Latest news with #Tanowitz
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in dance: Rachid Ouramdane: Outsider; Pam Tanowitz: Neither Drums Nor Trumpets
It's a rule of life that dancers can do anything with their bodies. In Rachid Ouramdane's new work, Outsider, made with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, they slide across the stage like oil, tumbling and curling like acrobats, swinging one another around like supple dolls. One woman falls and rises like a pendulum across a mass of bodies that gently push her from side to side. The stage, in Sylvain Giraudeau's stark design, is crisscrossed with a cat's cradle of taut climbing wires held on gantries. French-Algerian choreographer Ouramdane's stroke of magic is to introduce four extreme sport athletes who hang aloft seamlessly in semi-silhouette, their weightlessness contrasting with the gravity-bound dancers beneath. When they walk the tightrope, their arms wobble gently as they seek balance. Towards the close, they pull up four dancers from below, letting them dangle lengthways like human mobiles. Against Stéphane Graillot's pale lighting, and accompanied by Julius Eastman's minimalist score, the effect is meditative, transfixing. It's also slightly alienating: dance as an exercise in physics and composition. The excellent dancers are ciphers, parts of a puzzle. It's thanks to the thrilling range of London's Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections festival that it was possible to watch Outsider on the same day as a new piece by the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz that uses pattern in a much more human way. Neither Drums Nor Trumpets (the title taken from a line in a film by François Truffaut) is performed in the up-close space of the Royal Opera House's Paul Hamlyn Hall. Using seven of her own dancers and a phalanx of students from the Rambert School, Tanowitz weaves a layered 45-minute work that fills the room with movement and life, at once rigorous and playful, tugging at aspects of the building's history as a floral and dance hall. Her dancers are in flowery costumes (by Maile Okamura, who also performs), and the score composed by Caroline Shaw additionally features long stretches of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and a scratchy recording of Second Hand Rose, sung by Fanny Brice and beloved by Tanowitz's late mentor, the postmodernist choreographer David Gordon, to whom the work is dedicated. What's so impressive about Neither Drums Nor Trumpets is the power of its structure; the way Tanowitz builds repeated skeins of complex movement that thread in and out of the piece, conjuring ideas and fleeting thoughts. There are deep balances on one leg, little hugs of the arms across the body, sharp jumps from standing with arms raised like Merce Cunningham angels. At moments, the dancers sit thoughtfully, legs curled, like the Little Mermaid or a Nijinsky faun. Victor Lozano, in silver trainers, taps quietly round the performance square. Caitlin Scranton and Anson Zwingelberg crouch on their haunches and walk like children. Marc Crousillat carries the ethereal Christine Flores like a dart and then a scrunched-up ball. Lindsey Jones jumps across the stage, arms flailing wildly, then flattens herself against a screen. They are all superb – strong, striving human, raw. The students, meanwhile, make grave processions of detailed movement, the most basic dance positions of dance vocabulary transformed into subtle embroideries. Seeing these young dancers alongside professionals is remarkably inspiring – it feels like a gift to the future. Star ratings (out of five)Outsider ★★★Neither Drums Nor Trumpets ★★★★
Miami Herald
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
A nonconforming ballet heats up Miami City Ballet's ‘Winter Mix'
Speaking from her New York home base in January, choreographer Pam Tanowitz—currently held in the warmest of embraces by critics and knowing audiences—lamented the weather, confessing, 'I can't wait to come to Miami.' As the Northeast shivered through an arctic blast, she looked forward to returning to put the finishing touches on 'Coincident Dances,' the world premiere commissioned by Miami City Ballet as a red-hot component for its 'Winter Mix,' also including re-stagings of George Balanchine's 'La Valse,' a glamorous and mysterious whirl to Maurice Ravel, and 'Walpurgisnacht,' devilishly dynamic to passages from Charles Gounod's opera 'Faust.' The program opens at the Arsht Center in Miami, Friday, Feb. 14 through Sunday, Feb. 16. 'Winter Mix' continues at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday, Feb. 22 and Sunday, Feb. 23 and then at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Saturday, March 8 and Sunday, March 9. It's not that our subtropical climate sets the temperature for 'Coincident Dances.' But that concept amuses Tanowitz. She notes, 'Weather is like dance—ephemeral.' The choreographer further recognizes how surrounding elements seep into creation, saying, 'Life is messy, and everything can be in there.' In her case that includes motherhood and a divorce, her Jewish heritage, museum haunts and French cinema—and, yes, the environment. She references her choreography for 'The Seasons,' an opera to premiere at Boston Lyric Opera on Wednesday, March 12, the libretto by Sarah Ruhl springing from Vivaldi's concertos to tell of artists in a retreat disrupted by the weather. The collaboration, along with her concurrent MCB commission, is among the many high points on the choreographer's creative landscape. Sought-after by prominent dance companies in the United States and abroad, Tanowitz continues to head her twenty-five-year-old troupe, Pam Tanowitz Dance. Film work and a professorship of professional practice at Rutgers University extend her resume, which certifies Tanowitz as one of the busiest dance makers on the scene today. 'Though I don't need any more work, I'd feel stressed out if people stopped calling,' she admits. 'With every opportunity for me to make a dance, whether it's modern or ballet, I feel so, so lucky.' Small wonder she's mindful of self-care, faithfully putting in time at the treadmill. 'I have to do it every morning,' she says. 'It helps me focus for rehearsals.' She's been steadily holding that focus, wide and deep, to great results—two Bessie Awards, a Jacob's Pillow Dance Award, a Doris Duke Artist Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship among her honors, all especially meaningful to a self-confessed late-bloomer. 'I'm now 55. In New York since I was 23, I'd been choreographing for a really long time before people noticed me,' points out this Westchester, New York, native and MFA holder from Sarah Lawrence College. 'I had a totally different path. I wasn't a dancer in a company who then decided to be on my own. And my company is project-based, the dancers freelance.' Various modern dance figures have informed her work, with mid-twentieth century luminary Merce Cunningham looming tall. 'I love his technique, the clean lines,' says Tanowitz. This connection comes by way of the late Viola Farber, a founding member of the Cunningham company and a force of her own, 'She was my mentor at Sarah Lawrence,' says Tanowitz about the director of dance at her college. 'She challenged me and retaught me how to dance. She changed my life.' Considering Tanowitz's trajectory, many observers single out 2019 as a wonder year. A career upswing then raised the choreographer's visibility to a starry firmament, with commissions from Martha Graham Dance Company, Paul Taylor Dance Company, New York City Ballet, and Britain's Royal Ballet. Contacted for the current premiere by MCB artistic director Lourdes Lopez over two years ago, Tanowitz came by degrees into the company fold. At the end of 2016, to inaugurate the Faena Forum on Miami Beach, Tanowitz made 'Once With Me, Once Without Me,' a site-specific work joining her company with advanced students from MCB School. In May 2019, the same month that New York City Ballet staged 'Bartók Ballet'—its first Tanowitz piece— 'Gustave Le Gray No. 1,' a quartet created for Dance Theatre of Harlem and Miami City Ballet, featuring a man and a woman from each company, premiered as part of Ballet Across America at the Kennedy Center. Tanowitz explains that 'No. 1' uses ballet slippers while a 'No. 2,' for her own troupe, has the same movement base adjusted for bare feet. Tanowitz's exploration of pointe work, to be on view in 'Coincident Dances,' takes this balletic hallmark into her own territory. 'A lot of younger choreographers,' she considers, 'come into ballet to make a dance they think audiences want to see. I don't do that. I make what's interesting to me, and I always question things—an arm position or a head tilt. And I believe that's also interesting for the dancers.' MCB soloist Satoki Habuchi agrees, empowered by the choreographer's openness to contributions from the interpreters. One of seven men who, alongside eight women, make up the cast of 'Coincident Dances,' he participated as an MCB School student in the Faena project. Now more experienced in contemporary work, he's extended his talent adhering to Tanowitz's dictum 'to be a neutral version of myself. We don't have to make things bigger.' Still, even at their most natural, MCB dancers can be quite an eyeful. Habuchi tells how after Tanowitz saw him do an impactful jump in a studio class, she decided to incorporate it into her dance, labeling it the 'Satoki Special.' Principal Hannah Fischer, whose wide range in contemporary dance dates back to her days at National Ballet of Canada, appreciates how Tanowitz encourages 'honest intention.' This jives with the ballerina's belief that her art form is about mindset as much as physical exertion. 'Pam has a plan when she walks into the room, but she also lets us feel comfortable in the unknown. It's fine if we make a mistake because she might end up liking it,' she notes. Defying gender expectations, Tanowitz at one point asked if Fischer felt okay with circling the stage in a type of manège with traveling jumps usually reserved for men. Glad to take this on, the ballerina turned the opportunity into an off-the-playbook burst of excitement. Tellingly, both she and Habuchi point to a male duet—its soulfulness 'truly awesome,' says Fischer—as a standout in the dance. The choreographer is also unorthodox in not using counts in constructing phrases. Dancers take cues from the music, each other, and their internal responses. Whether in unison or in counterpoint, Fischer says she rides these currents in constant reference to the ensemble. Habuchi adds, 'We have to look at each other, and I let the music guide me emotionally.' Tanowitz is using two compositions, the scintillating 'Starburst' and 'Coincident Dances,' by Jessie Montgomery, among long-trusted collaborators—here including designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung for costumes and Brandon Stirling Baker for lighting—who bolster her conceptions. Montgomery's music, says the choreographer, 'feels very cosmopolitan—entertaining in the smartest way possible. It's very inspiring.' If you go: WHAT: Miami City Ballet's Winter Mix WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Feb. 14 and 15; 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 16 WHERE: Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCES: Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22; 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 23; Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 8; 1 p.m. Sunday, March 9 COST: $25-$225, depending on show time and venue. INFORMATION: 305-929-7010 or is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don't miss a story at
