The reviews are in for Pastoral, the hour-long piece that Pam Tanowitz and her New York company brought to the Barbican Theatre for its UK premiere on 1 October. Tanowitz made it with composer Caroline Shaw, who takes Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony apart and threads its fragments through live woodwind and the sounds of the city, and painter Sarah Crowner, whose vast green canvases are hauled about the stage by the seven dancers. On the craft the critics largely agree: Crowner’s designs look handsome and the dancing is precise. Where they part company is on whether any of it warms up. The Guardian, Gramilano and London Unattached find it fresh and enthralling; The Reviews Hub and The Stage find it cool to the point of chill, BroadwayWorld admires it without being drawn in, and Artbite is simply baffled.
The verdict: eight reviews in so far. Four carry a rating: one four-star notice and three three-star, an average of 3.3 out of 5. London Unattached, Gramilano and Artbite publish no score, and The Times sits behind a paywall. Nearly everyone admires how the piece looks and how precisely it is danced; the argument is over whether that precision ever turns into feeling.
What are critics saying about Pastoral?
The Guardian
"Beethoven explodes into bright bursts of gorgeous dance"
Reviewer: Lyndsey Winship
"Pam Tanowitz’s work is the antidote to the trend in dance for dark and shadowy stages, buckets of theatrical haze, claustrophobic soundscapes and gloopy movement. This stage is so bright and clean, like a sharp palate cleanser, and full of white space – literally, and in a more figurative manner. Tanowitz’s dance can be eccentric, odd even, but it’s also seriously thought-through and specific, every choice utterly distinct and deliberate, every angle planed to the exact degree."
BroadwayWorld
"Dance that goes where it wants to, regardless of the music, space and relationships"
Reviewer: Matthew Paluch
"Tanowitz has a recognisable language, and works with dancers who do it proud. Line, weight shifts, buoyant jumps, Hellenic form, the cast scamper, waddle and lilt between moments. As the set can move the space is often divided allowing for immediate entrance and exit and reveals of still or softly moving tableaux. The content is far from boring, enlightened even…yet the whole didn't seem to have the poetic encasing of Tanowitz's 2023 Song of Songs."
The Reviews Hub
"A chilly pastoral"
Reviewer: Richard Maguire
"However, there’s little flow to the piece as the dancers also have to drag Crowner’s canvases across the stage, often no more than a couple of inches, hardly changing the scenery at all. Meanwhile, curtains are drawn and undrawn and other pictures are winched down from the fly tower. The intention, like Shaw’s music, must surely be to interrupt and to create distance between the performance and the audience. However, it all feels a little too precious and, like the white wall at the back of the set, clinical. Although finely danced, this is a chilly 60 minutes."
London Unattached
"Tanowitz Weaves Her Magic on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony"
Reviewer: Teresa Guerreiro
"Like so much of Pam Tanowitz’s prolific output – TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, the biblical Song of Songs, for example – but perhaps less weighty, Pastoral is a masterful deconstruction and reframing of elements of our cultural history to create something for our times, thought-provoking and above all deeply, deeply enjoyable."
Gramilano
"a major new dance work to cherish"
Reviewer: Jonathan Gray
"I found it difficult not to love everything I saw and heard on the stage that night, and how often can one say that about a new contemporary dance work nowadays? With Pastoral, I believe Pam Tanowitz has given the world a major new dance creation that, in terms of its choreography, music and design, will surely rank amongst the very best."
Artbite
Reviewer: Gabriel Wilding
"However, if you need a brochure or digital programme to understand or appreciate a piece, it has gone too far down the art-world rabbit hole. Disconnected, perplexing and at points laughable, the dancers race this way and that, jabbing and gesticulating, seemingly without interacting with the artwork behind them apart from pushing it on and off stage. The surreal humour that bubbles up provides the piece’s few shining lights. A dancer brings on a red painting with a darker red outline, which he then shadows – funny, silly, light-hearted. A female dancer throwing herself into the arms of two men and being whisked off stage produces a wry chuckle. Yet the rest is clumpy, shakily danced, with not one but two falls and stumbles. Overall unfathomable. Winding themselves down into a world of signs, pastiches and cultural references, the trio seem to have forgotten the golden rule of theatre: someone has to watch it."
Also reviewed by: The Stage (Siobhan Murphy, three stars, "Glides past with an icy aloofness") and The Times ("Pastoral review — you’ll be captivated by this dance response to Beethoven"), whose reviews sit behind paywalls.
Production photographs by Maria Baranova and Lawrence Sumulong.
For more of this week’s verdicts, read our roundups of English National Ballet’s Rhythm Riot at Sadler’s Wells and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at @sohoplace.
Pastoral runs at the Barbican Theatre until Saturday 3 October 2026, with a 2.30pm matinee and a final performance at 7.45pm.
