Everyone Keeps Me
by Sarah Silverblatt-Buser
A woman in peach and a man in shades of blue teeter-totter in arabesques across the stage, each taking turns supporting the other. He holds her waist as she balances with her leg extended high á la seconde. She holds the impressive position herself and hops away. Later, she lays down and logrolls upstage, lounging on her side to watch the dance unfold. She is content with him, but also on her own.
Pam Tanowitz challenges the traditional relations inherent in classical ballet. She examines hierarchies, dependencies, and assumptions of legitimacy by questioning relationships: among dancers, choreographers, and audiences; between dance and music; and between dance and everyday life. She uses the very rules that hold norms in place to suggest new ways of expressing existence on stage.
Tanowitz proposes these new ways throughout Everyone Keeps Me, her Royal Ballet debut created for nine dancers. Set to music by Ted Hearne with lighting design by Clifton Taylor, it was commissioned as part of the Merce Cunningham centennial celebration in 2019. The work appeared after Frederic Ashton’s Monotones II, which was inspired by Cunningham’s Cross Currents, also on the program. Tanowitz’s singular choreographic voice clearly resonated amid two of Western dance’s most celebrated dancemakers.
In Monotones II, Ashton’s pure classicism accompanied by Eric Satie’s minimalist Gymnopédies reveals a dance of “unbroken poetic adagio” (New York Times). The 1965 work for one woman and two men dressed in identical white unitards and white head caps embodies the atmospheric score. The woman balances in precise precarity with one man steadying her waist as the other draws her leg high in second. She takes a breath before swooping through her splits, relying entirely on her partners to maneuver her torso around and back up. The dancers evolve through space like a billowing cloud, their waxing and waning informed by the whole, as dependent on each other as on the music.
Tanowitz often questions such codependent relationships between partners and music. Her choice to give independence to the ballerina with her leg extended to the side by having her hop away directly confronts Ashton’s traditional role delegations. Midway through Everyone Keeps Me, two men dance in a generous exchange of movement. One is lowered to a split on the floor as the music crescendos. Soon after, he takes his turn supporting the other to the same position, this time with no obvious relation to the music. They interplay between being the partner and being partnered, dancing with the music and dancing surrounded by it.
The notion of whole elements existing among each other is epitomized in Cunningham’s travelling trio Cross Currents. The work for two women and one man premiered in London in 1964 and received so much praise for “conquering conservatism” that the company’s European season was extended on the spot (New York Times). The Cunningham Trust describes the title of this radical dance as coming “from the way the dancers’ paths frequently intersected...where each dancer had their own, different rhythms, but they would all come together at the end of the phrase” (Cunningham Trust).
The piece begins with one dancer moving through space in a fast, spinning triplet. Simultaneously, another takes deliberate, far-reaching steps in a slower rhythm, while the third springs across the stage, seeming to change rhythms mid-flight. They are each compelled into motion by movement itself. For Cunningham, dance was more than musical illustration. Instead, sound was added after the dance was made as a textural device, allowing moments of harmony to happen by chance.
Tanowitz is greatly influenced by Cunningham, both through her MFA mentor Viola Farber, who was a Cunningham star and performed in the original cast of Cross Currents, and her company dancers, most of whom are steeped in Cunningham’s work. It comes as no surprise that Tanowitz was asked to contribute her voice to the Cunningham celebration. Yet her departures from the modernist remain clear. Where he insisted on dance’s autonomy from music, she chooses musical landmarks for moments of connection and exchange. Where he valued formalism over expression and context, she includes subtle personality and cunning references into her rigorous use of line and structure.
For Tanowitz, as dance is to music, so the dancers are to each other. Unlike Ashton’s ethereal ambiance and Cunningham’s objectivity, Tanowitz highlights the humanity of those dancing. “To just look at each other as people, that’s just as challenging as a triple pirouette, and it’s just as important in my work,” she says. In Everyone Keeps Me, each note and dancer is a whole entity participating in the same complex world.
It is with whom she engages directly in the studio that drives her dance making, rather than music or form leading the way. “It’s always going to be about the people in the room,” she says, “I offer them possibilities and they offer me possibilities back.” Such a person-centered process contextualizes her dances in the everyday, rendering her work relatable while maintaining a clear style and syntax. The woman lounging upstage could be any of us in casual coexistence with our peers.
Ashton’s dancers form a single unit. They appear magnetically drawn to each other, compelled by the music. In the opposite way, Cunningham’s atomistic dancers only overlap when their internal rhythms bring them together, compelled by movement. Tanowitz finds a new reality between these two older realms of dance. Her dancers consciously create community while dancing of their own free will. More than conduits of pure music or movement, they are people first, driven by the particular histories they each embody.
Dancer to dancer, dance to music, stage to everyday life: Tanowitz redefines these relationships throughout her work. All elements retain a bit of the other: they are independent yet permeable forces. Her choreographic weavings show the rewriting of rules set forth by her predecessors. She challenges the essentialism of musicality and form established by Ashton and Cunningham with a virtuosic complexity that opens a window into contemporary life.
