‘Overall unfathomable’
A UK premiere inaugurates the Barbican’s autumn/winter Theatre & Dance season with a co-commission from Pam Tanowitz Dance. Having toured New York and Luxembourg, the piece marks a unique conjoining of choreographer Pam Tanowitz (the company’s founder), Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and visual artist Sarah Crowner.
The best way I have found to understand the piece (having now seen it) is through the idea of palimpsest: a piece of work overlaid on, or reusing, a previous one. In the brochure they speak about Robert Rauschenberg’s erasing, and subsequent claiming, of a drawing by Willem de Kooning Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Given the vague and fragmentary nature of the piece’s relation to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, this viewpoint provides a sliver more sense.
Reid Bartelme has the seven dancers in net jumpsuits of pastel and primary colours, which at points, especially when they leap upwards, make them look like tulips or crocuses bursting through the soil. Sarah Crowner has the stage blinding white, with her own abstract Georgia O’Keeffe-meets-Matisse paintings, massive and hauled back and forth across the stage.
Caroline Shaw, queen of the sample, doesn’t make it easy for us. “Hearing a snippet of the Beethoven in an old 1913 recording from a wax cylinder, which already locates it; it sounds ‘other’, as if from another place,” she says in the blurb. Alongside this come sounds of domestic kitchen scenes, the concrete pastoral of trains and shouts, clicks, whoops and almost everything in between.
What grounds us are the fabulous musicians sitting stage left: Bill Kalinkos on clarinet, Andrew Nogal on oboe and particularly Dana Jessen on bassoon, who at one point leaves the booming instrument and, with what looks like a kazoo (or perhaps just the bassoon reed) in fluttering hands, does a great attacking-bird impression. They roll between snips of Beethoven and otherworldly moaning, embodying the more followable parts of Shaw’s composition.
Shaw says again in the ephemera: “Someone in New York City might think of pastoral as the absence of traffic or of speaking, seeking silence but never really having it.” This is one of the few references I did manage to glean from the bobbing and scuttling dancers and billowing paintings. I also adore three female creatives at the top of their game extemporizing something totally new together. “Sarah and I were looking at her paintings behind the dancers and deciding together in real time on colours for the set,” says Tanowitz.
However, if you need a brochure or digital programme to understand or appreciate a piece, it has gone too far down the art-world rabbit hole. Disconnected, perplexing and at points laughable, the dancers race this way and that, jabbing and gesticulating, seemingly without interacting with the artwork behind them apart from pushing it on and off stage. The surreal humour that bubbles up provides the piece’s few shining lights. A dancer brings on a red painting with a darker red outline, which he then shadows – funny, silly, light-hearted. A female dancer throwing herself into the arms of two men and being whisked off stage produces a wry chuckle. Yet the rest is clumpy, shakily danced, with not one but two falls and stumbles. Overall unfathomable. Winding themselves down into a world of signs, pastiches and cultural references, the trio seem to have forgotten the golden rule of theatre: someone has to watch it.
If you’re up for a challenge, click HERE for tickets