Her new work for the Royal Ballet, Hidden Things, is both prosaic and poetic, a gateway to ballet practice and collective memory.
LONDON – Secret Things, the title of Pam Tanovitz’s new production for the Royal Ballet, is indeed full of secrets – past and present, history and present of dance, knowledge stored in the bodies of dancers, their personal stories, memories and dreams.
Featuring eight dancers, the production premiered on Saturday night at the Royal Opera House’s little black box, the Linbury Theatre, and included two more performances by Tanovitz for the company: Everyone Holds Me (2019) and Dispatcher’s Duet, pas de de. recently composed for a gala concert in November. The entire show is only an hour long, but it’s an hour filled with choreographic and musical creativity, wit, and surprises that are almost overwhelming.
“Secret Things” from Anna Kline’s “Breathing Statues” String Quartet opens with a majestic and graceful solo by Hannah Grennell. When the first quiet music begins, she steps onto the stage, puts her feet together facing the audience and begins to slowly turn her whole body, turning her head at the last moment. Anyone who has attended or seen beginner ballet classes will recognize this as positioning—the way a dancer learns to do a few turns without getting dizzy.
Grennell repeats the movement several times, hesitates a bit as if trying to remember the mechanics, and then begins a series of bouncing side steps that a dancer could do to warm up the leg muscles. It is prosaic and poetic at the same time, a gateway to ballet practice and collective memory, but also surprising, even humorous in its juxtaposition. (She wore a translucent yellow jumpsuit, sequined leggings, and two-tone pointed-toe pumps to add to the party; applause for designer Victoria Bartlett.)
Working for a long time in obscurity, Tanovitz was a collector of choreography and a passionate researcher of the history, technique and style of dance. Her work is based on the physical ideas and images of Petipa, Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Eric Hawkins, Nijinsky and others, but is slightly transformed between them. It doesn’t matter if you know any of them. Tanovitz’s creativity does not stick, his beauty flourishes and dematerializes before our eyes.
The dancers in The Secret Things are both impersonal agents of movement and deeply human in their connection to each other and to the world of the stage. Toward the end of Grennell’s solo, others joined her onstage, and the dance portion became an ever-changing series of groupings and encounters. The dancer spins slowly, walks stiffly on tiptoe, makes small frog-like jumps, and then suddenly falls straight and sideways, like a log cut down in the forest.
Traditional dance partners are few, but unseen forces often seem to bring the dancers closer together; in one resonant part, Giacomo Rovero jumps powerfully with her legs outstretched; in Glenn Above Grennell, she jumps backwards, leaning on the floor with her hands and feet. the socks of her pointe shoes.
Like many moments in The Secret Things, the imagery suggests drama and emotion, but their illogical juxtaposition is also abstract. Kline’s complex melodic score, with echoes and the shimmering voices of Beethoven’s string quartets, offers a similar juxtaposition of the known and the unknown, where fragments of history meet moments of the present.
Tanovitz never seems to choreograph to music, but her choice of movements, groupings, and foci often changes subtly and drastically depending on the score. Sometimes she choreographs musical repetitions, sometimes she ignores them or works in spite of loud sounds with low-stakes gestures: a slight shuffle of her foot, a turn of her neck.
One of the many great aspects of “Secret Things” is how the eight dancers, mostly drawn from ballet, reveal their unique personalities without showing it. Simply put, they are just training without telling us that they are training.
The same can be said for principal dancers Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell, who performed the pas de deux in the Dispatcher’s Duet film Thrill, and Ted Hearn’s tight, fast-paced soundtrack. Directed by Antula Sindika-Drummond, the film features two dancers in different parts of the opera house, cutting and splicing the choreography: slow leg stretches, strut jumps, or crazy skaters sliding across the floor, can start from the stairs, the end of the Linbury foyer, or go backstage. O’Sullivan and Bracewell are first-class steel athletes.
The latest piece, Everyone Holds Me, also featured on the Hearn, Tanovitz soundtrack, was a quiet triumph at its 2019 premiere and looks even better three years later. Like The Secret Things, the work is illuminated by the beauty of Clifton Taylor’s painting and offers a cascade of dance imagery, from Cunningham’s transparent poise to Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun. One of the mysteries of Tanovitz’s work is how she uses the same ingredients to create completely different pieces. Maybe because she always humbly responds to what is happening here and now, trying to do what she loves: a dancer and dancing.