The choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s new work, “Song of Songs,” takes ideas about love, Judaism, and community and distills them in movement.
—stripping them of their emotional content and intercutting them with her own steps until they meld. When Tanowitz settled in New York, in the nineties, she began combing archives for material to use in the dances she was showing. She founded her company, in 2000, at a time when contemporary dance was moving increasingly toward conceptual and political concerns, but she went her own way and spent the next two decades drilling into formalism.
Recently, she has been exploring older texts. “Song of Songs” is the final dance in a trilogy, which began with “New Work for Goldberg Variations” . “Four Quartets” , to, is the most popular, but I found it overstuffed, its abstract dances vying for attention with a recitation of the text, images by Brice Marden, and music by Kaija Saariaho.
“Song of Songs” is a study in abstraction. It begins with the formation of a lyrical chorus in flowing costumes, perhaps the “daughters of Jerusalem” mentioned in the poems: a community of women. They perform a crossover step from a hora, but the folk character of the source material is gone. Something similar is also at work in other elements of the production.
In the dances that follow, there is no overt eroticism. The most we get is the woman’s hand fluttering like a heart on her own shoulder. Even as the lyrics and the music move from “my head is drenched in dew” to “open to me,” Tanowitz holds back. When the woman reclines fleetingly on her lover, her neck gives way: a hint of passion, but no more. We realize that even love has been abstracted—pressed out. Emotion here comes from an intensity of restraint rather than from surrender or sensuality.
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