The prolific, knotty postmodernist Pam Tanowitz reserves her most ambitious projects for Bard’s Fisher Center, where she is choreographer-in-residence. They’re ambitious not just in scope or prestige of partners (Brice Marden on sets, for example) but because they work against her predilection for abstraction. In 2018, the challenge was T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Next was the ancient Song of Songs. For this year’s Bard commission, the challenge from the canon is 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 explains. She 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, without being either insistent or static—takes Beethoven’s place. The textile artist and painter Sarah Crowther has applied her biomorphic designs in jewel hues to the sets. Each of these astounding artists is worth showing up for; together, Crowther asks, “Can we make our mediums more alive than they already are?” —Apollinaire Scherr