Pam Tanowitz’s Democratic Dances at the Vail Dance Festival
Pam Tanowitz is known for her spontaneity and novel use of space. Her seamless blending of varied movement styles through collaboration and juxtaposition offers a new poetic landscape. The uncanny familiarity of known movement made complex through intricate choreography conjures up unexpected emotions—humor, defiance, love, retreat, acceptance. Nothing is intrusively in your face. Rather, the subtle but strong rapport among dancers, the tender exactitude in which they describe each movement, bring you into a dialogue about art, time, space, energy, and dance itself.
Tanowitz first created work for Damian Woetzel’s Vail Dance Festival in 2015, made with then-rising stars Calvin Royal III of American Ballet Theatre and Joseph Gordon and Gretchen Smith of New York City Ballet. Day for Night for Vail, which was co-commissioned by New York City Center and accompanied by the quartet Brooklyn Rider, was a clever conversation through precise movement between music, dancers, and the audience. Quick side-eyed glances reminded the viewers that they were indeed the ones watching.
“I step here, we hold each other, I look at you in Row 37,” the dancers’ clear decision-making in Tanowitz’s choreography seemed to say, granting refreshing agency to subjects often objectified as literal objects of art. Tanowitz’s work highlights that rich humanity.
Tanowitz returned to the Rockies in 2017 with Entr’acte, a sharp, bright dance to Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s score for four dancers—Jared Angle of NYCB, Jeffrey Cirio now of English National Ballet, Royal, and Melissa Toogood, former Merce Cunningham dancer and Tanowitz’s rehearsal director and longtime company dancer.
That summer also saw an unexpected collaboration hatched in a car ride from the Denver International Airport to the creative incubator of the Vail Dance Festival. By chance, Tanowitz and former Miami City Ballet principal Patricia Delgado shared a shuttle on the way up the mountain and the two clicked. The encounter led to Solo for Patricia, a spur-of-the-moment creation that offered the recently retired ballerina renewed insight into herself as a mover and performer.
“What I love about Pam,” Delgado later recounted, “is that she brings out the strong, independent woman in me.” Delgado rediscovered herself by stripping away the performativity inherent in classical ballet, and instead found new freedom in simply dancing the dance that was made. “Our lives already have so many stories,” she said in describing the tempering of her dramatic expressiveness.
A celebration of the dancers in front of her—framed by a diligent examination of the dance makers who enriched their physical languages—gave Tanowitz’s latest work for Vail in 2019 its fullness. Flavors of George Balanchine’s architectural phrasing and Merce Cunningham’s risk-taking were presented in a purely Tanowitz register in One time more with feeling, her most intricate and expansive piece yet made for the Festival. The graphic-novel-like dance was made in collaboration with Shaw and included former Pacific Northwest Ballet principle Carla Körbes, NYCB soloist Miriam Miller, and corps dancer Preston Chamblee, as well as Toogood, Angle, and Royal.
Two separate scenes begin the dance. Miller in pointe shoes traces the perimeter of the stage while the other four dancers move in calm unison through the amphitheater’s partition between the lawn and the pavilion, down the aisle, and eventually onto the stage. Tanowitz’s rupture of the traditional use of the theater is not made merely to provoke. She awakens the audience to their own participation as onlookers by democratizing the use of the theater itself. Those in the lawn whose seating normally prevents them from such proximity are given priority, while those in the pavilion crane their necks to watch the dance’s departure.
The process of deconstructing hierarchy is a theme seen throughout Tanowitz’s work and echoes the ethos of the avant garde experimentalists who founded the Judson Dance Theater. No single aspect of a dance is more or less valuable. The music is important but does not dictate the work; the movements hold integrity, yet a highly technical classical jump is no more or less expressive than a swaying of the hips. Pointe shoes, sneakers, canvas shoes, and bare feet each say something different, but none holds a greater place than the others. From this leveled grounding, Tanowitz moves forward with her own language.
“I see myself in a continuum of history, not as an isolated artist,” Tanowitz says of her work. “I create work that incorporates history and asks questions of that rich history.”
One time more with feeling is an examination of the rules of dance. Tanowitz irreverently uses ballet dancers to question ballet itself—the rigid constraints of the arms, hips, and torso, the obsessive repetition of steps in search of impossible perfection, the jewelry box pedestal of “dance as woman,” as George Balanchine famously said—all are reviewed in a new light.
The duet between Körbes and Royal modernizes the traditionally antiquated narrative between the genders that is central to ballet. Tanowitz used the ballet textbook Pas de Deux: A Textbook on Partnering, to invert the typical male/female relationship. She took the exact technique described and choreographed the opposite. Instead of Royal taking Körbes’ waist to promenade her around himself, he leaves her standing solo on her own leg and walks around her. We are reminded that these dancers are two separate beings—at times attached, at times utterly alone.
“She wants you to be a person,” says Körbes. “That’s her only requirement. It tells me she cares about the people in front of her.” There is no archetype character being worshipped. Tanowitz presents two people faltering and sometimes succeeding at supporting each other.
Jared Angle, whose reputation as an expert partner at NYCB often supersedes him from dancing on his own, was given a dynamic solo as if to say, “Look here, I am not simply an accessory!” His dance ends sitting in a lawn chair at the back of the stage in watchful contemplation. Again, the audience is reminded of its own role as voyeur.
“Tanowitz gives the audience a different way to experience dance,” says Toogood. “How can you watch in a new way? What do we as the audience take for granted? Entrances and exits, for example, she’s purged that from her work. She never assumes one way of doing something.”
This meticulous examination of how things are and how they might be otherwise reverberates in the score created by Shaw. Similar to Tanowitz, Shaw asked each dancer the type of sound they wanted to hear when dancing, giving them agency in the creative process. A blending of the acoustic sounds of Johnny Gandelsman on violin alongside old wax recordings repeating the phrase “the artist has been censored” brought relevant history into the reality of our 21st-century world.
“I want this audience to hear sounds they don’t normally hear. I want them to become familiar with what they might be judgmental about or deem unimportant,” Shaw said when describing her decision to perform electronic music and recorded voice samples at a festival that more frequently hears acoustic music.
Shaw, who has created work for orchestras as well as rappers, uses a similar reconstruction approach, amplifying Tanowitz’s non-hierarchical framework as a starting point. Sampling Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake next to twinkling jewelry box sounds and an 808 electronic drum rhythm redistributes and questions the assumed significance of certain sound traditions over others.
With a deep grasp on the past, Tanowitz describes a new potential future. Democracy in movement and sound does not diminish the worth of established lineages of creative work. It instead offers a reevaluation of our assumed understandings of relationships between the watchers and those being watched, the legitimate and the illegitimate, and of linear and nonlinear ways of thought. Like the Vail Dance Festival itself, Tanowitz encourages encounters of disparate viewpoints, interactions that establish a new vision for and by the people of dance—the dancers, makers, and spectators alike.
*THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN THROUGH A COMMISSION BY PAM TANOWITZ DANCE
