The experience of attending a performance at Bard SummerScape in the Hudson Valley is not confined to the theater. For someone traveling from New York City, as I did on Saturday, there’s an entire preshow of escape into the country: the car or train ride along the blue stripe of the Hudson River, the calming effect of dense green forests.
This is partly the subject of “Pastoral,” the latest work by the choreographer Pam Tanowitz. Partly, because the pastoral in art is not a return to nature but an idealized view of it, a substitute following a separation.
This “Pastoral,” which ran Friday through Sunday afternoon, is very much in conversation with the past. 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. Caroline Shaw’s score samples from and playfully remixes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the one called “Pastoral.”
These elements — along with Reid Bartelme’s gauzy costumes in a sherbet color palette and Davison Scandrett’s subtly imaginative and color-sensitive lighting — combine in such fresh and delightfully unpredictable ways that it’s distorting to discuss them separately. Nevertheless, let’s start with the music.
Shaw switches among a live woodwind trio and several recordings of the Beethoven, both recent and more than a century old, wax cylinders with the scratchy sound of the distant past. The recordings fade in and out, sometimes eddying in stuck-record loops that toy with the tension and release of classical musical grammar. The live musicians behave like samplers, too: erasing bits of Beethoven, stretching, slowing, accelerating the tempo.
The woodwinds are all reeds, among the most pastoral of instruments, and on the low end of the section. The bassoonist Dana Jessen croaks like a frog and extends duck calls into song. Alongside these mimetic games, Shaw adds real field recordings of frogs and crickets but also of trains and traffic, the urban environment that creates the pastoral perspective. One of Shaw’s wittiest touches is to bring out the similarity between a bouncing triplet figure in the Beethoven and a car horn.
Crowner’s gorgeous contributions come in the form of paintings large and small, rolled on and off by the dancers or lowered from the fly, but also in curtains that slide in horizontally and vertically. These alterations of the stage space are so transformative, both in the poetics of space and as comedy, that it’s almost a spoiler to mention them. Tanowitz uses the panels and curtains to frame, hide and reveal her dancers. They run around the art and peek out from the edges, maybe in splits. A dancer might disappear only to re-emerge, seconds later, carried sideways.
Tanowitz’s choreography — itself in conversation with pastoral dances like Nijinsky’s “Afternoon of a Faun” and Merce Cunningham’s “Summerspace” — is her usual blend of classical and idiosyncratic, arabesques and foot waggles. Inventively complex and fundamentally communal, the dance swirls against the straight-line vectors of the moving set pieces. Gestural motifs, such as dancers leaning like trees in the wind, recur and develop with great compositional sophistication. As always, Tanowitz’s dancers show elegant restraint and natural grace, especially Christine Flores in a first-among-equals role.
The critic Edwin Denby once wrote of how Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring” evokes outdoor space. “Pastoral” feels interior, especially when the décor changes to the white walls of a gallery or artist’s studio. The shadow of a window, shifting shape, quickly suggests the passing of a day spent inside, contemplating art or making it. Throughout the work, the dancers seem to be inside a painting or looking at one.
It is momentous when the dancer Marc Crousillat carries on a square flat that matches the red of his costume. He dances in front of this color field, red on red, and when he slips behind to move it, his feet stick out amusingly. Later, the other dancers form a Poussin-like tableau, and when he finally joins them, the addition of his color changes everything, a brilliant brushstroke.
Again and again, small changes like that have a big impact. But in the terms of 18th- and 19th-century aesthetics, “Pastoral” is beautiful rather than sublime. While Shaw weaves in both Beethoven’s evocations of storms and the sound of the real thing, and Tanowitz’s choreography has gusts of force, this is nature tamed by art. Or maybe domesticated by working artists. Shaw’s score charmingly includes the sound of someone humming Beethoven’s tune while washing dishes.
Not that the art of “Pastoral” isn’t sufficiently wonderful. At the end, the dancers take a green sheet that has been lying on the stage lip like a Christmas tree skirt and drag it to center. There it becomes a patch of grass for Arcadia. Crowner’s large painting, pushed forward, seems to grow larger. In front of its flatness, standing on the grass, the dancers form another tableau, but now facing different directions, more assertively three-dimensional. “Pastoral” was not a place I wanted to leave.
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