She anchored her audience in the text right away, before later pushing against it. Not all Tanowitz’s steps were so literal, but thus began her game of supportive versus distractive movement. (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a double swivel turn spotting straight down before, very cool.) When Chalfant described a thrush in the English garden, Jones made darting, avian head movements and when Chalfant described roses overhanging an empty pool, Jones bent her tall form at the waist and peered at the stage floor as if on the brink of a pond. In this split-second shift, which seemingly peered through plasma and dermis to the soul, Tanowitz and company charged into one of Eliot’s main themes: the clash of the corporeal and the spiritual.Īctress Kathleen Chalfant commenced the reading of “Burnt Norton” in her wise and honeyed voice: “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past.” As she spoke, Jones turned, and her spins suggested the complicated cyclicality of Eliot’s lines. “Four Quartets” began with a sudden lighting change as this scrim became see-through, and the majestic Lindsay Jones was visible at the center of the stage, wearing a spectral, off-white jumpsuit in a gossamer fabric. The top half was a deep scarlet, which dripped in bloodlike rivulets down the amber background of the bottom half. Marden’s “Uphill 4” hung at the front of the stage while the audience ambled in and sat. Her expansive treatment, which cannily roped in painter Brice Marden’s images, Kaaijo Saariaho’s music, Clifton Taylor’s lighting and set design, Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung’s costumes, and Jean-Baptiste Barriere’s sound design, is a monumental achievement.

But Tanowitz did the honors, and her career-long interrogation of the language of dance made her an ideal interpreter of these verses. are shot through with dancing and dancers.” He notes how Martha Graham and other choreographers were fans. (I confess they among my favorite poems.) Dramaturge Gideon Lester explains in the program, “the poems themselves. The Four Quartets really speak to dance lovers, as was evidenced by the large crowd of balletomanes at BAM.

The resulting work had its NYC premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week.

Yet there has only been an actual dance set to this quartet since 2018, when choreographer Pam Tanowitz became the first person granted permission by the Eliot estate to choreograph to the text. Eliot wrote in 1936 in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem in his seminal late work, Four Quartets.

Four quartets text