"… Tanowitz messes creatively with classical vocabulary…like glimpsing a society that has forgotten most of its rituals but is going to perform the fragments that remain as beautifully as it can." –The Village Voice


New York, NY, April 29, 2009 – Dance Theater Workshop presents the world premiere of Pam Tanowitz's Be In the Gray With Me – a series of interrelated solos, duets, and ensemble pieces set to music by Vladimir Martynov, Pavel Karmanov, and an original score by Dan Siegler. The New Yorker has called Tanowitz "a clear sighted modernist" whose "studious, deliberate dismantling of traditional balletic movements produces a stream of provocative fresh juxtapositions." Her newest work continues to reconstruct classical, formal, and traditional movement using rigid physicality and abstract sensibility. Be in the Gray with Me explores performing rituals, mining codified techniques in an unusually layered contemporary collage. Imbued with rich, mysterious undertones, the work plays with narrative and abstraction, formality and immediacy, creating a progression of images that dissolve and reappear throughout the work's path.


Be In the Gray With Me features dancers Christina Amendolia, Dylan Crossman, Anne Lentz, Theresa Ling, Ashlee Kittleson, Ellie Kusner, Rashaun Mitchell, Uta Takemura, and Glen Rumsey, with set and lighting design by Philip Trevino and costume design by Renee Kurz.


Performances will take place at Dance Theater Workshop in the Bessie Schönberg Theater, June 18-20 (Thursday – Saturday at 7:30pm). There will also be a Post-show Talk with Rose Ann Thom on June 18 (Thursday). Tickets are $10 online and $15 through the box office and are available online at dancetheaterworkshop.org, over the phone at 212.924.0077, and in person at the box office. Box office hours are Monday – Friday from 5pm-9pm and Saturday – Sunday 12pm – 8pm. Dance Theater Workshop is located at 219 West 19th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues.


About the Artist

Pam Tanowitz holds a BFA in Dance from the Ohio State University and an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College. During her two years at Sarah Lawrence College, Tanowitz had the honor of working closely with Viola Farber-Slayton. Farber-Slayton became her mentor, and has greatly influenced her work and life. She also studied at the American Dance Festival and Bates Dance Festival and has studied choreography with Martha Myers and Dan Hurlin. She has set her work on NYU's Washington Square Repertory Dance Company, The Steffi Nosen Dance



Company and The Greenwich Academy dance Corp, where she was an artist in residence in 2005. In Fall 2006 the company was in residence at Ohio State University, where she set work on the dance majors and incorporated the students in the company's final performance. Most recently Tanowitz was invited to Oregon Ballet's Choreographic Institute where she created a new ballet. She has taught composition at Hunter College and Master Classes at American Dance Festival. She is the 2001 recipient of the Scripps/ADF Primus-Tamaris Fellowship in Choreography and an Astral Career Grant from the National Foundation for the Advancement in the Arts.

Be In the Gray With Me is commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop's Commissioning and Creative Residency Program with support from The Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Jerome Robbins Foundation and commissioning support from the New York State Council on the Arts Dance Program. This project is supported by the New York State DanceForce, with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts Dance Program and Altria Group, Inc.