Her choreography has been hailed by the New York Times as some of the greatest dance being made in the world. And yet her creations have never been performed outside the US until now. Next month, Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets will receive its UK premiere at London’s Barbican.
It is the first time the TS Eliot estate has granted permission for the poet’s last great work to be used in a dance production. Tanowitz had been carrying lines from it in her head for a decade before Gideon Lester, artistic director at Bard College, New York, commissioned her to choreograph a piece to mark the 75th anniversary of the first publication of the Four Quartets last summer.
The production was two years in the making, but Tanowitz has still not cracked all of the poem’s secrets. “It’s massive, it’s hard, it’s abstract. I still don’t understand the poem,” she says. “I don’t think you would ever understand it. It’s the kind of thing where you pick it up in a different headspace, age, or whatever’s going on in your life, and you get different things from it.”
The four sections, published as a collection in 1943, are a meditation on time, taking in rural England, Eliot’s Anglican faith and multiple references to music, rhythm and dance. But rather than making movement to reflect specific words in the text, Tanowitz wanted to treat the text as she would a piece of music. The one stipulation made by the Eliot estate was that the poem must not be manipulated (“Which I didn’t like at the beginning,” says Tanowitz) so the text is read live, in full, by US actor Kathleen Chalfant, with a soundtrack featuring music by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.
Tanowitz’s research for the piece involved making a pilgrimage to all four places that inspired the poems. First, the Dry Salvages, a rock formation off the coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, then travelling to England to visit the Cotswolds manor house Burnt Norton, the Somerset village of East Coker and Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire.
“I had never been to the English countryside, so how could I make a dance about it?” she explains. It was a revelation to her to see lines from the poem materialise in real life: “There is the pool with no water in it, there is the rose garden. The things I thought were abstract were literal,” she says. “We read the poem in each place and tried to map out how Eliot would have entered the garden, where he took a right or a left.”
The resulting performance looks nothing like an English country garden, with set designs based on paintings by US artist Brice Marden. His bold, colourful markings are the backdrop to Tanowitz’s highly detailed, rhythmical dance, with its nods to classical ballet and Merce Cunningham (Tanowitz was taught by the great Cunningham dancer Viola Farber). Her compositional skill has been lauded by US critics; Alastair Macaulay called Four Quartets “the greatest creation of dance theatre so far this century”.
Tanowitz may be arriving in the UK a fully formed artist, but that mastery of craft has been 25 years in the making. She’s an unintentional disruptor in an arts world that jumps at next-big-things and promising young artists are propelled into hyped-up careers. “I look pretty good for 49 but I was never going to be the hot young talent,” she says.
“I always had a job, a family, I have a daughter. I didn’t worry so much about touring or the business part of it,” she says. “I was just trying to make good dance. The first 10 years, or 15 years, I was very low-profile in New York. Not many people came to my shows. At the time it was frustrating and hard, but in hindsight it was the best thing for me as an artist because it really allowed me to grow without worrying about reviews or ticket sales.”
The reviews, since they’ve been coming, are glowing, particularly for Four Quartets and her 2017 take on Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Having been a New York secret for so long, it’s time for Tanowitz’s choreography to reach a greater audience. “Now it’s really great that people want to book my work,” she says. “I feel ready.”
Four Quartets is at the Barbican, London, 22-25 May.
