Sarah Crowner puts herself, and us, on stage
Pastoral
Pam Tanowitz Dance October 1–3, 2026
The Barbican Centre, London
Created through the Fisher Center LAB program at Bard College, which hosted its world premiere last summer, Pastoral has made many fans of contemporary dance happy. Pam Tanowitz, the LAB’s inaugural choreographer in residence, has been on a roll over the past decade, with numerous works performed by top-shelf companies including the Martha Graham Dance Company, New York City Ballet, and London’s Royal Ballet, since she established her own ensemble, Pam Tanowitz Dance, in 2000.
Rather than leave Ludwig van Beethoven’s 1808 symphonic ode to nature untouched, Pastoral intercedes it with silence and new contributions by Caroline Shaw, who became the youngest-ever recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013. The project’s third creative collaborator is artist Sarah Crowner, who answered C-print’s video call from Stockholm to Brooklyn.
C-P: Will you be in London for the upcoming run of Pastoral at the Barbican?
SC: Yes. I’m leaving on Tuesday. I’ve got some appointments and people to meet in London as well as the events, some other interviews, and activities around Pastoral.
C-P: Is there anything else you’re looking forward to doing while in London?
SC: I’d like to go to the Wallace Collection. It’s so different from anything we have in the United States and it’s so beautiful. I love the wall treatments there. Have you been?
C-P: Unfortunately, not yet. Were you at Fisher Center for Pastoral’s premiere?
SC: I was, yes. That was last summer, at the end of June. We had three shows and they went beautifully. It was a great place to premiere the performance because of the landscape. Have you been?
C-P: I have!
SC: So you know it’s surrounded by rolling, green hills and a lot of trees. It was the perfect environment.
C-P: I was there two summers ago for a show by Urban Bush Women, which almost didn’t happen. A wild storm ripped through that afternoon. A bunch of tree branches came down and cut power to the area. It was a mess but everyone sprang into action and the show did go on. Anyway, I spoke earlier this year with Caroline Shaw, for the current issue of Dance Magazine, and I’ve interviewed another choreographer you’ve worked with, Jessica Lang, I think twice. I’ve looked a lot at creative relationships between designers and choreographers: Daniel Arsham and Merce Cunningham, Norma Kamali and Twyla Tharp, Fraser Taylor and Carrie Hanson, Hogan McLaughlin and Robyn Mineko Williams, Peder Freiij and Mats Ek, Reid Bartelme and just about everyone, it seems, including Pam Tanowitz. Shaw talks in a recent video about the compositional similarities she sees between music and your visual art. What things from the realms of music and dance find their ways into your artmaking? How might you understand that process of translation, or maybe it’s more like transliteration? I feel you were exploring just that with the show Acrobat at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, in 2011, if that’s fair to say.
SC: Mm-hm. That was one of the first times I explored those ideas, as well as in a show at Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm, actually, called Rehearsal. I believe that was in 2012. Those two exhibitions were formative for me. I saw them as proposals for the idea that a painting or sculpture could also be a backdrop or a stage flat. I was thinking, What are the paintings’ functions? Or, What can a painting do as an action? Instead of sitting there on the wall, being pretty and pure, what happens when we have music, movement, dance, duration of time, activity, all swirling around the painting? What does that do to the painting? Does it activate it? Does it “still” it? Like, do those things make it seem more still because it’s not moving, while all these other things are moving around it? How do those activities, or actions, define or redefine what painting is? And so I saw those exhibitions as proposals for, What could it be? What happens? Let’s see!
I also think it’s more interesting to use a gallery exhibition as more of a site for experimentation, rather than, you know, a place to sell objects, which is also what a gallery is. I like to work out those kinds of ideas.
So those were two of the first exhibitions around what painting can do. There were a couple of other exhibitions around that time, too. In 2011, at Catherine Bastide, I built a large stage platform out of wood that spanned the entire architecture of that gallery, so you had to stand on the stage, and to be on stage, in order to encounter the work. You were kind of forced into an active role, rather than the typical, passive role, that we maybe assume when we look at art. My questions were, What happens when you get up on stage? Do you feel shy because you’re being looked at? Are you worried that a spotlight is going to hit you? I was thinking about the bodies of the viewers, walking around on stage, moving from painting to painting, as a kind of dance. I don’t know if that is a dance but, again: experimentation, proposal.
Then, I made other exhibitions with constructed stages, sometimes with paintings, sometimes not, sometimes with tiles on the platform, sometimes not, and then, a few years later, I began to receive inquiries to collaborate with choreographers. I don’t think they came out of the blue. I worked with [choreographer] Carolyn Schoerner and [composer] James Hoff at MASS MoCA in 2016, and then Jessica Lang reached out to me when she was going to create original choreography to [Antonín] Dvořák for the dancers of American Ballet Theatre in 2018. I created sets and costumes for that. It was about a 23-minute long dance. That was the first time I worked as a set designer, in the professional sense. I had a contract with ABT. I actually got paid. [Laughs] That was a very different process than what I’d been doing before in galleries and museums which is very, you know, scrappy, but also very open and, you know, the attitude is, Go for it! You name it! We support you! Whereas, working with an institution like American Ballet Theatre, there are unions, there are schedules, there are so many limitations, there’s a really tight budget…
C-P: There’s also a costume shop.
SC: Right! With the best costume designers in New York, you know? I got to work with dancers such as Misty Copeland and Herman Cornejo, some of the best dancers in the ballet world. That was a huge gift and a dream come true. I’d made smaller exhibitions, too, one with the Boston Ballet that was part of a group show in 2014. I made a huge, painted theatrical curtain for that. The Boston Ballet dancers improvised around this geometric, large scale, painted curtain and then, through a gallery I was with at the time, I was introduced to Pam Tanowitz, who was fresh off of Four Quartets at Bard’s Fisher Center, with Brice Marden’s backdrops, you know?
C-P: Mm-hm.
SC: …and Pam is just one of the most interesting choreographers I know. We had a blind date in my studio and quickly realized that we have a lot of things in common.
C-P: Was it typically or always the case that if you’re designing scenery or décor for a performance that you’re also designing the costumes? I ask because it doesn’t always work, for me, when different designers are handling the set and costumes. If I’m creating a specific color palette or visual environment, in “the background,” I would probably prefer to have some degree of control over what appears the foreground. I mean, it can be interesting to stand in front of a Caravaggio when someone in an acid green sweatshirt walks between it and you, but that’s a relationship that’s totally outside whatever’s going on inside the painting. It can really pull you out of that viewing experience.
SC: I had some hand in the costumes for all of them. Reid Bartelme is the costume designer for Pam’s Pastoral but I work with Reid very closely. It was more like a collaboration. He did the shape and volume of the costumes and designed them, but the colors came out of this dialogue he and I had about the gradients in parts of my paintings, which move from pink to teal or from peach to bright red. He didn’t mimic that, but he interpreted that, and integrated it into his costume designs. For the MASS MoCA project I did with Carolyn and James, I put her into this tight, red, sort of Merce Cunningham–style unitard, because the painting in the background was sort of raw and indigo and the stage I designed was a sort of pentagon-tiled pattern in shades of grey and white. I thought that red would pop strongly against all that.
I designed the costumes for Jessica Lang’s work, too. I wanted these shades of saturated color to feel like blossoms in a landscape, like tiny, little, floral forms, in a larger landscape.
C-P: Like a superbloom.
SC: Yeah!
C-P: You already brought us here but I want to pick up on it: When it comes to theatrical design, versus works shown in galleries and museums, it’s of course a lot about the shift in scale. Now, you work in large scale outside a theatrical context already. I’m thinking about that frieze of yours at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation; I’m thinking about the raised platform that elevated viewers of the plaque and the collage in that show. A friend of mine is a professor at SCAD and I’ve seen some images of your Platform as Platform there. You’ve talked about how your larger works require movement on the part of the viewer. With Around Orange, for example, you seemed interested in the viewer’s journey toward the artwork, and them incrementally becoming aware of more detail, more aware of a work’s construction. But an audience member at the Fisher Center or at the Barbican should stay in their seat, right?
SC:[Laughs] Right.
C-P: They’re not invited onstage. So, can you talk a bit about not just the larger scales of theatrical design, but also the limits a proscenium imposes on proximity? How do you think about artmaking when the viewers have to remain 25, 50, 100 feet away?
SC: It really is so different, right? You’re sitting in one seat and you’re kind of frozen, for 45 minutes or an hour. Both experiences are about paying a certain kind of attention. If you have to sit in an audience for some time, with your phone off, quiet, looking, that’s a really long time. What do you see, when you see that painting from so far away? You see shifts in the lighting design, right? There are so many different moments, with different lighting scenarios, in Pastoral, as an example. You’re also not only seeing the backdrop-as-painting from far away, but you’re also seeing it from a particular angle. You might be on the left side of the theater, or you might be sitting on the right side. You have a particular, very specific view, and you’re stuck watching it… [Laughs] Well, hopefully it’s not torture, but you get to see it evolve with all the dance and the music and all the lighting scenarios that change, all these ephemeral things that happen around the painting, which is kind of fixed. Well, the curtains move, and the painted flats: one of them gets suspended from the sky. So there’s movement happening within the paintings as well.
When you’re in a gallery or a museum, you walk in and you’re more free. You have your own schedule. You don’t have to sit down for a whole hour. You can move as close as you want, up to, like, three inches away from the painting if you really want to, and you can move around, but you also are in charge of your own attention span. You can stay an hour if you want, or you can look at the painting for two seconds and decide you want to leave. I won’t say one way is better than the other. They’re two different…attention-span muscles…being exercised, in different ways.
C-P: When you found yourself pulled into the dance world, was part of your process to investigate any of the histories of set design? I mean, there are some, like the Rauschenberg-Cunningham collaboration, that are so famous that you’ll learn about them even if you aren’t studying the performing arts, but was there anything that you found interesting or surprising or helpful about how artists had designed for dance before?
SC: Hm. Interesting or surprising? No… I mean, there’s always something to learn, for sure. Before I was interested in the ’60s and ’70s and the Rauschenberg-Cunningham-Cage world, I was interested in the early 20th century and the experiments of, like, the the Dada artists, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and her costumes, [Fernand] Léger’s stage designs and costumes, the Ballets Russes and the Ballets Suédois… The teens and the twenties were fruitful times for that kind of cross-pollination. In the research that I did, I focused more on ways of construction, how to build simple stage flats, and I’ve been doing a lot of that in my studio. I’ll make maquettes for a particular flat or backdrop I want to have moved around, but I’ll do it at half scale, so I’ve been building these big, cardboard objects and I’ll wonder sometimes if I’m using the same techniques they used back in the twenties. [Laughs]
C-P: Maybe!
SC: Yeah, I don’t know. Probably! Pam and I also did a recent collaboration with Paul Taylor Dance Company called Messengers, Maidens and the End of Something Else. One of the things we were looking at is Martha Graham and [Isamu] Noguchi, right? We went to see a few Martha Graham performances together — I was familiar with those collaborations already, and so was she — but we watched them again onstage and we both really loved the way that [Graham] and Noguchi used handheld props and headpieces and things like that. There’s a Paul Taylor work called Sunset with a ballet barre in the set design by Alex Katz and Pam really wanted to use a barre. She said, “I know I want to have a barre and I know I want to use Death and the Maiden,” the Schubert, so we started with that. And one of the things I had always wanted to do was painted [theatrical] wings. I liked the idea of using the wings as backdrops — in having the margins be more the focus, rather than something central. So I designed these, what, eight-foot by thirty-foot-high paintings that almost look like the edges of paintings sticking out of a rack, with a barre as our nod to Noguchi, though it isn’t like a geometric barre. It’s a more loopy, wiggly barre with a kind of flame on top, and it’s painted red, and she, Pam, has the dancers interacting with the barre, moving it, flipping it around, leaning on it and dancing on it, and so on.
C-P: When Jerome Robbins did his version of Afternoon of a Faun, he set it in a dance studio and there’s a barre in the set for that production as well.
SC: Oh yeah?
C-P: Yeah, and what everyone figures out at some point while they’re watching that work, it’s choreographed such that the stage opening, the fourth wall, is a mirror.
SC: Ah! Okay.
C-P: So they’re watching themselves in the mirror, they’re watching each other in the mirror, but we’re looking at them, through the mirror. It’s interesting, and totally different from the Ballets Russes Afternoon of a Faun. Anyway, when you’re making work by assembling pieces — I’m thinking about mosaic and tile, work with quilted qualities, collage: Does that relate for you in any way to the passage of time, like dance and music do? Are they collections of moments, versus one painted canvas, for example, where one surface holds the entire image? I think of such paintings as more documentary in nature, more about capturing different gestures and holding them together, in one frame. One moment.
SC: I wouldn’t think of it in that way but that’s an interesting idea, an interesting way to think about my paintings. Some of those are made by connecting different painted pieces of canvas together, with a sewing machine and thread, right? A lot of those parts that are connected come from different places and times. There might be a bunch of green that I painted maybe three years ago or, maybe, I cut up another painting and I put those shapes aside, because they weren’t working with what I was making then, but I wanted to, like, hold on to them for future projects. So I’ve got all these piles of shapes and colors in my studio that come from various times and places and, when I’m working on something new, I usually work on a big dropcloth on the floor, and I kind of fling shapes around on the ground, very physically, with my body, like, I’m picking up shapes and moving them around and leaning and kneeling and rearranging and composing in a very physical manner, and then that gets frozen and stitched and put together, and so, yeah, there is that sense of history and time that’s embedded in the material itself. It’s interesting to think about it as a dance, in a way. I hadn’t considered that before. I should think more about that.
C-P: I ask because I had a dance practice myself. I was in a lot of work and I choreographed some work. I always thought it was interesting when a movement phrase that was built the first day of a four-week process ended up stitched to a movement phrase that got finished the day before the premiere. As a dancer, when you’re moving through that sort of sequence, you’re like, For three seconds, I’m in the beginning of this process and then, for the next three seconds, I’m at the end of this process. You get the embodied experience of moving through something that you’re really familiar with, that you’ve practiced so much you don’t even have to think about it anymore, and then you move right into this other realm that’s just as unfamiliar. You have to actively try to remember what you’re doing, because the material is so new. That’s one of the ways that time and chronology can get scrambled up through choreography. That can be both interesting and almost disorienting. But, to go back to these scraps and artifacts from your previous projects: Do you have a filing system? Do you, like, store all the green pieces together?
SC: No, it’s pretty messy. [Laughs]
C-P: You have more of a mental map of where things are.
SC: Yeah, basically.
C-P: I’m sure you’re busy so, just to wrap up: As of today, what role do you want theatrical productions and performing arts collaborations to play in your career more broadly?
SC: I’d love to do more. They’re stimulating for me. I find it stimulating working with other kinds of cultural producers, in other zones of production, in dance, in music. Yes. Not only are the audiences different, everything is different. The techniques are different. The outcomes are different. The financial support structures are different. It’s like going to a new planet, right? Normally, I’m working in my studio, most of the time on my own, or I’m going to visual art shows and I’m in dialogue with other artists, and that’s great. But when I meet with choreographers and composers, the conversations are a lot more surprising. I find I’m learning a lot about composition, about duration, about lots of things. Working with Pam and Caroline has been, like, one of the best things that’s happened to my work as a painter. I think it’s changing my work. A lot.
C-P: Are you attending performances more often than you used to?
SC: I am, yes, but it’s also research, so it’s a write-off. [Laughs] So I feel very free to buy tickets to anything, to any dance performance around the city, and there’s so much going on in New York all the time. There’s always something to see and then, the more I go out, the more I meet and get to know people in that world. I’d love to have a side hustle as a set designer.
C-P: What else are you exploring and thinking about? What’s in the works?
SC: I’ve got a lot going on… Let’s see: We’ve got Pastoral at the Barbican and then we’ve got Messengers, Maidens and the End of Something Else at Lincoln Center in November. In March, I’m going to make an art installation at the Barcelona Pavilion, the Mies van der Rohe. I’m doing large-scale paintings and sculptures that are based on the sculptures that I made for Garden Blue, actually, but using painted aluminum. They’re outdoor sculptures now, but the same forms, so I’m curious to see how they’re going to feel as sculptures instead of stage objects. Again, it’ll be in the difference in how they’re constructed, in how they’re viewed, in how they’re manipulated. And then, after that, I have a big show in Berlin, at Galerie Max Hetzler, and that’s in May. I’m gonna show paintings and sculptures there. So, a little bit of everything: dance, sculpture, painting…
C-P: That’s exciting. I feel like the Barcelona Pavilion is simpatico with your work in that it’s all about the materials, and the nature of those materials, and how they’re combined in space. I can see that building being an appropriate site for your work.
SC: Yeah! Thanks. I’m looking forward to working with the space itself, with its extreme horizontality, and the way it’s kind of perched up… There’s a big plaza or, I guess, square that’s open to the public, where there’s a lot of people milling around, but then the pavilion itself is kind of raised, I don’t know, like three meters up. So it already has this stage-like feeling to it. Plus those red velvet curtains relate to the stage so much, too. I think a lot of that space is about hardness — glass, steel, stone, those hard, cold, strong materials — but I’m kind of injecting a softness into it. The paintings are very soft and I’m showing an embroidery that’s very soft. The sculptures have a kind of ephemeral feeling to them as well. There’s a lot of softness and curve going on. I think it’ll look good.
Zachary Whittenburg