Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Caroline Shaw discusses composing the music for Pastoral, premiering at this year’s Bard SummerScape.

Video by A Doll’s House Pictures (adollshousepictures.com).

Pastoral
Fisher Center LAB Commission/World Premiere

Choreography by Pam Tanowitz
Décor by Sarah Crowner
Music by Caroline Shaw

Featuring Pam Tanowitz Dance
Inspired by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral”

June 27–29

fishercenter.bard.edu/events/pastoral/

Pastoral is the latest world premiere from Fisher Center LAB Choreographer in Residence Pam Tanowitz at Bard SummerScape, in a major new collaboration with composer Caroline Shaw and visual artist Sarah Crowner.

Following the success of Four Quartets, named “the greatest work of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times, and Song of Songs, regarded as “a thing of beauty” by The Guardian, Tanowitz continues her series of major performances that respond to masterworks of the past.

Setting the dance to Beethoven’s beloved Symphony No. 6 in F Major, the “Pastoral,” Tanowitz then removes the music, replacing it in part with silence, in part with a specially commissioned score by her long-time collaborator, renowned composer Caroline Shaw, which itself responds to and transforms the Beethoven score. The décor for the production will be created by Brooklyn-based painter Sarah Crowner, well-known for her “cut & stitch” abstract canvases, which evoke pastoral landscapes in magnificent jewel colors. The resulting performance will be a gorgeous palimpsest of many artistic layers, with Beethoven’s evocation of the natural world as a guiding spirit.