Choreographer Pam Tanowitz: ‘I’m a neurotic Jew, waiting for something bad to happen’

Despite her work being described as the greatest dance theatre of the century, Tanowitz can still be found ‘backstage, throwing up’ before shows. Will her new production, based on a Hebrew love poem, help her finally embrace success?

Where will you find the choreographer Pam Tanowitz before a show? This is the woman whose work Four Quartets was hailed by the New York Times as “the greatest creation of dance theatre so far this century”? “I will be backstage, throwing up,” she says, matter of factly.

Tanowitz, 53, may have been lauded with five-star reviews and commissions for New York City Ballet, the Australian Ballet and the Royal Ballet, but you won’t see her soaking up the adoration in the auditorium. “I do not like watching other people watch my work; it’s a huge stresser for me,” she cringes over video call from New York.

Self-deprecating, funny, serious and passionately nerdy about dance, she says that the premiere of a work is often the first time a choreographer really sees what they have made. “You don’t really know what it is until it’s in front of an audience. The whole thing is humiliating.” Even when everyone gets up and claps at the end, I ask? “Sometimes I don’t believe them,” she replies.

Well she should. Tanowitz is making some of the most curiously satisfying choreography of the moment. Her highly formal modern dance is underpinned by invisible logic, with masterly craft and clarity, sharp angles and surprises. “Unfussy but full of detail,” I wrote when I reviewed Four Quartets. “Where you can never predict what happens next but when it does it makes perfect sense.”

When Four Quartets came to London in 2019, Tanowitz became an instant hot property, but it was the kind of overnight success that comes only after quietly slogging it out on the New York dance scene for 25 years, making one show a year, while working a day job. It was when she made New Work for Goldberg Variations in 2017, that “everyone woke up”, she jokes. “But they might stop calling tomorrow,” she says. “Even [in] the most successful pieces, I can see things that I could have done better.” The word “success” makes her superstitious, she says. “I’m just waiting for something bad to happen. I’m a neurotic Jew,” she smiles.

Jewishness, beyond such cliches, is actually at the heart of her latest work, Song of Songs, named after the love poem from the Hebrew Bible. Tanowitz’s father died in 2018 and the idea came from Tanowitz wanting to honour him, and research her family and heritage. She grew up in a conservative Jewish family in Westchester, New York (“not kosher, but I went to Hebrew school three times a week”). Her doctor dad was Orthodox, his parents from Lithuania. After her batmitzvah, Tanowitz had to choose whether to spend her weekends at Hebrew school or dance class and chose the latter, to the rabbi’s disappointment. “She’s going to be a Jew longer than she’s a dancer,” he told her dad. “And I like that story because I’m still a Jew and I’m still a dancer,” she says.

This is the first time, however, that she’s used explicitly Jewish sources in her research, which involved delving into New York Public Library archives to look at Israeli dance, folk dance, Jewish-American choreographers and various kinds of traditional dance. When Tanowitz makes work there’s a lot of quoting from different sources (including her own past work), splicing steps together, remaking them, but also absorbing the research and then forgetting it, she says. “I don’t want to make anything literal.”

The text of Song of Songs (which appears as part of the score by the Pulitzer prize-winning composer David Lang) is an erotic poem. But Tanowitz’s work is no love story. “It’s not about a man and a woman; that’s not what I do,” she says. “It’s not an erotic romance – it’s very restrained, there’s a formality to it. There is wildness in it,” she adds, “but there’s nobody having sex or anything, or making out,” she laughs. “Maybe I should put that in … ”

In recent years, Tanowitz realised her dances were often about people trying to connect and not succeeding. “Relationships failing is in there. I mean, it’s about things that are happening in my life. But not literally,” she says. (Tanowitz is divorced, with a 22-year-old daughter.) Form and composition are the most important driving factors, and the complex dialogue between content, structure, time and other elements. There’s so much at play in any given moment. “Dance is seen as the lesser of the arts, but it’s more,” she says. “It’s actually more.”

So with all this formalism, is she very rules based? “My boyfriend actually calls me Rules Girl,” she says. “He’s always making fun of me because I do follow rules and I’m like: ‘You’re not allowed to do that!’” But in creation, she also breaks her own rules, and has no interest in repeating something that’s already been done. “I’m always thinking: what can I add, to dance history, to this artform?” She’s uninterested in making another “nice duet”. “Not to say that’s not good – it’s just that other choreographers already do that.”

Tanowitz followed a friend to a modern dance class in fourth grade and never stopped. She didn’t excel at school. “I grew up in the 80s and it wasn’t in style to check children for learning disabilities,” she says. “I have dyslexia, I have comprehension problems. They just put people in the lowest group. But I actually think that was how I got started because choreography to me is like doing a puzzle or being a detective. There’s part of my brain that wants to figure something out, and I don’t know if that would have been turned on otherwise. Maybe that was my way of trying to understand the world.”

She “devoured” dance at Ohio State University, where she started choreographing. Her first show was at CBGB’s Gallery, next to the famed music venue, which closed in 2006. They danced on a wooden floor “with nails and splinters” and got a cut of the door, just like a band would. They even got a New York Times review, headlined An Evening of Breezy Sassiness. (“So I loved that.”) But things soon plateaued. She took a master’s at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was taught by Viola Farber, a founder member of the modern American dance pioneer Merce Cunningham’s company, “and she changed my life”. But Tanowitz’s next show was in the middle of a snowstorm and seven people came. “I went home crying. I lost all this money.”

But she just kept going, working at New York City Center managing the dance studios by day, rehearsing in those same studios on evenings and weekends, while raising her daughter. Even though it’s a common story, some artists might feel ashamed of having to have a day job to make ends meet. “I feel the opposite,” says Tanowitz. “I feel like it shows how resourceful they are, it shows character. I chose to be an artist, to be a choreographer. I have friends that are rich, and I used to get upset, but then I was like: why am I getting upset? That was their choice, this was my choice. I had to do what I had to do.”

She was 40 before she got her first grant, heading for 50 when things started blowing up. Even now she lectures at Rutgers University. “People see my fancy commissions and they’re shocked that I have to teach. But that’s not enough money for my whole year.” She enjoys working with students, anyway. “It keeps me grounded, it keeps me current, it keeps me fresh,” she says.

Tanowitz’s dad didn’t get a chance to see Four Quartets. He’d just come out of hospital when it premiered, and he died two weeks later. But he did read the glowing New York Times review. “He said to me after he read it: ‘Wow, you really were a late bloomer!’” remembers Tanowitz. “So in the programme for Song of Songs, I dedicated the show to him, and then I wrote: ‘Also dedicated to all the late bloomers.’”

Song of Songs is at the Barbican theatre, London, from 11 to 14 October; New York City Ballet performs Tanowitz’s Gustave Le Grey No 1 at Sadler’s Wells, London, 7-10 March 2024

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