Last Updated on October 2, 2026
Tanowitz Weaves Her Magic on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony
4.0 out of 5.0 starsPam Tanowtiz is becoming quite the regular on London stages and I, for one, am absolutely delighted. I’m not the only one: through her commissions for The Royal Ballet (her fifth piece for Covent Garden will open early next year), and the Barbican, where her third co-commission, Pastoral, has just opened, the American choreographer has built up a large and enthusiastic following this side of the water.
Pastoral follows on from Four Quartets (2019) and Song of Songs (2023) and, like them, it’s an deeply enmeshed collaboration with artists from other disciplines, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and visual artist Sarah Crowner, all inspired by Beethoven’s Symphony No. Six, the “Pastoral”, but transcending it to move in brand new and unpredictable directions.
As you enter the Barbican Theatre, your eye is immediately caught by the flash of emerald green of a large silken cloth that cascades over the edge of the stage. Its usefulness not apparent until the very end of the one-hour piece, it is, nevertheless, already a harbinger of things to come: the oblique references to nature and its depictions throughout history in the high-definition green floral shapes of Sarah Crowner’s large movable curtains, which frame and define sections of the stage as they open, close and disappear to make way for large, brightly coloured panels, only to appear again.
Three musicians with their wind instruments sit at floor level, their sparing, unobtrusive playing seamlessly blending with Caroline Shaw’s sampling of Beethoven’s “Pastoral”, identifiable snatches of which pop up unexpectedly, sometimes clearly, sometimes as played in scratchy, primitive wax cylinders, but always briefly, their intrusions lingering like a distant dream in the dancers’ steps.
And then, of course, there’s the compelling movement on stage that so cleverly knits all this into a glorious whole. Pam Tanowitz’s choreographic language is at times reminiscent of the work of past pioneers of modern dance, such as Merce Cunningham, and has elements also of classical ballet, the rigour and lines of which have always been present to a certain extent in her work, but I wonder, are they more apparent now as a result of her growing involvement with The Royal Ballet?
What never changes, though, is her basic belief in movement for its own sake: the body creating limpid shapes with no need for emotional expression or her pet hate, “pulling faces”. As she once told me, “I don’t like to be danced at.” And so the seven excellent dancers of her Pam Tanowitz Dance, five women and two men, create movement the import of which is suggested by the way the bodies align and relate to each other.
It’s movement that, in deference to its starting point, lightly evokes the rhythms of nature, flowing on the stage, but contained by it. In soft, one-piece, two-tone costumes designed by Tanowitz’s regular collaborator, Reid Bartelme, and immersed in Davison Scandrett’s lighting, which subtly dims from dazzling brightness to create mellow atmospheres and cast geometric shapes on the stage, they dance individually or join together in twos or larger groups. They form brief tableaux, like scenes from a painting, which soon dissolve to give each dancer their freedom.
The arms are often stretched forward, except when they form a perfect round above their heads in a balletic fifth position. Balances recur and are required to be held for long stretches. And although most of the dancing is earthbound, little hops and skips punctuate everything. There are brief pauses, fleeting moments of rest, soon interrupted by another flurry of movement. At times there are different foci of dancing, as when the two men upstage appear to mimic a sedate courtly dance, as one woman further down goes through her own dance.
Like so much of Pam Tanowitz’s prolific output – TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, the biblical Song of Songs, for example – but perhaps less weighty, Pastoral is a masterful deconstruction and reframing of elements of our cultural history to create something for our times, thought-provoking and above all deeply, deeply enjoyable.
Pastoral, Pam Tanowitz Dance is at the Barbican Theatre 1 – 3 October at 7.45 pm. Sat mat at 2.30 pm
Dur.: 1 hour no interval. Tickets: £18 to £45
Barbican
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS
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