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

After the success of her staging of TS Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, choreographer Pam Tanowitz returns to poetry

Melissa Toogood and Zachary Gonder in Pam Tanowitz and David Lang’s ‘Song of Songs’ (Maria Baranova)

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.