Pam Tanowitz and William Bracewell collaborate at the Linbury Theatre, 6 to 13 February 2027.
Pam Tanowitz was born in the Bronx in 1969, took her first ballet class in high school, and has spent thirty years making work that uses the classical vocabulary without any of the story, the mime or the hierarchy that normally comes with it. Martha Graham’s company, Paul Taylor’s and New York City Ballet have all commissioned her. Her Four Quartets, set to Eliot, is the piece most often named as the reason she matters.
William Bracewell is a principal of the Royal Ballet and one of the most watchable classical dancers in Britain, a different job from the one Tanowitz usually casts. Bracewell came to the Royal Ballet from Birmingham and has spent the last few seasons taking on the roles that define a principal’s range, so a collaboration made on him rather than for him is a step outside that.
They make this together in the Linbury Theatre from Saturday 6 to Saturday 13 February 2027 — made between the two of them rather than by one for the other, which is how the house is billing it and is the unusual thing about the commission. A choreographer of Tanowitz’s standing normally arrives with a piece and teaches it. Eight days is the whole run, in a four-hundred-seat room, the correct scale for watching a single dancer be rebuilt by somebody who works from outside his tradition.