Bard SummerScape Presents World Premiere of FOUR QUARTETS

75 years ago T.S. Eliot published Four Quartets, a poetic meditation on time and memory that is widely regarded as his crowning achievement. Now, to celebrate this milestone anniversary, Bard SummerScape 2018 presents the world premiere of Four Quartets, the first authorized dance performance ever to be based on Eliot's modernist masterpiece. A SummerScape commission, the new work is an interdisciplinary collaboration that draws on the talents of three of today's most potent artistic voices. Since making her acclaimed festival debut at SummerScape 2015, Pam Tanowitz has been recognized as "one of the most formally brilliant choreographers around" (New York Times), with honors including a Bessie Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the prestigious 2017 Cage Cunningham Fellowship.

For Four Quartets' music, she turned to the work of Grawemeyer and Grammy Award-winning Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose rich, polyphonic textures have "given her audiences - and given late 20th- and early 21st-century music as a whole - some of the most luminous, beguiling and sheerly sensual experiences they can hope to have" (The Guardian). The creative trio is completed by American modernist painter and Hudson Valley resident Brice Marden, "one of today's leading artists" (New York Times), who was the subject of a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The performance features nine members of the Pam Tanowitz Dance company, with a complete narration of Eliot's poem cycle by Tony-nominated actress Kathleen Chalfant (Angels in America, Wit). Saariaho's music will be performed live by four members of The Knights, the celebrated orchestral collective that has "become one of Brooklyn's sterling cultural products" (New Yorker). This world premiere will be performed three times on July 6-8 in the Sosnoff Theater in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center on Bard College's glorious Hudson River campus. Four Quartets is co-commissioned with The Barbican Centre in London and The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, and the work will be performed in London and Los Angeles in 2019.

Pam Tanowitz said of this performance, "Living inside Eliot's poetry has been a process of training myself how to look at the world. I am experimenting with how to pair dance within his rhythm of words while activating the audience's imagination to create meaningful images and connections." Kaija Saariaho added, "I have loved Eliot since my youth, and think of his words often in relation to my music. It's a pleasure to partner with Pam and Brice to create a new way of encountering these rich and significant poems." Brice Marden said, "It's a pleasure to reconnect with Four Quartets. The poems are elemental, preoccupied with the turning world, the seasons and elements, and the ineffable, highest qualities of our lives."

Since founding her own company in 2000, Pam Tanowitz has become known for her post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. The seeds of Bard's new commission were sown three years ago, when the choreographer first brought her company to SummerScape with a triple bill that scored a five-star review in the Financial Times. It was then that she and Gideon Lester, Bard's Artistic Director for Theater and Dance, discovered their shared fascination with the poetry of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), and with the ways he wrote about dance. Eliot was obsessed with dance, especially ballet, and Four Quartets (1943) - his last great work of poetry, completed while he worked as an air raid warden in London during the Blitz - is suffused with dance-related imagery. In an insightful blog chronicling the project's development, Lester writes:

"The idea to create a dance based on Four Quartets came from the poems themselves. ... Eliot admired dance for its abstraction, and for the tensions it can create between stillness and movement, the ephemeral and the eternal, past and present. ... In Burnt Norton, the first of the Quartets, he created a startling vision of a dance 'at the still point of the turning world.' ... In East Coker, the second Quartet, Eliot takes us to the village in Somerset where his ancestors lived. He portrays their ghosts dancing in a field outside the village, enacting ancient cycles of life and death, the turning planets, and changing seasons. ... In Little Gidding, the final poem, choreography becomes a metaphor to describe the process of writing."

This passage spoke most powerfully to Tanowitz. As Lester recounts:

"When she reread this section of Little Gidding, Pam was startled by how closely Eliot reflected the choreographer's process. 'This is my task,' she told me: 'To make a dance where every phrase is at home, taking its place to support the others, an easy commerce of the old and the new, exact without vulgarity, precise but not pedantic.'"

Tanowitz is not the first choreographer to draw inspiration from Four Quartets, but although others, notably Martha Graham, have also done so, none have previously been granted permission to set a dance performance to the cycle. When approached about Bard's new commission, however, the estate of T. S. Eliot not only authorized it, but provided funding for Tanowitz and Lester to make a pilgrimage to each of the poem's four primary sites. Lester explains:

"Eliot's poems are complex and beautiful meditations on time and timelessness, and on the limits of human comprehension of the divine. [He] wrote them in part as a response to spiritual epiphanies he experienced in four particular places."

Three of these places are in England, the poet's adopted homeland, and one in his native America. Burnt Norton (1935) shares its name with a manor house and gardens Eliot visited in Gloucestershire; East Coker (1940) with the Somerset village to which his family traces its roots, where he is himself now buried; The Dry Salvages (1941) with a cluster of rocks off the coast of Massachusetts, around which he sailed as a boy; and Little Gidding (1942) with a Cambridgeshire village whose storied chapel made a profound impression on him. About their pilgrimage Lester said, "It was an incredible privilege to walk in Eliot's footsteps in these four extraordinary places, and to sense in them "the intersection of the timeless with time" that he writes about. Their ancient landscapes, and the ghosts of those who went before, inspired Eliot to create poetry with a concentration and grace that is a balm in our own chaotic times."

Another artist who has long been inspired by Eliot's poetry is Polar Music Prize-winner Kaija Saariaho, whose opera L'Amour de loin won both Grawemeyer and Grammy Awards, and went on to become just the second work by a female composer to be mounted at the Metropolitan Opera. She first set lines from Four Quartetsto music back in the early 1980s, but without authorization from the Eliot estate, this early composition was never performed. Rather than returning to it, for Bard's new commission Saariaho created an original score from some of her existing chamber works, now in new arrangements for violin, viola, cello, harp, and electronics.

Hudson Valley's Brice Marden is "an artist who has spent his career assiduously converting the rule-ridden zone of Minimalist abstraction into a capacious yet disciplined place" (New York Times). When the team approached him about artwork for Four Quartets, he too responded positively, noting: "Eliot is my god." Although the artist once designed sets for a 2003 production at Naples' San Carlo Opera, Bard's premiere production of Four Quartets represents the first time Marden's work for the stage will have been seen here in the States.

All three collaborators share Eliot's gift for abstraction. Furthermore, like the poet, all three artists combine their conceptual approach with a profound feel for the personal. As Lester puts it:

"[The] paradoxical conversation between the depersonalized and the personal is a defining feature of Pam's choreography. It is why, I think, she is such a good match for Eliot - along with her other collaborators on the project, Kaija Saariaho, and Brice Marden, who are both abstract artists with a deep sense of humanity."

Bard's world premiere performances of Four Quartets feature a complete, live reading of the four Eliot poems by veteran actress Kathleen Chalfant, whose accolades include Outer Circle Critics, Drama Desk, and Obie awards; a Tony nomination; and a Lucille Lortel lifetime achievement award. Her casting marks a break with tradition, for Eliot's cycle has come to be associated with the voices of the British men who have recorded it, from Alec Guinness and Jeremy Irons to the poet himself. Putting his words instead into the mouth of an American woman offers audiences the chance to hear them in a fresh light. Moreover, by showcasing the work not only of Chalfant, but of Tanowitz and Saariaho too, Bard's production allows Eliot's text to interact with their strong female presence.

Chalfant will be joined on stage by nine dancers - Kara Chan, Jason Collins, Dylan Crossman, Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood - all of whom are members of Pam Tanowitz Dance. Since its founding as a platform for the choreographer to explore her vision with a consistent group, the company has received commissions from, and undertaken residencies at, such prestigious venues as The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series, Dance Theater Workshop, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival. Pam Tanowitz Dance was named among the New York Times' "Best of Dance" in 2013, 2014, and 2015. Click here to see selected excerpts from the company's work.

Saariaho's music will be interpreted by four members of The Knights: co-artistic director Colin Jacobsen on violin, Nicholas Cords on viola, Hannah Collins on cello, and Bridget Kibbey on harp. Hailed as a "consistently inventive, infectiously engaged indie ensemble" (New York Times), The Knights previously performed with Pam Tanowitz Dance two years ago in the company's celebrated premiere of Sequenzas in Quadrilles at New York's Joyce Theater. The electronic components of Saariaho's score will be supervised by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, the award-winning Parisian composer and mixed-media artist whose numerous collaborations with Saariaho span decades, dating from their time together at France's IRCAM, where he directed research, education, and production. Marden's original artwork will be complemented by the scenic and lighting design of Lucille Lortel Award nominee Clifton Taylor, with costumes designed by Pam Tanowitz Dance members Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, whose work for the company has been called "exquisite" (New York Times).

Gagosian is the lead corporate sponsor of Four Quartets. Major support is provided by Rebecca Gold.

Four Quartets is co-commissioned by the Fisher Center, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, and the Barbican, London. Additional commissioning funds were provided by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, the O'Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, the T.S. Eliot Foundation, King's Fountain, and Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Creation and performance of the music is supported by the Thendara Foundation.