Reboot Ideas Presents: Song of Songs

Reboot Ideas Presents: Song of Songs at The Fisher Center at Bard
Original Dance by Pam Tanowitz Dance, Music by David Lang
Conversation with Rabbi Kendell Pinkney

Join Reboot Sunday, July 3 at 1:00 p.m. ET for a special performance of Pam Tanowitz Dance’s latest piece, Song of Songs at The Fisher Center at Bard in Upstate New York. Tanowitz Dance’s first formal encounter with Jewish identity within her work, Song of Songs will begin with a conversation with Rabbi Kendell Pinkney. Read more about the piece here.

Pam Tanowitz is quick-witted and rigorous. The New York-based choreographer and collaborator has steadily delineated her own dance language through decades of research and creation. She redefines tradition through careful examination, subtly questioning those who came before her yet never yielding to perceptions stuck in the past. And now, the world’s most respected companies—Martha Graham Dance Company, Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, among others—are proudly integrating Tanowitz’s poetic universe into their repertories. Tanowitz’s combination of intentional unpredictability, whimsical complexity and natural drama evoke master dance makers from Cunningham to Balanchine through the clever weaving of movement, music and space. Tanowitz holds degrees from Ohio State University and Sarah Lawrence College, where she clarified her creative voice under former Cunningham dancer and choreographer Viola Farber. After attaining her MFA, Tanowitz moved to New York City to begin her professional career. She immersed herself in dance by working in administration at New York City Center, splitting her time off by studying the Center’s archived dance videos or developing her own work in their studios. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance (PTD) to explore dance-making with a consistent community of dancers. She has since been commissioned by Fisher Center at Bard, The Joyce Theater, The Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Vail Dance Festival, and many other leading arts institutions, and has received numerous honors and fellowships from organizations ranging from the Bessie Awards, Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Princeton University, Herb Alpert Award, Doris Duke Artist Awards, and most recently LMCC’s Liberty Award for Artistic Leadership. When awarding Tanowitz the 2017 BAC Cage Cunningham Fellowship, Mikhail Baryshnikov, described her interrogative approach to choreography as “a distinct intellectual journey. ”Her dances have been called a “rare achievement” (New York Times) and her 2018 work, Four Quartets, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece, was called “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (New York Times). Tanowitz is a visiting guest artist at Rutgers University and is the first-ever choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center at Bard.