Tanowitz's 'Pastoral' UK Premiere Deconstructs Beethoven in Bright — SkimNews
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- Pam Tanowitz's "Pastoral" received its UK premiere as a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and artist Sarah Crowner, inspired by Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and the idea of the pastoral in art.
- Caroline Shaw's score deconstructs Beethoven using three live musicians on reed instruments, excerpts of orchestral recordings, and real-world sounds of streets, skies, and the city.
- Sarah Crowner designed a floor-to-ceiling curtain and a vast canvas with pale pink slices cutting through deep greens, dividing the stage into "rooms" amid otherwise white walls.
- Reid Bartelme's costumes placed dancers in ombre chiffon running through coral, pink, red, lilac, and chartreuse — colors the review describes as humming "on the edge of concord and discord."
- The staging deliberately rejected contemporary dance's trend toward dark, shadowy sets and theatrical haze, offering instead a bright, white stage that the critic called "a sharp palate cleanser."
- Tanowitz's choreography echoes Merce Cunningham's mid-century abstraction with flattened lines and symmetry; dancer Anson Zwingelberg's fleeting solo phrase is singled out as "an exquisite miniature."
- A darker thematic moment — an angry red square canvas and a bird call "like a siren" — interrupts the pastoral idyll, the reviewer reads it as "a threat against nature."
Why it matters: The premiere is the first UK showing of an ongoing three-woman collaboration (Tanowitz, Shaw, Crowner) that fuses deconstructed Beethoven, abstract dance, and hard-edge painting into a single work. For British audiences, it also offers a rare chance to see Tanowitz's signature bright, spacious aesthetic — a deliberate counterpoint to the shadowy, effects-heavy staging that has dominated contemporary dance programming.
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