Becket — Jacob’s Pillow comes alive most visibly for its Summer Dance Festival, but the 94-year-old institution in the Becket hills has in fact continued to operate year-round, more quietly, for almost 10 years now—through Pillow Lab, their winter residency program for dance artists, and through diverse community engagement programs. But with the launch of an inaugural spring season, 2025 into 2026 will see Jacob’s Pillow expand, for the first time in its history, into a year-round public venue for dance audiences, too.
“When we built the new [Doris Duke Theater], we knew that we wanted to be able to offer more performances for our audience,” Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge told the Berkshire Edge. “We know that there’s an appetite; not only have more people moved here year-round, but we want to collaborate with other arts and cultural organizations that are seeking to bring tourist traffic here beyond the summer months.” Last fall, they brought Caleb Teicher and Nic Gareiss for a nearly sold-out fall pilot performance in the Duke. “People were just so excited to be at the Pillow in the month of October, and we were thrilled at the size of the audience and the feeling of the Duke. It’s such an intimate space. People want to be in community right now.”
Continuing the momentum, and following a successful first-ever week-long winter intensive for dancers in January, Jacob’s Pillow has announced two weekends of performances this spring. From April 24 through 26, Compañía Irene Rodríguez will perform the world premiere of “Flamenco Soul.” And from May 1 to 3, Hari Krishnan and his company inDANCE will return to Jacob’s Pillow to present “Rowdies in Love,” which is set to a modern soundscape by composer Niraj Chag, whom Krishnan has said “understands [his] choreographic schizophrenia.”
“Flamenco Soul,” noted Pillow Public Relations and Communications Coordinator Kendall Lockhart, promises to be an especially intimate performance, as Compañía Irene Rodríguez will present a solo performance to music by a live three-person ensemble. Tatge agreed, explaining, “In percussive dance forms, many of those artists consider themselves to be musicians, and they are, because you cannot separate the dance from the music. What’s exciting about being in the Duke is … you’ll be able to see the footwork, and that proximity is going to be really exciting, along with the acoustics in the space.”
Cuban-born Irene Rodríguez made her debut at the Pillow in 2017 in the first festival that Tatge curated. “People who know her,” said Tatge, “will remember her fierce virtuosity, her ability to connect with an audience. She’s incredibly magnetic as a presence, so much so that … we brought her back for a week because there was such high demand for her return.”
Rodríguez started her company in Havana, Cuba, but now calls Tampa, Fla., home. “She’s always challenging herself; she is putting this world premiere together with a new company.” Tatge thinks “Flamenco Soul” will be “to a certain extent autobiographical.”
“Rowdies in Love” is the product of a Pillow Lab residency Hari Krishnan and inDANCE received in 2024. Hari, a choreographer and dance professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, approached Tatge about creating the ensemble piece for eight male dancers at Jacob’s Pillow. She explained, “This work in an exciting way recalls our founder, Ted Shawn, who bought the farm in Becket in 1933 as a home for his men dancers, where the company could create new works and then tour them around the world, and Hari, like Shawn, believes that there is something quintessential in male vocabulary and interaction that he captures in this work, which is all about male love.”
In a film from that Pillow Lab, Krishnan describes seeing a video of Ted Shawn’s “ethnic dances” as a child in Singapore. “I wasn’t sure what I was looking at,” he recalled, “but that seeped into my social consciousness and that, coupled with being born and raised in multicultural Singapore, gave me a broad outlook in terms of what else dance could encompass.” Krishnan fuses South Indian Bharatanatyam dance, a percussive form, with contemporary dance, through a queer lens. Interested in the “sociopolitical resonances,” Krishnan stated, “For dance and for art to live it must address contemporary concerns in a very urgent way, and this urgency can only be manifested if you break down silos and boxes.”
Both performances will happen in the Doris Duke Theater, which reopened this past July and which Tatge called “a reimagined theater for the 21st century,” with a state-of-the-art spatial sound system, full lobby and gallery spaces, and “much better amenities for the artists and staff.” “It feels similar to the original Duke” when set up traditionally, Tatge thinks, but added, “What this theater is known for is its incredible flexibility; we can configure the space in any way an artist wants.”
Additionally, the Pillow will be launching two online courses open to dance enthusiasts of all experience levels. One will look to the past, drawing on Jacob’s Pillow’s extensive archives, while the other will preview the approaching summer season. Seeking to expand access and build on the Pillow’s online presence during the pandemic, Kendall Lockhart explained, “This is a new development that we’re excited to bring to people who may never be able to set foot at the Pillow.”
Dance History 101 will run from March 17 through April 21 led by Pillow alum and former editor of Dance Magazine Wendy Perron. Lockhart said it would be an excellent opportunity to learn about dance pioneers like Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham. As Tatge expressed, “We have some of the most important dance archives in the world. The idea that we are going to have an online course that can be accessed by anyone in the world, that teaches the fundamentals of dance history using the Pillow archives as text, I think is really exciting.”
Experiencing Dance, running from April 28 through June 2, connects audiences to the Pillow’s upcoming programming, said Lockhart, addressing ways to experience and interpret dance as an audience member. “It can be hard sometimes; dance, we always say, is open to interpretation, but there can be a method to perceiving it.” Tatge noted, “You can’t cover everything, of course, but you can have an understanding of ‘what are some of the questions I might ask?’ or learn some vocabulary that will help you enter into the work. This is what [instructor] Kate Mattingly will bring us into, using as the course’s subject matter some of the works that are coming this summer.”
People can read more about the spring artists and online courses as well as buy tickets on Jacob Pillow’s website.
