Pam Tanowitz: Pastoral review – Beethoven explodes into bright bursts of gorgeous dance

Pam Tanowitz’s work is the antidote to the trend in dance for dark and shadowy stages, buckets of theatrical haze, claustrophobic soundscapes and gloopy movement. This stage is so bright and clean, like a sharp palate cleanser, and full of white space – literally, and in a more figurative manner. Tanowitz’s dance can be eccentric, odd even, but it’s also seriously thought-through and specific, every choice utterly distinct and deliberate, every angle planed to the exact degree.

This UK premiere of Pastoral is a collaboration between New York choreographer Tanowitz, Pulitzer prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and artist Sarah Crowner. Inspired by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and the idea of the pastoral in art, Shaw pulls apart and deconstructs the Beethoven, with three live musicians (on various reed instruments) and excerpts of orchestral recordings that emerge like echoes or memories, plus real-world sounds of the street, the skies and the city.

Tanowitz likes a bit of deconstruction too, taking apart or adding to phrases and motifs, with flashes of wit and eccentricity. Her style, simplistically speaking, nods to Merce Cunningham’s mid-century abstraction, with flattened lines and pleasing symmetry. Crowner’s work also harks back to the 1950s and 60s (to geometric abstraction and so-called hard-edge painting). She’s designed a floor-to-ceiling curtain and a vast canvas, with pale pink slices cutting through deep greens. They divide the space, creating “rooms” amid otherwise white walls. Reid Bartelme’s costumes have the dancers in ombre chiffon, an offbeat spectrum through coral-pink-red-lilac-chartreuse. The colours hum, on the edge of concord and discord.

There’s something refreshing and challenging in the sparseness of the score, the dance and the stage, with all its thinking space. There’s zero fuss, even when the dancers have to execute fiendishly tricky balances. When Anson Zwingelberg suddenly dances a gorgeous phrase, like an exquisite miniature, it appears and evaporates with no fanfare.

In the same way Beethoven’s music will unexpectedly slide into view, images and associations make fleeting impressions. When the dancers gather against the green, for example, as if picnicking in a 19th-century painting. Or when the pastoral idyll is interrupted by an angry red square canvas and the sound of a bird call like a siren – a threat against nature, perhaps. It’s a dance full of curiosity, and curiosities; a tangy conversation between three distinctive artists.