Pam Tanowitz and David Lang’s Song of Songs review: This lush, physical work glows with ideas

Both poised and intense, this new collaboration between choreographer Pam Tanowitz and composer David Lang glows with ideas. Responding to the Biblical “Song of Songs”, it’s filled with images of connection and boundaries, community and self. If the surface is serene, it has complex undercurrents.

Tanowitz, who founded her own company in 2000, had an international breakthrough with Four Quartets, her staging of TS Eliot’s poetry. In Song of Songs, she returns to poetry as inspiration – but rather than using the whole text, she and Lang unpack and reflect on it.

Lang’s score starts with images. In unison, the three onstage singers list attributes named in the text: your lips, your rounded thighs, your flowing locks. Layered with cello, violin, and percussion, the voices have a woodwind quality; it’s yearning but abstract.

A woman in a long, gauzy dress takes slow, limpid poses. She’s joined by a second woman, who has a jittery, nervous quality, hands fluttering as if in panic. They coexist but don’t connect, responding to the music’s phrasing or going their own ways. Six more dancers join them, floating past each other or winding into friezes. There are folk inflections, tilted hips and shoulders, hints of a wedding dance or community celebration.

The set is lines of white ribbon – a striped wall that looks solid until moved by a breeze. Dancers lean through it, reaching more urgently than when they’re standing together. One skips along the edge of the white floor cloth, one foot tapping outside the line. Duets unfold at the edges of the stage, almost into the wings.

The poetry of the “Song of Songs” is famously erotic, lush and physical, but Lang and Tanowitz aren’t creating a sexy dance. Instead, they suggest emotion considered, understood as part of the community or the self. Lang and Tanowitz set out to explore their Jewish heritage; the finished work feels both contemplative and personal, with layers of thought behind each gesture or wash of sound. Even the costumes, simple in shape, drape gauze or fluffy textures over shiny fabrics. There’s always something else going on.

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Tanowitz’s dance imagery can be transparently beautiful, but always self-contained. Bold leaps and catches don’t break the ongoing flow of movement. One dancer falls right off a raised platform into another’s arms, then goes on her way. Though the group dances suggest a shared ritual, it happens at a distance: not the wedding dance itself, but a burnished memory.

Barbican Theatre, until 14 October