The New York Times Reviews Pam Tanowitz’s Pastoral at Bard SummerScape

Bard Summerscape’s Pastoral, the latest work by choreographer-in-residence Pam Tanowitz in collaboration with composer Caroline Shaw and visual artist Sarah Crowner, combines music and design in “fresh and delightfully unpredictable ways,” writes Brian Seibert for the New York Times. “As always, Tanowitz’s dancers show elegant restraint and natural grace, especially Christine Flores in a first-among-equals role,” writes Seibert. Setting the dance to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F Major, the “Pastoral,” Tanowitz then removes the music, replacing it in part with silence, in part with a specially commissioned score by Shaw, which itself responds to and transforms the Beethoven score. Seibert continues, “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.”

Post Date: 07-01-2025