After a performance at Dance Theater Workshop in the 1990s, Pam Tanowitz was approached by Viola Farber. The free-spirited Merce Cunningham dancer (and Tanowitz’s teacher at Sarah Lawrence College) told her: “Now don’t start making dances you think they want to see.”

It was a warning. She didn’t want Tanowitz to let her rigor slide into something cute or, worse, sacrifice form for fashion. It never has. In the ensuing years, I’ve watched Tanowitz as she’s plugged along with unrelenting devotion, producing dances in which choreography is the star. This, defiantly, is an old-fashioned pursuit: Today, much contemporary dance is about creating atmosphere at the expense of innovative movement—an approach that’s quickly becoming tedious, in inexperienced hands. But Tanowitz, who has been snubbed by fellow choreographers and producers for years, is tougher than she looks.

She did experience a few false starts, though. For some time after Farber’s death in 1998, Tanowitz’s dances had more in common with cerebral exercises than poetry. But over the years she’s figured out a couple of things. One has been to introduce a softness to the classroom step. The other, which she is still honing, is seamlessness—providing a theatrical frame where a formal structure can breathe. With a dogged persistence and a strong sense of dance history, she has unearthed a voice of her own. Choreography is a craft, however, and experience (self-producing at the Joyce Soho, with the occasional Danspace Project season) has served her well.

It seems the times are finally catching up with Tanowitz. Choreography—the meaty sort, with attention to steps and detail—is reentering the downtown-dance consciousness (thank God). As Sarah Michelson proved in Daylight and Dogs, where an exploration of movement mirrored conceptual ideas about dancing, and Beth Gill in Eleanor & Eleanor, which included a sly homage to Trisha Brown, the most talented of artists seem to be asking an important question: Where has choreography gone? Tanowitz tries to answer that query in her new evening-length Dream Sequence (No Secrets). The title refers to the setting: In a studio, there are no secrets. Any dance is full of them, however, and this is what Tanowitz finally seems to have grasped—structure is one thing, but emotion gives it the space to live.