PAM TANOWITZ

Attaining Greatness

By Alastair Macaulay

Dance uses human energy; choreographers express views of human potential. So we can watch choreography as philosophy: as imagery of how human life may be lived.

The choreographer Pam Tanowitz – after about seventeen years of making clever, formally unorthodox, and often witty dances at professional level – broke through into poetically theatrical greatness in 2018 with a sensuous magnum opus, Four Quartets, both timeless and modern. It combines T.S.Eliot’s classic poems (complete, spoken by Kathleen Chalfont) with music by Kaija Saariaho (who died in 2023), scenic images by Brice Marden as realised onstage by Clifton Taylor, and costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung. Since then, Tanowitz’s achievement has only grown. In the years 2019-2023, she has choreographed for top-level companies in both ballet and modern dance around the world – notably, Australian Ballet (Watermark, 2021), Martha Graham Dance Company (Untitled (Souvenir), 2019), New York City Ballet (Bartók, 2019), The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden (several pieces between 2019 and 2023), Paul Taylor American Modern Dance Company (all at once, 2019). Her finest work belongs to her collaborations with her own dancers, Pam Tanowitz Dance, which in autumn 2023 performed her Song of Songs (2022) in both London and New York.