After Pam Tanowitz's "Pastoral" at Bard. After Pam Tanowitz's "Pastoral" at Bard. Beautiful dancers. I loved the backdrops by Sarah Crowner and the costumes by Reid Bartelme, and the dancers, who were absolutely beautiful. The dance has many of the qualities that have made Tanowitz's work so popular in the last decade: excellent taste in visual elements and dancers, intelligence, wit. The shapes created by the dancers are often interesting as well. I confess that I don't connect with the way the choreography fits together, by the absence (to my eye) of longer arcs or phrases, or of extended legato passages, and by the looseness of the relationship to the music—each sort of does its own thing, without adding much to the other. The choreography reads to me as fragments, loosely connected (n this case, like Caroline Shaw's fragmented score, with its bits and pieces of Beethoven). There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But I never quite seem to "lock in" to what I'm watching. That said, I admire many of the elements at play. It's a case of lack of affinity.
