Country Music and Line Dancing

In general, one knows exactly what to expect of a Pam Tanowitz piece. There will be deconstructed ballet and modern steps. There will probably be set pieces (paintings, panels, columns, or curtains) and shafts of light that migrate around the stage. The dancers will perform with an earnest, intelligent passivity; neither winking nor guileless. And they will likely be sporting minimalist jumpsuits. One or two may venture onto the proscenium of the stage at some point. There will certainly be group sequences, solos, and duets that bleed into one another. Though the movements may be decisive and the imagery bold—color-blocking, sharp angles, dramatic lighting, technical feats, and distinct musical phrases are often present—there will be no jarring transitions. Whether the dancers’ moves are fast or slow, the overall pace of a Tanowitz ballet is always leisurely—a steady drip of ideas, a slow accumulation of motifs.

Performance

Pam Tanowitz Dance: “Pastoral”

Place

Rose Theater, Lincoln Center, New York, NY, January 12, 2026

Words

Faye Arthurs

Pam Tanowitz Dance in “Pastoral” by Pam Tanowitz. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

How is it, then, that she always manages to surprise me? Even as I have been so put off by the ubiquity of contemporary trends lately, Tanowitz’s repetition provokes awe rather than derision. Why is that? As I watched Tanowitz’s latest, “Pastoral,” at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center, I realized that she—more than any other choreographer working today—is the descendant of George Balanchine’s Black and White ballets (a series of plotless, set-less works danced in simple black and white leotards and tights). As if by magic, both Balanchine and Tanowitz make use of a rigid and predictable template (and lots of internal recycling) to continually break new ground.

This is true of Tanowitz’s new “Pastoral” (co-commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Barbican London, and Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels), which takes Beethoven’s famous 6th symphony about countryside idylls, singing shepherds, and flash storms as its foundation. For “Pastoral,” composer Caroline Shaw has taken the 14 instruments and 30+ musicians typically required for the Beethoven symphony and boiled the roster down to just five instruments played by three talented musicians: Dana Jessen on bassoon, Bill Kalinkos on clarinet and bass clarinet, and Andrew Nogal on oboe and English horn. Sometimes Shaw strays very far from Beethoven’s course, with the trio performing flatulent tones and meditative, yogic chords. But then, Shaw occasionally samples a 1913 recording of the 6th symphony with a full orchestra, in either surround sound or tinny offstage speakers.

She also incorporates car horns, sirens, trains, humming, frog ribbits, cicada buzzing, whistles, and the sound of dishes being washed. With this sonic grab bag, she brilliantly aligns the symphonic trills and toots of the original “Pastoral” (Beethoven’s approximations of birdsong and animal calls) with the ambient noises of a contemporary landscape, deftly showing how much our post-industrial communications borrow from the natural world. Talk about animal mimicry! Cars in traffic are but geese honking or cows lowing. A fire truck’s toggling wail is a bird signaling danger. Clattering silverware sloshing in a wet sink stands in for rain and thunder. This is Shaw’s fifth collaboration with Tanowitz, and the second using Beethoven as a springboard. These women push each other in wondrous ways, in lock step as to process: they both start with deconstruction before rebuilding through wildly inventive free association.

Pam Tanowitz Dance in “Pastoral” by Pam Tanowitz. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

For her part, Tanowitz does not respond directly to Shaw’s varied soundscape as much as slowly develop her own choreographic themes around it. In so doing, her repetitive step snippets take on shifting meanings. For instance, one motif featured a dancer pushing another’s extended foot to initiate a rotation in a 90-degree à la seconde. When set to nature sounds, this passage suggested the flicking of a samsara seed, which Tanowitz reinforced later with floaty, helicoptering versions of the step for solo jumpers. But when accompanied by urban sounds, the sequence resembled a turnstile.

A recumbent motif was subject to the same fluidity in signification. One dancer lay supine with one knee and hand stuck up. Another dancer walked past and grabbed the uplifted joints to pull them up and along. Depending on the scoring, this bit of partnering evoked human kindness, mathematical problem solving, or a burr or a tick waiting in the grass and attaching to a passerby. Tanowitz’s ingenious game is to take steps (also paintings, symphonies, poems, scripture) apart and divorce the pieces from their standard meanings. The shock lies in how much meaning the shards accumulate on their own.

Sarah Crowner’s vivid décor was just as crucial to the multiplicity of possible interpretations as Shaw’s score in Tanowitz’s bucolic experiment. The “Pastoral” stage featured a white box frame, with moveable floor-to-ceiling panels and curtains painted with bright green foliage with pink slashes, as well as mobile squares of saturated tangerine and leaf green. This artistic array conveyed both a verdant landscape and a modern art gallery at the same time.

Crowner’s arresting pieces landed somewhere between Rousseau’s jungle paintings, Orla Kiely’s patterned shower curtains, and mid-century tile coffee mugs. A swath of fabric hanging into the pit on the right side of the stage was at first tinted blue and called to mind a river, but later it was lit in green and stretched out in the middle of the stage (Davison Scandrett did the lighting and production design). Some dancers sat casually on this tarp while others posed themselves grandly around it, fingertips grazing a contrapposto shoulder here, palms clasping a torqued hipbone there. The tableau evoked both picnickers and lawn statuary.

Pam Tanowitz Dance in “Pastoral” by Pam Tanowitz. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

But that wasn’t all. This was one of many times Tanowitz and company hinted at classical concepts of arcadia. There were passages that suggested ancient deities or pagan satyrs and nymphs, much like in the mythical section of Disney’s Fantasia, which is also set to Beethoven’s 6th. To be sure, stately posing features into many of Tanowitz’s works; I thought especially of “Untitled (Souvenir)”, made for the Martha Graham Dance Company in 2019 (and which also featured music by Shaw). But this time the imagery was wondrously overladen. The swatches of greenery on the pillars and floor referenced landscaping, but the white-walled staging alluded to a museum. Thus, in the same instant, the dancers appeared to be marble sculptures on manicured grounds or in an antiquities exhibit, as well as the legendary figures themselves just hanging out on Mt. Olympus.

Yet, although Tanowitz compressed many timelines and realities into “Pastoral,” the stage was also a world unto itself. With white panels sealing off the stage’s side exits, one sometimes got the impression that the dancers were moving through the countryside of a specific universe. One neat passage had the terrific Christina Flores soloing in front of a large floral panel to pulsing music, though she was not dancing on the meter. The vegetation lifted to expose a group chugging perfectly along to the beat, as if they had been doing their own thing back there for a while. This surprising reveal suggested the existence of vistas beyond the visible. Were they bugs in the trees, a herd in a pen or a faraway field? On one hand the dancers were boxed in like zoo animals, but on the other Tanowitz teased ideas of contemporaneous activity in other zones, realms, and eras.

Another clever moment had Marc Crousillat emerging from behind a central scrim and sautéing boldly around the stage before pausing in a corner. He had no discernable motive, which was refreshing because most men who travel the perimeter of a stage alone in a ballet are princes expressing angst and wanderlust. Crousillat was more of a detached, yet excitable, flaneur. Perhaps an impulsive, wiggly child or a goat frolicking in a pasture. After he exited, other dancers repeated his aimless, skipping solo loop, like deer bounding across the same lea at different times of day.

A lot of “Pastoral” toyed with the un-sentimentality of wildlife like this—particularly in the pas de deux. In so many pieces Tanowitz dissects ballet partnering in a way that questions its relationship to procreation, intimacy, and anatomical geometry (as in the dispassionate, porno-adjacent finale of her “Song of Songs”). She often uses animalistic twitterpation to get her point across (I thought, again, of Mark Morris’s hilarious bird flocks in L”Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato”). But here, to Beethoven’s cuspy Romanticism, Tanowitz’s duets were among her least romantic. The pairs communicated through flash and imitation, as in animal mating rituals, and mechanically fit themselves together (the jumping of a woman onto a man’s body in a shotgun position, for example). This also made me think of Balanchine’s B&W’s, with their interlocking, puzzle-piece pas de deux. But Balanchine’s duets are always slightly erotically charged, perhaps because of the icy glamour of their delivery. Also, the non-costumes are still gendered and broadcast heteronormativity—leotards for the women, white tops and black tights for men. Reid Bartelme’s unisex, ombre pantsuits helped Tanowitz cast off one more layer of balletic convention. The costumes’ bright coloring became camouflage in Crowner’s stylized foliage, yet it also popped against the white walls.

Pam Tanowitz Dance in “Pastoral” by Pam Tanowitz. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

Tanowitz’s unemotive couplings also bucked the gropey emoting trends that are so big in dance right now. Though group hugs are rampant, Tanowitz’s only hugging was self-hugging, which she ironically used in group dances. The dancers wrapped their arms tightly around their own shoulders while performing unison steps, each one an island even in rare moments of choreographic unity.

But as always, Tanowitz was at her best when exposing the bizarreness of dance conventions, and the environmental themes of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” were particularly ripe for one of her favorite questions: what is natural? In ballet terms, she came up with tons of new fodder for this query, as when the dancers kept testing their arms in front of and behind a gestural leg lifted to the side, which made me chuckle. Arms and legs often do have a hard time sharing the same plane in ballet, and the agreed upon solutions are certainly arbitrary. This thesis did not hold true, however, for the sauts de basque and à la seconde sautés with fisted, en dedans arms that fought the dancers’ aerial momentum. Ballet is both contrived and highly coordinated, and Tanowitz is always looking for that dividing line.

Peculiar, upright hitch kicks, performed with arms in stiff fourth positions (and the dancers snapping their heads towards their lower arm at the crest of the jump) looked truly weird and went against dance standards. After several people repeated this robotic move, Crousillat stood still and performed just the indulgent, counterbalancing backbend that usually accompanies a hitch kick. Without the jump, and after all that ramrod oddness, the isolated layout looked louche. It was a case study of a classic step. She’s riffed on this concept before, but not on this exact pathway. And it demonstrated anew how Tanowitz always keeps one guessing. Though she frequently depicts how unnatural ballet is, sometimes she plays devil’s advocate and proves how much it flows.

In another humorous passage, the commanding Lindsey Jones held an arabesque for a long time before popping into a forced arch relevé. When Jones repeated this deadpan heel pop later, someone swooped in to catch her. This surprising change unlocked a fundamental difference between Tanowitz and Balanchine: Balanchine clarifies; Tanowitz blurs. Balanchine’s repeats strictly match and anchor their murky scores. For example, when Balanchine recycles a lift that moves from a split to a frog into hovering beats in the first movement of “Episodes,” it is first done upright and then upside down, corresponding to Anton von Webern’s inversion of the same musical phrase. If Balanchine’s repeats are grounding, Tanowitz’s repeats are destabilizing. They act like a pop quiz you can never ace. “Do you remember this sequence?”, Tanowitz asks. “Well, now it’s different.” This bait-and-switch trickery exposes how much we yearn to connect dots, recognize patterns, solve mysteries.

Pam Tanowitz Dance in “Pastoral” by Pam Tanowitz. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

And because Balanchine is in the game of elucidating music, and Tanowitz is all about scrambling semantics, it makes sense that they select opposite types of scores. Balanchine’s B&Ws employ cerebral, atonal, and often obscure music, while Tanowitz engages with heavyweight, canonic compositions or texts (Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” The Bible’s “Song of Songs”). Balanchine follows his scores precisely; Tanowitz strips down and pushes against her famous soundscapes, probing how they operate. She forces us to rethink them, which often, ironically, leads to deeper comprehension. Of course, she also casts beyond music, integrating other mediums and collaborators. Balanchine, however, is about as abstract as you can get in the B&Ws. He draws a line directly between two mediums. Sets and costumes would only distract from his project of turning bodies into music.

I find it fascinating that despite so much methodological overlap, Balanchine and Tanowitz’s objectives are the opposite. However, they are very much aligned in one key aspect: both reward an educated and invested audience. Tanowitz’s dances are more provocative if one knows the texts and scores and paintings and steps that she is referencing and dismantling, just as Balanchine’s B&Ws are richer for those who can read music. That Balanchine’s B&Ws have endured, and Tanowitz is so in-demand today, gives me hope. Their dances prize close reading and critical thinking. Their art is challenging, but we need more challengers to the puerile group hugs and simple dopamine hits that are increasingly dotting our cultural landscape.

Faye Arthurs

Faye Arthurs is a former ballet dancer with New York City Ballet. She chronicled her time as a professional dancer in her blog Thoughts from the Paint. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their sons.

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