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Song of Songs, a Major New Dance-Theater Work from Pam Tanowitz and David Lang, Makes Its World Premiere July 1–3 as Part of Bard SummerScape 2022

Song of Songs Is Commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Where Tanowitz Is Choreographer-in-Residence, and Which Also Commissioned and Premiered Her Renowned Four Quartets

The Fisher Center at Bard, which has become one of the world’s preeminent sources of major multidisciplinary performance works, presents a project that exemplifies its place on the cultural landscape: a new dance setting of the biblical Song of Songs created by the Fisher Center’s internationally celebrated choreographer-in-residence, Pam Tanowitz, with new music from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, making its world premiere July 1-3 as part of the 2022 edition of the Bard SummerScape festival.

Spiritual and erotic, playful and mysterious, Song of Songs (also known as The Song of Solomon) is perhaps the greatest of all love poems—a hymn of yearning, steeped in images from the natural world. It has inspired artists and lovers for millennia; some scholars argue that the entire tradition of Western love poetry springs from its glorious verses. Based on this radiantly beautiful text, Tanowitz’s collaboration with Lang, in which she explores her Jewish identity, is a collage of movement, sound, and song that reimagines ancient rituals of love and courtship and holds the sacred and profane threads of the Song in perfect balance.

In addition to choreography by Tanowitz and music by Lang, Song of Songs features production design by Tanowitz and her longtime collaborators Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung, and Clifton Taylor; sound design by Garth MacAleavey; music supervision by Caleb Burhans; and dramaturgy by Mary Gossy. Betsy Ayer is the production stage manager. 

The performers include Pam Tanowitz Dance company members Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Brian Lawson, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood (rehearsal director); and musicians Emily Brausa (cello), Caleb Burhans (viola), Martha Cluver (soprano), Katie Geissinger (alto), Rebecca Hargrove(soprano), and Yuri Yamashita (percussion). 

Song of Songs follows the resounding success of Tanowitz’s two previous Fisher Center commissions: I was waiting for the echo of a better day, chosen as one of The New York Times’s “Best of 2021,” and Four Quartets, which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was, after its Fisher Center premiere, named “Best Dance Production of 2018” by the Times. The paper pronounced it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”

Pam Tanowitz, who is entering her fourth year as the Fisher Center’s choreographer-in-residence, says of the work, “I feel a deep personal connection with this work—an intimate, small-scale love story. In 2018, after my dad died, I started thinking about lineage, and Jewish identity, and wanted to make a piece that honors my father and my heritage, something I’ve never done. For me, the use of this text provides a framework to push myself artistically. I want to find a way to mirror the structure without being literal. I plan to deconstruct the duet form as I investigate how to give shape or feeling to a figure.”

David Lang explains, “It was Pam’s idea to make a big project that would be based on the biblical text Song of Songs.I responded to her suggestion by mapping out four different paths through the text, resulting in a new text for the music that I would write myself. Each of these paths applies a different literary filter to the original text, and each path tries to concentrate on the paradox that, for Judeo- Christian believers, the text is both a sensual description of the experiences of two lovers and, at the same time, a deeply spiritual exploration of a relationship with god. My hope is that, by examining this deep and powerful text from such different angles, these movements, taken together, may begin to reveal more of the original text’s emotional and spiritual powers.”

Bard SummerScape, described by The New York Times as “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure” and as a producer of dance works that provide “reliable transcendence,” returns this year June 23 - August 14 and comprises eight weeks of live music, opera, dance, and theater. Additional highlights include the 32nd Bard Music Festival, Rachmaninoff and His World; a new production of Strauss’s The Silent Woman, directed by Christian Räth; and a new adaptation of Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Ashley Tata; and more. More information about the 2022 festival is here. 
                                                            
Performance Schedule and Ticketing
Performances of Song of Songs take place July 1 at 8pm, July 2 at 5pm, and July 3 at 2pm in the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center (Manor Ave, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504). Tickets, starting at $25 ($5 for Bard students), can be purchased at fishercenter.bard.edu or 845-758-7900.

About Pam Tanowitz
Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance- making with a consistent community of dancers. Tanowitz is currently the Fisher Center’s Choreographer in Residence.

Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a “rare achievement” (The New York Times). Four Quartets (2018), inspired by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho, was called "the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (The New York Times).

In 2016, Tanowitz was presented with the Juried Bessie Award for “using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus.” She has been commissioned by New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bard SummerScape, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Duke Performances, Peak Performances, FSU's Opening Nights Series, and the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston. 

About David Lang
David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention as a passionate, prolific, and complicated composer. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms. 

Lang is one of America's most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalog is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.

Lang's “Simple Song #3,” written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino's acclaimed film Youth, received many award nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe. Recent works include his opera Prisoner of the State, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam's de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, and Bruges Concertgebouw; his opera The Loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the Public Domain for 1000 singers at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; and his chamber opera Anatomy Theater at Los Angeles Opera and at the PROTOTYPE Festival in New York. His 2008 composition The Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Lang's works are performed around the globe by prominent orchestras, ensembles, festivals, and venues. His music is used regularly for ballet and modern dance including works with such choreographers and companies as Twyla Tharp, the Paris Opera Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and Benjamin Millepied. Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination, Musical America's Composer of the Year, the Rome Prize, a Bessie Award, Obie Award, and a Grammy Award. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others. 

Funding Credits
The 2022 SummerScape season is made possible in part by the generous support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members. The 2022 Bard Music Festival has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Commissioning funds for Song of Songs are provided by Jay Franke and David Herro, with additional support received from the O’Donnell Green Music and Dance Foundation. The Fisher Center on behalf of Pam Tanowitz Dance received a 2020 NDP Finalist Grant Award for Song of Songs, made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to address sustainability needs during COVID-19.

Post Date: 03-14-2022

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Bardians Featured in Dance Magazine

“Dance has always been a radical act, even if it was covered in gauze and tulle.”
—Maria Simpson, Professor of Dance and Dance Program Director 

Dance Magazine features Bard College in its January 2022 issue, highlighting the work of Sam Pratt ’14 in its “25 to Watch” cover story, and interviewing Bard senior Leslie Morales and Professor Maria Simpson in “Dance with a Purpose,” an article about blending art and activism in your practice, even before graduation.

Post Date: 01-04-2022

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Long Distance Dance Dialogue: Professor Yebel Gallegos in Conversation with Joanna Kotze

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Yebel Gallegos joins Joanna Kotze in conversation for Long Distance Dance Dialogues Exchange #8. In the exchange, Gallegos talks about his journey as a musician in high school, to dancing, and now to being an educator. They also discuss borders, culture, and balancing all of one's passions, interests, and selves. The second part of the exchange is video of movement that has been relayed from Milka Djordjevich in Los Angeles to Yebel Gallegos in Annandale-on-Hudson. Djordjevich does her original movement and then both Djordjevich and Gallegos do Djordjevich's movement, which Gallegos learned. Gallegos will add onto this and that movement will be passed on to Sarah Beth Oppenheim in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Long Distance Dance Dialogues is a series of exchanges between Joanna Kotze and 12 dancers/choreographers around the world and throughout the United States between January–December 2021. Each exchange begins with a video interview that will be archived online and shared with the public once a month beginning in March 2021. The discussion is followed by sharing one minute or less of movement, as a relay, from one dancer to the next, linking us together through the making, learning, and documenting of dance. Each relay of movement will also be archived and shared online in its intentionally raw, unpolished form, once a month. At the end of the year, a film bringing together all parts of the relay will be shared as a record of the project. 

Post Date: 10-06-2021

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Arthur Avilés ’87 Joins New York University as Artist in Residence; Choreographer’s Performance Library Published by the University’s Hemispheric Institute

The digitally remastered Arthur Avilés Collection includes video documentation spanning this groundbreaking dancer/choreographer’s decades-long career. To mark its publication, the Hemispheric Institute and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) are cosponsoring Naked Vanguard: The Arthur Aviles Archive in Motion, a series of conversations and performances that are available for streaming through the Institute’s HemiTV portal.

Post Date: 09-14-2021

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Choreographer Arthur Avilés ’87 Will Perform and Be Celebrated This Fall

Avilés, award-winning Bronx-based dancer/choreographer, will perform in two events and be celebrated by NYU's Hemispheric Institute. After graduating from Bard, Avilés joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In 1998, he co-founded The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!), a performance space that blazed a path for professional art and dance in the Bronx. Avilés received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bard in 2015, a Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) award, and multiple Bessie Awards including a 2020 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance.

Post Date: 08-24-2021

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Dancer, Educator Helen Wicks ’13 Receives Spring 2021 Dancers’ Group CA$H Grant

Dancers' Group, a service and presenting organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, has awarded $105,000 in grants to 30 Bay Area dance artists and organizations during its spring 2021 round of CA$H Dance. The CA$H Dance program, which has been supporting dance makers since 1999, was designed by artists for artists, and seeks to support artists and organizations that represent the broad diversity of dance in the Bay Area.

Post Date: 05-25-2021