At Jacob's Pillow, a performance is just the beginning. The 94th Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival finds the Berkshire campus alive with activity well beyond its stages.
Set on a 225-acre National Historic Landmark, the Pillow invites visitors to experience dance in many forms through performances, rehearsals, exhibitions, movement classes, artist post-show talks, conversations with scholars, community gatherings, local dance performances, and engagement with an internationally recognized dance archive.
The Archives offer a vital point of entry into the history of dance, with opportunities for visitors to explore films, photographs, documents, and materials that preserve the stories of artists and companies across generations.
Through Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive, an ever-growing collection of articles and dance videos filmed at the Pillow from the 1930s to today, audiences can explore the artists and performances that have shaped the festival’s history.
The world's longest-running dance festival is also home to a highly regarded dance school where students receive rigorous training, create and present choreography, and perform for public audiences. Many alumni have gone on to distinguished careers throughout the dance world.
Together, the performances, Archives, School, exhibitions, and public programs create an environment where audiences encounter not only the finished work, but the process, history, and people behind it.
Among the August offerings are the Martha Graham Dance Company in its centennial year, San Francisco Ballet returning after a seventy-year absence with the Albany Symphony, tap artist and vocalist Brinae Ali, Ballet Hispánico, Huang Yi with his dancing robots, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago closing the season on Aug. 30. These join late July and early August productions by Gauthier Dance, Brian Brooks Moving Company, UFly Mothership, and KaJe Movement Collective.
Beyond the stages, visitors can explore exhibitions including Illuminating the American Experience: Groundbreaking U.S. Women in Dance, Martha Graham: Call to Action, and Parable of the Portals: The Acorn Archives; experience Art Omi: Dance | 20 Years of International Exchange; attend the Indigenous Fire Pit Gathering and Community Day; and encounter local artists throughout the campus.
"The exhibition program," Tatge said, "really serves to put the art that people are seeing into a greater context."
Jacob's Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pam Tatge finds the spirit of the Pillow in moments of connection.
She recalled watching a student leave the Ted Shawn Theatre speechless, "trying to grapple with the beauty of what they've just seen." She spoke of friends recognizing one another across the campus after a long winter apart, an artist entering the Doris Duke Theatre for the first time and seeing the possibilities of what that space enables, and an intern taking charge of a situation and embodying the values of the institution.
"There are so many moments like that," she said.
Those encounters are inseparable from the environment itself. At Jacob's Pillow, dance exists in conversation with history, scholarship, the natural landscape, and the community that has gathered here for nearly a century.
That attention to history extends to the land itself. The Indigenous Fire Pit Gathering recognizes the many histories held by the grounds, including the history of the Mohican people and other Tribal Nations whose presence continues across Turtle Island. Designed by Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., the gathering connects visitors with the practices, rituals, and knowledge of the Nipmuc Nation.
"All of these activities together make this a festival with depth and breadth and context," Tatge said, "that I think no other place in the world when you see dance has to offer."
Long before conversations around dance became common, Jacob's Pillow founder Ted Shawn believed audiences needed a point of entry into the modern dance he was pioneering. Today, the Pillow continues to encourage curiosity, giving audiences opportunities to learn more about the work and why a performance matters.
Artists also benefit from these encounters.
"Artists often create in great isolation," Tatge said.
The opportunity to encounter the audience for whom they created the work is an important part of that exchange.
"For anyone who comes to the Pillow in August," she said, "what I hope stays with them, what I hope they remember, is that it was a place where they were astonished, where they discovered something new, where they felt the warmth and care of our staff, who are there to steward them through an experience that we hope will last a lifetime."
Catherine Tharin is a choreographer, writer, curator, and educator. Her writing on dance has appeared in The Dance Enthusiast, Interlocutor, Side of Culture, and the Boston Globe. Tharin currently curates The Dance Series at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY, and dance film at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY.
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