A viewer who worries, as Eliot’s narrator does, about having the experience but missing the meaning, need not worry. The poem and the paintings help the dance from going too dry, and the dance and the paintings save the poem from some of its obscurity. Those ruminations of Eliot inflect Tanowitz’s patterns, making the return of a dance phrase even more like a memory. The many scattered allusions to dance and music in the poem, surely the inspiration for the project, allow Tanowitz to treat the text tangentially, trusting in both set and serendipitous links. The infrequent correspondences between text and dance - or the rare synchronicity of a musical plunk and the turn of a head - ring like bells during meditation. So do recurrent images in the dance: a running-in-place with heels kicked up behind, head back, one arm reaching high a deeply tilted arabesque adorned with a quaking, shimmering hand. As the music sinks and resurfaces, images and ideas from the poem (some direct and sensuous, some baffling) advance and recede in your imagination, or just in your attention.

The viewer is left with a freedom to focus and drift. Her complex and irregular sense of form - now still or spare, now quick and insistent solos and duets emerging in and out of sudden gatherings action that overlaps and spills off the edges of the stage - is complemented rather than crowded by the other elements. But soon the ear adjusts to the music’s buzzing and sliding as another part of this world.Īll of this is right for the poem and for Tanowitz’s choreography. For a while, her voice is the only sound, and when the music enters - a spectral score of harp and strings by Kaija Saariaho, played live by members of the orchestral collective the Knights - it’s nearly an intrusion. The actress Kathleen Chalfant recites the poem matter-of-factly, with a voice of experience that earns the occasional laugh. There’s so much going on here, so many layers.

But the success of Tanowitz’s work - why it doesn’t sink under the weight of the poem’s paradox-laden ruminations on time, pattern, history and memory - lies as much in the dance’s independence from the text as in its coordination. If you’re going to make a dance to a long and difficult poem, it makes sense to take Eliot’s phrases about beginnings and endings as guideposts, almost as stage directions. The circular structure is a formal idea with philosophical resonance. Eliot, tell you the outer shape of “Four Quartets,” the much-acclaimed dance by Pam Tanowitz that had its New York City debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. Those tail-eating lines, paraphrased from “Four Quartets,” the poem by T.S.

Four quartets text