T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is full of music and movement. The players, such as they are, slip, slide, shake, tumble, wrestle, leap, kick, whirl, fold and kneel. There are lines like stage directions: ‘stillness’, ‘quick now’, ‘the dancers are all gone under the hill’. In her rendering of Four Quartets, the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz has denied reviewers the satisfaction of ‘Eliot in leotards’ jokes. Her dancers wear diaphanous ruched onesies. No Cats spandex here.
In collaboration with the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and the New York artist Brice Marsden, Tanowitz’s Four Quartets is a remarkable recasting of Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’ and ‘Little Gidding’ — which were collected in one sequence in 1943. Four Quartets succeeds in the way that Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, a triple bill inspired by Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves, did in 2015. Not by a literal acting out of prose or poetry, but by responding to mood and tone. Tanowitz has the Eliot rhythms right. The results may be uneven — some parts are dung and death, some fire and rose — but the intelligent, inspired translation from page to stage is electrifying. The actress Kathleen Chalfant reads the Quartets in a voice like salted caramel: rich, molten and gravelled. She guides you to the wit, the pathos, bathos and silences. There are tricks and winks. At the lines ‘As, in a theatre,/ The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed/ With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness’ the set is dismantled, the backstage left bare and black. There is a wonderful passage of dancing to accompany ‘the river/ Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed and intractable’. The movement of the dancers becomes inexorable, lapping, tidal.
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