Pam Tanowitz, Royal Opera House, review: American choreographer’s star continues to rise

Choreographer Pam Tanowitz can pick up a movement and turn it over, tilting it to see how it catches the light. Secret Things, her quirky new work for The Royal Ballet, goes from meditative to glitzy and back again. 

Based in New York, Tanowitz has had a quiet rise to international status. She founded her own company in 2000, and had a major breakthrough with her lucid 2018 staging of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets. For the Royal Ballet, she’s working in the smaller Linbury Theatre, rather than the big main stage, and makes the most of its intimate space.

Soloist Hannah Grennell makes her entrance from among the musicians, a string quartet playing a whispering new score by Anna Clyne. Once she’s on stage, Grennell moves in long, clean lines, then wriggles to find a new angle. 

When she’s joined by seven more dancers, there’s a sense of solo exploration, everybody conducting their own experiments. One man drives through an athletic solo, while another sits shuffling along the floor. When two men lift a woman, she keeps exactly the same pose, feet flexed as if still on the floor. The Royal Ballet’s dancers respond happily to Tanowitz’s style: they’re absorbed and unselfconscious, moving with crisp line and sharp detail. 

Victoria Bartlett’s costumes divide the dancers’ bodies: different colours on front and back, or floaty gauze over unisex sequinned boob tubes. (It’s certainly a look.) The piece keeps turning, finding different ways to see things. 

Secret Things is inventive, but not as coherent as the lovely Everyone Keeps Me, created in 2019. A line of dancers weaves across the stage, arms around waists. Women dip and flow as they run, the movement light and windblown. Different duets bloom across the stage, with movement ideas echoed and varied, rather than just repeated. Clifton Taylor’s lighting makes Mondrian patterns glow underfoot. 

Joonhyuk Jun floats through a long, lyrical solo – then suddenly allows the effort to show. He lets himself gasp for breath, or tips off balance before recovering. After showing his workings, he returns to serenity.

A film version of Tanowitz’s Dispatch Duet literally takes different views of the dancing. Anna Rose O’Sullivan and William Bracewell were recorded dancing in different parts of the building – industrial backstage, plush gilded foyer – with the sequences edited together. Throughout this short programme, Tanowitz keeps the perspective constantly changing.

Royal Opera House, until 16 February