![]() ![]() Other than that there was very little touching. One salient image was that of a dancer jumping into the arms of another. ![]() She built the work upon a series of steps and phrases that are repeated in various ways: jumped, turned, performed alone, performed in unison and performed in reverse. Movements were balletic, full of arabesques, skittery connecting steps, soft leaps and jumps. In her selection of the movements and structure of Four Quartets, Tamowitz chose to ignore the depth and imagery of the poems, producing a cool Merce Cunningham-like ballet that glided along beautifully on the surface of Eliot’s heavy, sometimes distasteful, imagery. Long periods of dance were performed without Chalfant’s speaking the words. Veteran actor Kathleen Chalfant pronounced the poetry with a somberness only infrequently interrupted by unexpected ironic humor in the text. Eliot, poems filled with images of despair and the relentlessness of existence (“In my beginning is my end,” East Coker). The Four Quartets are, of course, the master poems (written between 19, published in 1943) by American ex-pat T. Now Pam Tamowitz has brought her troupe of excellent dancers to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in her much lauded work Four Quartets which debuted in 2018 at the Fisher Center at Bard College. ![]() Martha Graham did it and so did Merce Cunningham. ![]() There’s a long history of modern dance choreographers composing works supported by the spoken word. ![]()
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