Music, Form, and People who Dance: Pam Tanowitz’s Royal Ballet Debut

A woman in peach and a man in shades of blue teeter-totter in arabesques across the stage, each taking turns supporting the other. He holds her waist as she balances with her leg extended high á la seconde. She holds the impressive position herself and hops away. Later, she lays down and logrolls upstage, lounging on her side to watch the dance unfold. She is content with him, but also on her own. 

Pam Tanowitz challenges the traditional relations inherent in classical ballet. She examines hierarchies, dependencies, and assumptions of legitimacy by questioning relationships: among dancers, choreographers, and audiences; between dance and music; and between dance and everyday life. She uses the very rules that hold norms in place to suggest new ways of expressing existence on stage. 

Tanowitz proposes these new ways throughout Everyone Keeps Me, her Royal Ballet debut created for nine dancers. Set to music by Ted Hearne with lighting design by Clifton Taylor, it was commissioned as part of the Merce Cunningham centennial celebration in 2019. The work appeared after Frederic Ashton’s Monotones II, which was inspired by Cunningham’s Cross Currents, also on the program. Tanowitz’s singular choreographic voice clearly resonated amid two of Western dance’s most celebrated dancemakers. 

In Monotones II, Ashton’s pure classicism accompanied by Eric Satie’s minimalist Gymnopédies reveals a dance of “unbroken poetic adagio” (New York Times). The 1965 work for one woman and two men dressed in identical white unitards and white head caps embodies the atmospheric score. The woman balances in precise precarity with one man steadying her waist as the other draws her leg high in second. She takes a breath before swooping through her splits, relying entirely on her partners to maneuver her torso around and back up. The dancers evolve through space like a billowing cloud, their waxing and waning informed by the whole, as dependent on each other as on the music. 

Tanowitz often questions such codependent relationships between partners and music. Her choice to give independence to the ballerina with her leg extended to the side by having her hop away directly confronts Ashton’s traditional role delegations. Midway through Everyone Keeps Me, two men dance in a generous exchange of movement. One is lowered to a split on the floor as the music crescendos. Soon after, he takes his turn supporting the other to the same position, this time with no obvious relation to the music. They interplay between being the partner and being partnered, dancing with the music and dancing surrounded by it. 

The notion of whole elements existing among each other is epitomized in Cunningham’s travelling trio Cross Currents. The work for two women and one man premiered in London in 1964 and received so much praise for “conquering conservatism” that the company’s European season was extended on the spot (New York Times). The Cunningham Trust describes the title of this radical dance as coming “from the way the dancers’ paths frequently intersected...where each dancer had their own, different rhythms, but they would all come together at the end of the phrase” (Cunningham Trust). 

The piece begins with one dancer moving through space in a fast, spinning triplet. Simultaneously, another takes deliberate, far-reaching steps in a slower rhythm, while the third springs across the stage, seeming to change rhythms mid-flight. They are each compelled into motion by movement itself. For Cunningham, dance was more than musical illustration. Instead, sound was added after the dance was made as a textural device, allowing moments of harmony to happen by chance. 

Tanowitz is greatly influenced by Cunningham, both through her MFA mentor Viola Farber, who was a Cunningham star and performed in the original cast of Cross Currents, and her company dancers, most of whom are steeped in Cunningham’s work. It comes as no surprise that Tanowitz was asked to contribute her voice to the Cunningham celebration. Yet her departures from the modernist remain clear. Where he insisted on dance’s autonomy from music, she chooses musical landmarks for moments of connection and exchange. Where he valued formalism over expression and context, she includes subtle personality and cunning references into her rigorous use of line and structure. 

For Tanowitz, as dance is to music, so the dancers are to each other. Unlike Ashton’s ethereal ambiance and Cunningham’s objectivity, Tanowitz highlights the humanity of those dancing. “To just look at each other as people, that’s just as challenging as a triple pirouette, and it’s just as important in my work,” she says. In Everyone Keeps Me, each note and dancer is a whole entity participating in the same complex world.  

It is with whom she engages directly in the studio that drives her dance making, rather than music or form leading the way. “It’s always going to be about the people in the room,” she says, “I offer them possibilities and they offer me possibilities back.” Such a person-centered process contextualizes her dances in the everyday, rendering her work relatable while maintaining a clear style and syntax. The woman lounging upstage could be any of us in casual coexistence with our peers. 

Ashton’s dancers form a single unit. They appear magnetically drawn to each other, compelled by the music. In the opposite way, Cunningham’s atomistic dancers only overlap when their internal rhythms bring them together, compelled by movement. Tanowitz finds a new reality between these two older realms of dance. Her dancers consciously create community while dancing of their own free will. More than conduits of pure music or movement, they are people first, driven by the particular histories they each embody.

Dancer to dancer, dance to music, stage to everyday life: Tanowitz redefines these relationships throughout her work. All elements retain a bit of the other: they are independent yet permeable forces. Her choreographic weavings show the rewriting of rules set forth by her predecessors. She challenges the essentialism of musicality and form established by Ashton and Cunningham with a virtuosic complexity that opens a window into contemporary life.

*THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN THROUGH A COMMISSION BY PAM TANOWITZ DANCE

 

Pam Tanowitz’s Democratic Dances at the Vail Dance Festival

Pam Tanowitz is known for her spontaneity and novel use of space. Her seamless blending of varied movement styles through collaboration and juxtaposition offers a new poetic landscape. The uncanny familiarity of known movement made complex through intricate choreography conjures up unexpected emotions—humor, defiance, love, retreat, acceptance. Nothing is intrusively in your face. Rather, the subtle but strong rapport among dancers, the tender exactitude in which they describe each movement, bring you into a dialogue about art, time, space, energy, and dance itself. 

Tanowitz first created work for Damian Woetzel’s Vail Dance Festival in 2015, made with then-rising stars Calvin Royal III of American Ballet Theatre and Joseph Gordon and Gretchen Smith of New York City Ballet. Day for Night for Vail, which was co-commissioned by New York City Center and accompanied by the quartet Brooklyn Rider, was a clever conversation through precise movement between music, dancers, and the audience. Quick side-eyed glances reminded the viewers that they were indeed the ones watching. 

“I step here, we hold each other, I look at you in Row 37,” the dancers’ clear decision-making in Tanowitz’s choreography seemed to say, granting refreshing agency to subjects often objectified as literal objects of art. Tanowitz’s work highlights that rich humanity. 

Tanowitz returned to the Rockies in 2017 with Entr’acte, a sharp, bright dance to Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s score for four dancers—Jared Angle of NYCB, Jeffrey Cirio now of English National Ballet, Royal, and Melissa Toogood, former Merce Cunningham dancer and Tanowitz’s rehearsal director and longtime company dancer. 

That summer also saw an unexpected collaboration hatched in a car ride from the Denver International Airport to the creative incubator of the Vail Dance Festival. By chance, Tanowitz and former Miami City Ballet principal Patricia Delgado shared a shuttle on the way up the mountain and the two clicked. The encounter led to Solo for Patricia, a spur-of-the-moment creation that offered the recently retired ballerina renewed insight into herself as a mover and performer. 

“What I love about Pam,” Delgado later recounted, “is that she brings out the strong, independent woman in me.” Delgado rediscovered herself by stripping away the performativity inherent in classical ballet, and instead found new freedom in simply dancing the dance that was made. “Our lives already have so many stories,” she said in describing the tempering of her dramatic expressiveness.  

A celebration of the dancers in front of her—framed by a diligent examination of the dance makers who enriched their physical languages—gave Tanowitz’s latest work for Vail in 2019 its fullness. Flavors of George Balanchine’s architectural phrasing and Merce Cunningham’s risk-taking were presented in a purely Tanowitz register in One time more with feeling, her most intricate and expansive piece yet made for the Festival. The graphic-novel-like dance was made in collaboration with Shaw and included former Pacific Northwest Ballet principle Carla Körbes, NYCB soloist Miriam Miller, and corps dancer Preston Chamblee, as well as Toogood, Angle, and Royal. 

Two separate scenes begin the dance. Miller in pointe shoes traces the perimeter of the stage while the other four dancers move in calm unison through the amphitheater’s partition between the lawn and the pavilion, down the aisle, and eventually onto the stage. Tanowitz’s rupture of the traditional use of the theater is not made merely to provoke. She awakens the audience to their own participation as onlookers by democratizing the use of the theater itself. Those in the lawn whose seating normally prevents them from such proximity are given priority, while those in the pavilion crane their necks to watch the dance’s departure. 

The process of deconstructing hierarchy is a theme seen throughout Tanowitz’s work and echoes the ethos of the avant garde experimentalists who founded the Judson Dance Theater. No single aspect of a dance is more or less valuable. The music is important but does not dictate the work; the movements hold integrity, yet a highly technical classical jump is no more or less expressive than a swaying of the hips. Pointe shoes, sneakers, canvas shoes, and bare feet each say something different, but none holds a greater place than the others. From this leveled grounding, Tanowitz moves forward with her own language. 

“I see myself in a continuum of history, not as an isolated artist,” Tanowitz says of her work. “I create work that incorporates history and asks questions of that rich history.” 

One time more with feeling is an examination of the rules of dance. Tanowitz irreverently uses ballet dancers to question ballet itself—the rigid constraints of the arms, hips, and torso, the obsessive repetition of steps in search of impossible perfection, the jewelry box pedestal of “dance as woman,” as George Balanchine famously said—all are reviewed in a new light. 

The duet between Körbes and Royal modernizes the traditionally antiquated narrative between the genders that is central to ballet. Tanowitz used the ballet textbook Pas de Deux: A Textbook on Partnering, to invert the typical male/female relationship. She took the exact technique described and choreographed the opposite. Instead of Royal taking Körbes’ waist to promenade her around himself, he leaves her standing solo on her own leg and walks around her. We are reminded that these dancers are two separate beings—at times attached, at times utterly alone. 

“She wants you to be a person,” says Körbes. “That’s her only requirement. It tells me she cares about the people in front of her.” There is no archetype character being worshipped. Tanowitz presents two people faltering and sometimes succeeding at supporting each other. 

Jared Angle, whose reputation as an expert partner at NYCB often supersedes him from dancing on his own, was given a dynamic solo as if to say, “Look here, I am not simply an accessory!” His dance ends sitting in a lawn chair at the back of the stage in watchful contemplation. Again, the audience is reminded of its own role as voyeur. 

“Tanowitz gives the audience a different way to experience dance,” says Toogood. “How can you watch in a new way? What do we as the audience take for granted? Entrances and exits, for example, she’s purged that from her work. She never assumes one way of doing something.”

This meticulous examination of how things are and how they might be otherwise reverberates in the score created by Shaw. Similar to Tanowitz, Shaw asked each dancer the type of sound they wanted to hear when dancing, giving them agency in the creative process. A blending of the acoustic sounds of Johnny Gandelsman on violin alongside old wax recordings repeating the phrase “the artist has been censored” brought relevant history into the reality of our 21st-century world.  

“I want this audience to hear sounds they don’t normally hear. I want them to become familiar with what they might be judgmental about or deem unimportant,” Shaw said when describing her decision to perform electronic music and recorded voice samples at a festival that more frequently hears acoustic music. 

Shaw, who has created work for orchestras as well as rappers, uses a similar reconstruction approach, amplifying Tanowitz’s non-hierarchical framework as a starting point. Sampling Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake next to twinkling jewelry box sounds and an 808 electronic drum rhythm redistributes and questions the assumed significance of certain sound traditions over others.    

With a deep grasp on the past, Tanowitz describes a new potential future. Democracy in movement and sound does not diminish the worth of established lineages of creative work. It instead offers a reevaluation of our assumed understandings of relationships between the watchers and those being watched, the legitimate and the illegitimate, and of linear and nonlinear ways of thought. Like the Vail Dance Festival itself, Tanowitz encourages encounters of disparate viewpoints, interactions that establish a new vision for and by the people of dance—the dancers, makers, and spectators alike. 

*This essay was written through a commission by

Pam Tanowitz Dance

Behind the scenes: Music at the Vail Dance Festival enhances programming

The Vail Dance Festival is known as an epicenter of dance. But dance is not the only element of the two-week celebration that resonates beyond the Vail Valley.

Under Artistic Director Damian Woetzel, also the President of The Juilliard School in New York City, the live music offered at the Festival has grown in as dynamic a manner as the dance that has catapulted the Vail Dance Festival to international recognition. This year’s musical offerings outdo any previous year’s performances. 

Caroline Shaw, the Festival’s Pulitzer Prize winning Leonard Bernstein Composer-in-Residence, collaborated with celebrated choreographer Pam Tanowitz for a new work that will be presented on Aug. 5 for NOW: Premieres, an evening of world premieres. Shaw, who has worked with artists ranging from Renée Fleming to Kanye West, described the collaboration with Tanowitz in a series of questions: “How does Tanowitz think about movement and form, and how does she make decisions? How would she interact with musical modules and phrases and textures, and would it be similar to how she choreographs with dancers?”

Shaw’s referential compositions work in tandem with Tanowitz’s complex weavings of deconstructed classical and modern movement. For the 2019 Festival, Shaw is also collaborating with Michelle Dorrance, and Tiler Peck is using Shaw’s existing quartet piece, “Thousandth Orange,” for her new work. Shaw is truly a composer-in-residence.

Shaw’s work with Tanowitz, Dorrance and Peck follows last summer’s collaboration with Memphis jooker Lil Buck. Shaw sampled phrases spoken by Lil Buck over a heavy, pulsating beat that reverberated into the limestone of the Rockies. This year, Lil Buck joined tap dancer and music maker Michelle Dorrance along with the Kennedy Center’s Artistic Director of Jazz, Jason Moran, for a new work that will also be performed on Aug. 5 for NOW: Premieres. 

Jason Moran is unencumbered by the confines of form. In addition to creating work alongside Dorrance and Lil Buck, The MacArthur “Genius” Fellow worked with contemporary ballet choreographer Alonzo King on an unprecedented collaboration involving four LINES dancers and four New York City Ballet dancers. The rare cross-coastal creation was presented in International Evenings of Dance II on Aug. 3 and will return for NOW: Premieres on Aug. 5. 

Moran’s creative process is based on one of the essential tenets of jazz music: the “set,” in which musicians come together to engage in a collaborative process of improvisation, riffing off of one another to create the musical experience. This rewardingly free-form process is central to the Vail Dance Festival ethos. 

The composer’s presence at the Festival is impressive for the dancers and awe-inspiring for the Juilliard Jazz Musicians, who describe Moran as an idol and authority on jazz. “The SlapPack” is a group of five recently graduated Juilliard musicians who were invited by Woeztel. The group has already made several appearances warming up audiences before performances and during intermissions, and as the jam band for the yearly Vail Dance Festival Jam. Alberta Khoury is a classical guitarist also hailing from Juilliard and performed in the vibrant re-creation of Alexei Ratmansky’s “Fandango” for rising New York City Ballet star Roman Mejia. 

The Juilliard musicians made festival history alongside Shaw, “Hamilton” Music Director Kurt Crowley, festival string quartet Brooklyn Rider, and multi-instrumentalist Kate Davis, as they played the original score by pioneering composer John Cage in accompaniment to the Merce Cunningham piece “Antic Meet,” staged and conducted by Melissa Toogood. The assemblage of musicians from surprisingly varied backgrounds, in the same adventurous spirit as the great modern choreographer himself, served as a spontaneous Orchestra-in-Residence for one night only on International Evenings of Dance I on Aug. 2.    

The neighboring Breckenridge Music Festival Orchestra also boasts an accomplished ensemble of musicians hailing from across the nation for a summer season in the mountains. On opening night, the Orchestra accompanied The Colorado Ballet and principals from New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre in George Balanchine’s stirring “Serenade” to music by Peter Tchaikovsky. The Orchestra returns on Aug. 9 to accompany the Martha Graham Dance Company’s “quintessentially American” performance of “Appalachian Spring” with music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Copland. 

The music is half the show when it comes to dance.

“The best choreographers make you hear the music differently,’” said former principal pianist of the New York City Ballet Orchestra, Cameron Grant. 

The Vail Daily

Martha Graham Dance Company

Trailblazing artistry, then and now

 Martha Graham. The name is synonymous with modern dance in America, and as a trailblazer of culture itself. The legendary choreographer forged her own company and technique in 1928 in a Western artistic landscape that was dominated by classicism and an ethereal aesthetic. She sounded a mighty call of creative power that today echoes throughout the world and increases in its impact as it reaches new audiences and generations of dancers.

Graham’s work was rooted in raw emotionality and often in the American experiences of her time. Her sharp, angular and direct movements emerge from the body’s core, allowing her social and historical dramas to “embody the emotional jaggedness of life, both modern and eternal, and anything but neat,” said The New York Times in 2003. Her works marked a significant departure from the fairytale ballets familiar to audiences of the 20th century, and today represent a pinnacle of American artistic achievement.

Today, 27 years after Graham’s death at the age of 96, her Martha Graham Dance Company consistently reinvigorates her masterpieces through new interpretations and stagings, as they appear nationally and internationally to captive audiences. Building on Graham’s creative foundation, Artistic Director Janet Eilber maintains the company’s trailblazing spirit by commissioning vibrant new works from the world’s most daring contemporary choreographers. This summer, Vail audiences will experience both aspects of the Graham legacy: the enduring 1944 classic Appalachian Spring accompanied by the Breckenridge Festival Orchestra, new work by Bessie Award-winning choreographer Pam Tanowitz, and a collaborative new piece by acclaimed theater and dancemakers Maxine Doyle and Bobbi Jene Smith.

Appalachian Spring has been described as “quintessentially American” for its 19th century narrative of a Pennsylvanian newlywed couple building their first farmhouse together and for the bright, traveling score created by Pulitzer Prize winning American composer Aaron Copland. But what is “quintessentially American” goes beyond the promise of new beginnings. Just as Graham was unafraid to express the depths of human emotion, so too was she fearless in addressing challenging contemporary issues related to social, political, psychological and sexual themes. Created during and in response to World War II, Appalachian Spring was an affirmation of democratic values. In her original script for Copland, she spoke of ''a legend of American living'' that should ''by theatrical clarity, add up to a sense of place.''

Pam Tanowitz similarly creates dances in dialogue, though less explicitly in reference to social issues and more in tune to her artistic antecedents and the dancers she engages with directly in the studio. Tanowitz’s combination of wit, rigor, line and tenderness evoke master dance makers of the Graham lineage – Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown – through the weaving of movement, music and space. By contrast, Doyle and Smith are building more on the legacy of theater inherent in Graham. Their new work is built off of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and harnesses an emotional movement language to tell a story, building a theatrical experience through dance.

It is fitting to have the Graham company back in Vail at the Ford Amphitheater as, in her youth, Mrs. Ford herself was a student of Graham. Her connection to the choreographer and the company remained throughout Mrs. Ford’s lifetime, and now Vail audiences will have the chance to continue that connection and experience one of the greatest dance companies in the world.

The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform on August 9 in a performance that will be a highlight of the 2019 season.  

2019 Vail Dance Festival Magazine

Alonzo King and Jason Moran

Vivid, visceral collaboration

Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet awed Vail audiences last summer with dance that surpassed the simple melding of movement and music to become a visceral experience. King returns in 2019 to choreograph one of the Festival’s most ambitious collaborations yet: four LINES artists alongside four New York City Ballet artists will dance to a new score by pioneering jazz musician Jason Moran. A previous collaboration with Moran, Sand, was presented last summer to rave responses from Festival audiences.

For King, artistic collaboration is central, and he describes his works as, “for people. It’s an attempt to awaken anything that is sleeping in human beings because we are creatures of habit.”

More than a presentation of technical prowess— which his dancers keenly exhibit— King’s works extend into the realm of philosophy. “One of the wonders of art-making is that… it will make you feel connected once again to the largeness of the universe and the insignificance of our teeny little size in the bigger picture."  

King’s collaborations highlight his trust in the interconnectedness of humanity. From Shaolin Monks to a Baroque orchestra, no genre of partnership, if met with sincerity and rigor, is out of the question. Jason Moran is equally unencumbered by the confines of form. The MacArthur Fellow’s creative process is based on one of the essential tenets of jazz music: the “set,” where musicians come together to engage in a collaborative process of improvisation, riffing off of one another to create the musical experience.

Such dialogue-based beginnings transfer into all potential artistic mediums. Moran has worked in the realms of multimedia art and theatrical installations, in addition to appearing on over thirty albums ranging from avant-garde jazz, blues, hip hop, classical music and film soundtracks. As the leader of his own trio, The Bandwagon, Moran has released eight studio albums to much critical acclaim. For Vail, Moran will perform solo.   

Both King and Moran compose the past and future into works of art for the present. Their new collaborative work will be performed on two Festival programs, International Evenings of Dance II on August 3, and NOW: Premieres on August 5.

2019 VAIL DANCE FESTIVAL MAGAZINE