duet—its soulfulness 'truly awesome,' says Fischer—as a standout in the dance. The choreographer is also unorthodox in not using counts in constructing phrases. Dancers take cues from the music, each other, and their internal responses. Whether in unison or in counterpoint, Fischer says she rides these currents in constant reference to the ensemble. Habuchi adds, 'We have to look at each other, and I let the music guide me emotionally.' Tanowitz is using two compositions, the scintillating 'Starburst' and 'Coincident Dances,' by Jessie Montgomery, among long-trusted collaborators—here including designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung for costumes and Brandon Stirling Baker for lighting—who bolster her conceptions. Montgomery's music, says the choreographer, 'feels very cosmopolitan—entertaining in the smartest way possible. It's very inspiring.' If you go: WHAT: Miami City Ballet's Winter Mix WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 14 and 15; 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 16 WHERE: Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCES: Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22; 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 23; Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 8; 1 p.m. Sunday, March 9 COST: $25-$225, depending on show time and venue. INFORMATION: 305-929-7010 or is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don't miss a story at
