There’s something unsolvable about Pam Tanowitz’s choreography – that’s what draws you in. It could also be the thing that pushes some away, but there’s hidden logic in Tanowitz’s dance, there’s beauty, and there’s so much certainty in each step, enough to make you believe her.
This New York choreographer has been making dances for a couple of decades, but she’s had international success in recent years with works including Four Quartets (seen in London in 2019), and commissions for the Royal Ballet. Her dance is made from fragments woven into a new whole. In Song of Songs – inspired by the love poem from the Hebrew Bible – some of those fragments come from Tanowitz exploring her family’s Jewish heritage and Jewish dance of many kinds. You can see folk motifs, small skipping steps, hands joined in a circle dance, a bouncing heel-first walk, but it’s all metamorphosed into something new. Her movement isn’t descriptive, but it is specific: arms so sharply horizontal that a dancer’s head could be the bubble in a spirit level; a precise flicker of a foot; a body suddenly hitting a taut pose, as bright as someone turning the lights on.
Foundational to Song of Songs is the dreamlike score, by Pulitzer prize-winning composer David Lang. The musicians share the stage with the dancers, three singers, cello, viola, and percussion. The orchestration may be sparse but it is full of warmth, tenderness and human breath. A repetition of phrases builds to hypnosis, words from the original text are extracted and pulled into close-up focus: “Just your cheek, just your neck”, they sing, marvelling at a lover’s presence. “I can taste your mouth, I can taste your wine.” Soprano Sarah Brailey is bewitching, her voice rich and pure in the upper register, closer to natural speech in the lower.
The music provides the emotional anchor for the dance to take a more cerebral path. There is a lot of flesh in the text, while the dance seems resistant to the messiness of real human connection, eyes often gazing into the distance. The feel is not so much desire as yearning and disconnection, the brilliant dancers somehow frantic and still at the same time. The body contains mysteries.
• Song of Songs plays at the Barbican, London, until 14 October.
