Be in the Gray with Me

SHADOW DANCING Anne Lentz soars in Tanowitz’s work.

Photograph: Rachel Pappo

It’s a rare thing to encounter a contemporary choreographer who invests in movement—no conceptual strings attached—but in her new Be in the Gray with Me, Pam Tanowitz invents complex phrases that highlight technique “in the service of the dance.” As she explains over lunch in midtown, “I’m not really from the ballet world at all. But I think I’m romantic. There’s a mysterious, idealized quality that I am attracted to.”

Be in the Gray with Me, which will be performed at Dance Theater Workshop beginning Thursday 18, features a highly technical cast of nine including three men—Dylan Crossman, Rashaun Mitchell and Glen Rumsey—who are former and present members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In recent works, Tanowitz has begun the evening with a demonstration of sorts in which a dancer introduces the vocabulary and tone of a dance with a solo. She compares the action to a minimap before the bigger map is unveiled. “This piece just starts: lights, music, dancing,” she says. “That represents some things I’ve been thinking about: How do you start a dance and where do you end it? Why do people go offstage and onstage? What starts a new section? How does that relate to the movement itself in a piece? I’m also thinking a lot about entrances and exits.”

For Be in the Gray with Me, Tanowitz has replaced the wings with clear sheets of plastic; the set, designed by Philip Treviño, also features doorways (three per side), from which the dancers will appear and disappear. More plastic will stretch along the back of the stage so that the dancers’ crossings—and the mechanics of the dance—will be visible yet not wholly transparent. “I think of the set as placing a new context around the dance or framing the physical space in the same way that I frame the movement and the action onstage through composition,” she says. “This is a very ‘dancey’ piece—there are a lot of steps, and in some ways I want to undercut some of that.”

The title refers to Tanowitz’s reluctance to compartmentalize herself as a choreographer; the gray zone, in this case, isn’t an ambiguous area, but one marked by freedom. “It came from something my husband once said to me years ago: ‘Why does everything have to be black and white? Be in this process with me,’_” she recalls. “It relates to a lot of things. Why does it have to be ballet or modern? Why does the dance have to be on- or offstage?”

The production is constructed from fragments of the past and present, which are reframed within the context of a larger dance. Along with an homage to character dances—specifically, the czardas she became obsessed with from the ballet Raymonda—Tanowitz references other inspirational moments in dances, from Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces to the Rose Adagio in The Sleeping Beauty. “This is never parody—for me, it’s something very precise, out of respect to dances I have learned so much from,” she says. “I want to celebrate dance history, but at the same time question it and maybe, at times, reject it. I think it is my way of cataloging all this amazing, inspiring work—of processing it, organizing it and presenting it again.”

The latter is key; in Tanowitz’s work, a dancer might perform something that looks like a pas de chat—but with a tilted torso, an emphasis on the down beat, and one arm held rigidly and kept for the next step. But while her choreography is painstakingly rigorous, Tanowitz also plays with building tension between narrative exploration and abstraction. Part of the enigma is due to the score—while there is an electric section composed by Dan Siegler, the most prominent portions are by Russian composers Vladimir Martynov and Pavel Karmanov. “The piece starts with music by Martynov, which is very different for me,” she says. “It’s beautiful and impressionistic and that has also added another layer of difficulty: When we execute our movements, we want to make sure that they don’t become pretty-pretty. One of the dancers said, ‘It should be like a Sharpie on a Cézanne.’ ”

She’s toying with ending the dance in silence. “It’s scary, but if I do it correctly I think it’ll work,” she says. “I’ll tell you what I don’t want: the full cast coming on doing a unison phrase to big music. No. Bad, bad, bad.” She sighs. “I think I’m in denial. I don’t mean to sound touchy-feely, but I love process. I don’t present process onstage, at all, and I’m not interested in that as a form of theater, though some people do that really well. I think I’m not making an ending because I don’t want it to end. I haven’t ever felt that. Usually I want it done and I want to check it off the list. I’m very much a businesswoman like that. But for some reason I feel like I’m hanging on to this for dear life.”

Pam Tanowitz is at Dance Theater Workshop Thu 18–Sat 20.

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