What exactly is the pastoral, that tradition from about Virgil to Wendell Berry and beyond that devotes itself to nature? And can it even exist in a honking, smoggy metropolis?
The choreographer Pam Tanowitz welcomes questions like these in her latest work, “Pastoral,” which premieres on Friday at the Fisher Center at Bard College. In her signature blend of classical ballet and free-form modern dance, it is set to a reworking of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, nicknamed the “Pastoral,” by the composer Caroline Shaw, with décor by the painter Sarah Crowner that puts nature front and center.
All three of these artists live in New York City, and while “Pastoral” draws from Beethoven in name, it pulls equally from their daily work and lives. It is also, for a dance, uncommonly engaged with the vocabulary of visual art. One late spring morning, with the fog low and cow daisies high in the Hudson Valley, Tanowitz strode into rehearsal with a book under her arm of Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century French painter of allegorical and historical scenes.
“We have two tableaus in this dance,” Tanowitz said, describing scenes in which her dancers arrange themselves into a particular formation and hold it, facing the audience. “And this is what I want those moments to feel like,” she said, flipping to Poussin’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.”
In that painting, four youthful figures frolic in a hillside clearing. They are mid-hop, the hands joined into a maypole ring, backs to one another, togas billowing in colors not too far from the lavenders and combinations evoking pink lemonade and smoked salmon that are used by Reid Bartelme, the costumer for “Pastoral.”
Crowner makes abstract paintings, full of hard-edged wiggle shapes, shards and lobes. She assembles these from painted canvas fragments that she has saved, rolled up and color-coded in her studio, over the years. She then joins her patchworks with a marine sail sewing machine, like fabric puzzles, and tightens them to stretchers.
Tanowitz first visited her Brooklyn studio two years ago with a collaboration in mind. “Everything in that room that day was bright, almost stage-like,” Crowner said, “so we kind of sat there and thought, ‘Maybe painting could be the place to start.’”
At Bard, the stage will be white, boxed in by walls of white muslin. It resembles a big, tall gallery. Because the arrangement closes off the wings, dancers must enter and exit the stage through narrow rear passages, and around Crowner’s curtains: concentric leafy shapes of green and red, which will expand and contract during the performance. The curtains, not the paintings themselves but large prints of them, drop from the ceiling, and are dragged or wheeled upon rigid wooden panels by Tanowitz’s dancers, whose arabesques and dips echo the painted shapes behind them.
“Sarah’s paintings help me position the dancers in space,” Tanowitz said. She also listened to the “Pastoral” Symphony while choreographing. She devised a “storm” section to match the stress of Beethoven’s in the fourth movement. But she began this dance as she does all her others, she said: not with music but with movement, and with leftover steps that have lived in her head from the “cutting-room floor” of past projects. In “Pastoral,” one such step is the grapevine, a crisscross sideways hop that nods, she said, to the folk dance passage in Beethoven’s sprightly second movement.
“We talk of the Sixth Symphony as being the beginning of the Romantic movement,” Shaw said in a video interview. The Sixth premiered in 1808, the same night as his brooding Fifth. Beethoven annotated the Sixth to mimic a day’s walk in nature, assigning specific nature roles to his sections and instruments, such as lightning, birds and a brook.
This is Shaw’s fifth dance with Tanowitz, beginning with “Watermark” in 2021. There, Tanowitz used a Shaw piece based on Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. Two years later, Tanowitz proposed to Shaw that they adapt Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.” Although they scrapped Vivaldi, they stayed with the nature theme, which led to the “Pastoral.”
Shaw’s score is half live, played by a woodwind trio that quotes memorable sections of the Sixth in offbeat, fragmented arrangements, which echo the breaking up of dancers onstage. She also composed a “storm” but purposely mismatched it to Tanowitz’s in the dance. “I wanted the music to frame the dance,” Shaw said. “And I tried to avoid a ‘Beethoven remix’ quality. Anything with a beat, I strictly avoided that.” Tanowitz, too, avoids counts in her steps. This requires her dancers to react to one another more than to any tempo.
“We both love this relationship to older music, to older things,” Shaw said. (Tanowitz has set previous dances to Bach and scripture, and she talks admiringly of the choreographer George Balanchine’s classically inspired “Apollo.”) “You belong to a tradition. You’re approaching that tradition, not in a ‘I need to tear it down’ way but in a ‘What do I love about this?’ way.”
The prerecorded half of Shaw’s score includes synthesizer drones intended to fade into the woodwinds, samples of a Sixth Symphony recording from 1913 and field recordings of amphibians Shaw found in an online database. “I wanted to hear Beethoven, but I also wanted to hear being outside,” she said.
There are also traffic horns, recorded by Shaw. “In New York City, your environment is the city,” she said. “There is a certain calm to hearing cars filtered through your window. Not everyone gets to go upstate.”
In a recent rehearsal at the Fisher Center, where Tanowitz is the choreographer in residence, the audio designer tested Shaw’s sound patches while Crowner reviewed her notes with the lighting designer, who was testing bright squares of false sunset. Tanowitz took the stage and went over the first tableau. Two male dancers reclined in “Dying Gaul” positions, and Tanowitz took one hand of each, posing briefly before demonstrating with a series of movements how they were to be “dragged” upward to their feet in slow motion.
“You’re pulling them into the tableau,” she said to the dancer Christine Flores, who had been watching intently. Now Flores tried it, slow-hoisting the men — who sort of side crawl — with a more languid, more fluid progression than the choreographer had just proposed, a chain of movement resembling a rescue at sea.
Flores whipped her head back and asked, “Is this too much?”
“No,” Tanowitz decided with a smirk. “What is too much?”
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