There’s something about Pam Tanowitz. A bright-edged clarity fills her works, illuminating the space around the steps, making you see movement just a little differently. It has taken the American choreographer, now 54, a long time to find the kind of success that sees her making work for companies such as New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet. But the waiting seems to have distilled her vision, giving it a rare beauty, wit and sense of purpose. She compels attention.
The Royal Ballet has to date commissioned three of her works, shown here in a programme – two live and one on film – that lasts just over an hour but feels full of riches. It opens with a new piece, Secret Things, to a score for string quartet by Anna Clyne. At the start, dancer Hannah Grennell saunters through the musicians, looking at them thoughtfully before she begins to turn, eyes searching a fixed point, at the start of a lengthy, intricate solo full of contrasts between the graceful movements of dance and more natural notes when feet flex or bodies flop.
She’s dressed (courtesy of designer Victoria Bartlett) in leotard and shin pads, sequinned at the front, plain at the back, covered in a short lemon chiffon jumpsuit. Her pointe shoes look as if they have been dipped in turquoise paint. When she’s joined by seven more dancers, male and female, they are in similar garb, this hint of Broadway glitz creating another contrast as they quote from classical ballets of the past – a hand gesture from Raymonda here, a bend of the wrists from Giselle there.
The references are various and many. Carefully structured – a quartet for women matched by one for four men; Grennell’s opening solo with one full of buoyant jumps for Liam Boswell, who exits whistling at the close – this is a work about dance, but one that’s also full of love for dancers as they switch in a single instant between achievement and struggle, sometimes dropping to the floor, or rising to the sky in airy battements, hands twitching as if they could fly. It’s complex and lovely, full of flecks of humour and unshowy intelligence.
Though Tanowitz’s work is rooted in a deep knowledge of the history of dance, it feels utterly of this moment. It looks out as well as in, as revealed in the slides reading “we are changing the floor” that mark a pause before a film of her incisive Dispatch Duet, shot in various rooms of the Royal Opera House, starring William Bracewell and Anna-Rose O’Sullivan, both magnificent.
The evening ends with Everyone Keeps Me, to a string quartet by Ted Hearne, first seen in 2019, and gleaming as vividly as ever. Bathed in Clifton Taylor’s welcoming light, another group of the company’s younger dancers, now in soft shoes, creates subtle patterns of movement. It’s more lyrical than Secret Things, but just as full of secrets, little quotations, tender glances. The whole programme is a glory.
Over at Sadler’s Wells, the music is the star of Dance Me, as Leonard Cohen’s poetic, rasping voice provides the background to a lot of lithe writhing by Ballets Jazz Montréal. The choreography, mainly by Ihsan Rustem and Andonis Foniadakis, is repetitive, but the production values – at one point featuring a corps of Cohens in raincoats and tipped hats, at another a Busby Berkeley-style lineup of legs around typewriters – are those of a lavish Vegas floor show and the dancers are tireless.
Star ratings (out of five)
Secret Things/Everyone Keeps Me ★★★★★
Dance Me ★★★
Secret Things/Everyone Keeps Me is at the Linbury theatre, Royal Opera House, London, until 16 February
Dance Me: Music By Leonard Cohen is at Sadler’s Wells, London, until 14 February
