Tanowitz and Shaw's Pastoral Premieres in UK — SkimNews
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- Pam Tanowitz's "Pastoral" received its UK premiere, a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw and artist Sarah Crowner, inspired by Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and the broader idea of the pastoral in art.
- Caroline Shaw deconstructs Beethoven with three live musicians on various reed instruments, excerpts of orchestral recordings treated "like echoes or memories," and real-world sounds of the street, skies, and city.
- Sarah Crowner designed a floor-to-ceiling curtain and a vast canvas with pale pink slices cutting through deep greens, dividing the white-walled stage into "rooms" and evoking 1950s–60s hard-edge painting.
- Reid Bartelme's costumes dress the dancers in ombre chiffon cycling through coral, pink, red, lilac, and chartreuse — colors the reviewer describes as "humming on the edge of concord and discord."
- Dancer Anson Zwingelberg executes "a gorgeous phrase, like an exquisite miniature," that "appears and evaporates with no fanfare," embodying the work's spare, zero-fuss aesthetic.
- The pastoral idyll is interrupted by an angry red square canvas and a bird call "like a siren," which the review reads as a "threat against nature."
Why it matters: The UK premiere gives British dance audiences a rare look at a major American choreographer's three-way collaboration with a Pulitzer-winning composer and a painter, staged as a deliberate counterpoint to the trend toward dark, hazy, claustrophobic dance productions — the review frames its brightness, white space, and Beethoven deconstruction as a sharp palate cleanser for the field.
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