There’s something unsolvable about Pam Tanowitz’s choreography – that’s what draws you in. It could also be the thing that pushes some away, but there’s hidden logic in Tanowitz’s dance, there’s beauty, and there’s so much certainty in each step, enough to make you believe her.
This New York choreographer has been making dances for a couple of decades, but she’s had international success in recent years with works including Four Quartets (seen in London in 2019), and commissions for the Royal Ballet. Her dance is made from fragments woven into a new whole. In Song of Songs – inspired by the love poem from the Hebrew Bible – some of those fragments come from Tanowitz exploring her family’s Jewish heritage and Jewish dance of many kinds. You can see folk motifs, small skipping steps, hands joined in a circle dance, a bouncing heel-first walk, but it’s all metamorphosed into something new. Her movement isn’t descriptive, but it is specific: arms so sharply horizontal that a dancer’s head could be the bubble in a spirit level; a precise flicker of a foot; a body suddenly hitting a taut pose, as bright as someone turning the lights on.
