Pam Tanowitz’s Dance ‘Pastoral’ Weaves Beethoven and More

What exactly is the pastoral, that tradition from about Virgil to Wendell Berry and beyond that devotes itself to nature? And can it even exist in a honking, smoggy metropolis?

The choreographer Pam Tanowitz welcomes questions like these in her latest work, “Pastoral,” which premieres on Friday at the Fisher Center at Bard College. In her signature blend of classical ballet and free-form modern dance, it is set to a reworking of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, nicknamed the “Pastoral,” by the composer Caroline Shaw, with décor by the painter Sarah Crowner that puts nature front and center.

All three of these artists live in New York City, and while “Pastoral” draws from Beethoven in name, it pulls equally from their daily work and lives. It is also, for a dance, uncommonly engaged with the vocabulary of visual art. One late spring morning, with the fog low and cow daisies high in the Hudson Valley, Tanowitz strode into rehearsal with a book under her arm of Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century French painter of allegorical and historical scenes.

“We have two tableaus in this dance,” Tanowitz said, describing scenes in which her dancers arrange themselves into a particular formation and hold it, facing the audience. “And this is what I want those moments to feel like,” she said, flipping to Poussin’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.”

In that painting, four youthful figures frolic in a hillside clearing. They are mid-hop, the hands joined into a maypole ring, backs to one another, togas billowing in colors not too far from the lavenders and combinations evoking pink lemonade and smoked salmon that are used by Reid Bartelme, the costumer for “Pastoral.”