(ANNANDALE-on-HUDSON, NY) – Pam Tanowitz Dance makes its Bard SummerScape debut with a triple bill featuring a world premiere solo for Ashley Tuttle and live music by the FLUX Quartet in the Fisher Center at Bard College on Saturday, June 27, and Sunday, June 28, 2015.

The program showcases the choreography of Bessie Award-winning Pam Tanowitz, and includes the world premiere of Tanowitz’s “Untitled (solo for Ashley Tuttle),” set to music by Mexico’s Carlos Chávez – subject of the 2015 Bard Music Festival – and danced by former American Ballet Theatre principal Ashley Tuttle.

Bookending the new work are two of Tanowitz’s most recent ensemble pieces, “Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy)” and “Heaven on One’s Head,” named “Among 2014’s Best” by the New York Times, with live music from FLUX Quartet, which “has brought a new renaissance to string quartet music” (Village Voice).

Staged in two performances on June 27 and 28, the triple bill takes place in Sosnoff Theater in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center on Bard College’s Hudson River campus.
Pam Tanowitz has proven herself “the wittiest choreographer since Mark Morris” (New York Times). Offering an unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical and modern dance vocabulary, her work is marked by its “sharp, off-kilter energy [and] strange skewed beauty” (Dance Magazine). Since founding Pam Tanowitz Dance in 2000, she has been recognized with the 2009 Bessie Award, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2013-14 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.
As in previous seasons, SummerScape 2015 takes its inspiration from the Bard Music Festival, which turns for the first time this year to Latin America with a celebration of “Carlos Chávez and His World.” The central figure in 20th-century Mexican music, Chávez composed his Sonatina for violin and piano (1924) during the cultural renaissance that followed his homeland’s ten-year revolution.

In her new work, “Untitled (solo for Ashley Tuttle),” Tanowitz draws on Chávez’s modernist language in an en pointe solo created for Ashley Tuttle. A former prima ballerina at the American Ballet Theatre, where her career spanned 17 seasons, Tuttle’s honors include both Tony and Fred Astaire Dance Award nominations. She previously collaborated with Tanowitz on 2012’s “Untitled (the Blue Ballet),” in which her performance had “a revelatory force” (New York Times). In Bard’s world premiere presentation of the choreographer’s new dance, Tuttle will dance to a live rendition of the Chávez sonatina by another trusted Tanowitz collaborator, Grammy Award-nominated violinist Pauline Kim Harris, with Michael Scales, music director of New York Theatre Ballet, on piano.

Tanowitz describes the starting point for her new work: “I am fascinated by the tension between the old and the new, the known and the unknown, and the space of transition from one to the other. I thrive on risk and challenge, and my work straddles aesthetics and breaks the unwritten codes and formulas of dance genres. I am especially interested in how dancers carry classical ballets in their bodies like personal history, since often ballet dancers have been training and performing from a very young age, developing their personalities alongside their craft. Working with Ashley allows me to examine classic ideas of beauty, femininity, grace and purity against contemporary images of these same characteristics, allowing audiences to be pulled back and forth by the uncanny sense of the familiar in the unfamiliar.”
Inspired by a J.D. Salinger story, “Broken Story (wherein there is no ecstasy)” examines romantic intimacy by playing with conventions of dance and cinema. Tanowitz explains:

“As Salinger satirized the clichéd boy-meets-girl narrative formula, Broken Story is my attempt to subvert the history, structure, conventions, and symbolism of a well- worn choreographic device: the pas de deux. I am intrigued by the challenge of using a form with so much physical intimacy to convey a story in which the lovers never meet face to face.”
Tanowitz’s choreography for this piece is set to music for string quartet by contemporary composers David Lang, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, Caroline Shaw, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize, and Ted Hearne, of whom the Los Angeles Times writes: “No single artist embodies the post- genre Brooklyn scene, but Hearne may be its most zealous auteur.” Their works will be performed live by FLUX Quartet, a group at the forefront of the new music scene since its founding in the late 1990s.
Commissioned by Works & Process at the Guggenheim, “Broken Story” received its premiere at the Guggenheim Museum in February 2014, and the critical response was elated. “Ecstatic is a good word for how it made me feel,” declared the New York Times. “Following an eccentric line, Ms. Tanowitz dodges sentimentality and sneaks up on deep emotion.” As for the choreographer’s collaborators, all of whom are returning for the SummerScape revival, the Times praised the “resourceful lighting design by Davison Scandrett and costumes by Reid Bartelme,” and concluded that the dancers “could hardly be better.”

 

It was when “Heaven on One’s Head” premiered at New York’s Joyce Theatre in February 2014 that the New York Times observed: “The dance steps, phrases and constructions by the choreographer Pam Tanowitz are among the finest being made anywhere today,” going on to name the virtuosic ensemble piece one of the year’s best. Tanowitz’s dance is set to the First and Third String Quartets of innovative American experimentalist Conlon Nancarrow, a contemporary of Chávez, who relocated from New York to Mexico to escape persecution as a Communist. Nancarrow’s quartets will be performed live by the FLUX Quartet, as at last year’s premiere, when the Financial Times noted: “The variously spiky, plucky and ethereal Nancarrow string quartets Nos. 1 and 3, performed live by the excellent FLUX ensemble, perfectly complemented the choreography.”
SummerScape has presented significant dance performances each summer since 2005. In 2013, to celebrate the centenary of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” the festival co-commissioned “A Rite,” a new dance-theater piece from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company, and last season saw the return to Bard of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, making its farewell tour of proscenium stages.