Over the past decade, choreographer Pam Tanowitz has created a body of work that amalgamates the disciplines of ballet and classic modern dance; creating abstract movement that is meant to trigger the surfacing of our collective expectations of dance, classicism, composition as well as the concert going experience.
Tanowitz’s project generates work consisting of seemingly incongruous elements of beauty and awkwardness. This approach is used to underscore the often unseen but subliminally experienced conflicting forces that exist in the contemporary “post-everything” landscape. Tanowitz challenges our expectations, and therefore allows us an opportunity to witness a new paradigm. This emptying out of that which we have been trained to anticipate is at the very heart of her work.
Pam Tanowitz Dance has performed three times at Danspace Project- with presentations in 2002, 2004 and 2006. Tanowitz’s work has also been seen at Central Park Summerstage, Dance Theater Workshop and Joyce SoHo. PTD has performed twice at The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process program, which enabled Tanowitz to create Informal with City Ballet soloist Tom Gold (2001) and to be apart of An Evening of Song & dance with Charles Wuorinen (2005) along side Wuorinen and John Ashberry. In 2001Pam Tanowitz Dance was one of only three companies in the United States invited to perform at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC, as part of the Emerging Generations concert. The company has performed at the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2002 and 2005.
PTD has received commissioning funds from Dance Theater Workshop’s First Light Commission (with support from Jerome Foundation); Danspace Project’s Commissioning Initiative (supported by the Jerome Foundation); ADF’s Emerging Generations program (funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation); and The Guggenheim Museum’s Works and Process program. Pam Tanowitz Dance has also received grant support from the American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance Program, Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Meet the Composer. |
Pam Tanowitz holds a BFA in Dance from the Ohio State University and an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College. During her two years at Sarah Lawrence College, Tanowitz had the honor of working closely with Viola Farber-Slayton. Viola became her mentor, and has greatly influenced her work and life. She also studied at the American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival and has studied choreography with Martha Myers and Dan Hurlin. She has set her work on NYU’s Washington Square Repertory Dance Company, The Steffi Nosen Dance Company and The Greenwich Academy dance Corp, where she was an artist in residence in 2005. In Fall 2006 the company was in residence at Ohio State University, where she set work on the dance majors and incorporated the students in the company’s final performance. Most recently Pam was invited to Oregon Ballet’s Choreographic Institute where she created a new ballet. She has taught composition at HunterCollege, and Master Classes at American Dance Festival. She is the 2001 recipient of the Scripps/ADF Primus-Tamaris Fellowship in Choreography and an Astral Career Grant from the National Foundation for the Advancement in the Arts. |
