Choreographer: Pam Tanowitz
There’s something very postmodern about Pastoral, Pam Tanowitz’s new dance, currently at the Barbican. Her choreography dissects classical ballet steps into their rawest as the dancers perform to the sound of Caroline Shaw’s playful remix of Beethoven’s Sixth. The stage is adorned with the huge canvases of Sarah Crowner’s flat but impressive abstracts. It all looks beautiful, but as theorist Frederic Jameson said of Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, it lacks depth too.
The seven dancers, dressed in Reid Bartelme’s sheer pastel jumpsuits (although it’s distracting to see that two of them have open backs to their outfits whereas the others don’t), appear from behind Crowner’s screens, jade-coloured with cream leaf motifs. To begin with, the dancers are deliberately shaky, stumbling over their single-leg holds, although it’s unclear whether one of the male dancers is supposed to take a tumble as he disappears behind the canvas.
Similarly, it takes a few minutes to get used to the discordant sounds of the three-piece band (Dana Jesson on bassoon, Bill Kalinkos on clarinet and Andrew Nogal on oboe), as it plays over a backing track in which snippets of Beethoven’s original can be heard. Crowner remarks in the programme notes that the pastoral can be different things to different people, and so samples of city noises are inserted, such as street noise. And is that the sound of tills opening and closing? Or is it someone washing up?
The dancers quickly lose the character of amateurs and deliver precise moves, sometimes in duos or trios and sometimes all together. There are plenty of energetic assemblés and elegant pirouettes. Some movements bring laughter to the audience, such as when one female dancer dives horizontally into the arms of two others. Towards the end, a dancer, sitting on the green sheet that is hauled onto the stage, takes the position of the naked woman in Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The rest of the ensemble watches her curiously.
However, there’s little flow to the piece as the dancers also have to drag Crowner’s canvases across the stage, often no more than a couple of inches, hardly changing the scenery at all. Meanwhile, curtains are drawn and undrawn and other pictures are winched down from the fly tower. The intention, like Shaw’s music, must surely be to interrupt and to create distance between the performance and the audience. However, it all feels a little too precious and, like the white wall at the back of the set, clinical. Although finely danced, this is a chilly 60 minutes.
Runs until 3 October 2026
