Pam Tanowitz is the real deal: Secret Things/Everyone Keeps Me, at the Linbury Theatre, reviewed

Civilisation has never nurtured more than a handful of front-rank choreographers within any one generation, with the undesirable result that the chosen few end up excessively in demand, careering around the globe and overworking, delegating or repeating themselves. Please can someone up there ensure that Pam Tanowitz doesn’t suffer such a fate. This fifty-something American has recently matured as one of the best in field, producing dance of rigorous clarity, austere yet richly nuanced, that makes the work of certain other big names look fuzzily derivative or gimmicky. Just don’t ask too much of her, because she works through fine detail, not a broad brush.

An hour-long programme of her creations for the Royal Ballet, presented in the intimate environment of the Linbury Theatre, proved deeply rewarding and absorbing. True, the revival of 2019’s Everyone Keeps Me looked a little under-rehearsed. Nine young dancers, focusing hard to get it right, didn’t quite capture its mood of playful, teasing, almost pastoral friendliness (Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering a point of reference?), but when nerves have settled its full beauty will surely emerge.

Secret Things is the novelty, set to an intensely Beethovenian string quartet by Anna Clyne. The gorgeously coloured costumes designed by Victoria Bartlett are ancient Greek chitons with greaves around the calves: do these eight dancers represent Amazons gathered on an Olympian plain? The bare stage gives no clue.

Hannah Grennell (wonderful) opens with a long solo, hesitant and fragmented, as though she is uncertain of her body’s power and what she is meant to do with it. As others more confidently emerge, symmetries are set up only to be disintegrated, with movement not so much a prelude to action as evidence of unease.