Pam Tanowitz’s most ambitious projects originate from Bard College’s Fisher Center, where this knotty postmodernist is choreographer-in-residence. These dances are ambitious not just in scope or prestige of partners (Brice Marden on sets, for example) but because they work against Tanowitz’s predilection for abstraction. In 2018, the challenge was T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Next was the ancient Song of Songs. For last summer’s Pastoral, the challenge from the canon was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” wherein the Enlightenment notion of nature and its peasant caretakers grows before our eyes, our ears. The choreographer is “using that music as a frame, but also erasing it,” she has explained. Tanowitz has set the dance to the symphony, but we won’t be hearing it. Instead, silence and a commissioned woodwind score by Caroline Shaw—whose music is invariably dense, like that of many of her successful contemporaries, but without being either insistent or static—takes Beethoven’s place. The textile artist and painter Sarah Crowner has applied her biomorphic designs in jewel hues to the sets. Each of these astounding artists is worth showing up for; together, Crowner asks, “can we make our mediums more alive than they already are?” —Apollinaire Scherr