This past summer, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket hosted nearly 40 performances and events over its nine-week summer season. The summer festival included performances, of course, as well as public dance classes, workshops, and talks. The Pillow also has world-renowned summer dance intensives for aspiring professional dancers and a dance archive that is second-to-none. The Pillow is so much more than just a mecca for dance and dance culture in the summer, however. It is an institution that promotes dance and dance education in the Berkshires, and supports and nurtures artists and choreographers, all year round.
For many years, for example, the Pillow has had a Community Engagement Department, which runs throughout the year, and among its other programs, a Curriculum in Motion™ program in the Berkshire County Public Schools and other school systems. This program brings dance and movement classes to elementary school students. Additionally, students are invited to the Pillow to tour the facility, experience the events happening there, and, of course, look at some of what is in the Pillow Archives. These community outreach programs remain largely unheralded, but they are nonetheless an important and vibrant part of the cultural and educational fabric of the Berkshire community during the year.
Additionally, back in 2017, the Pillow launched the “Pillow Lab” residency program, a choreography and performance incubator for creative artists. Last month, the Pillow announced the 10 recipients of the 2024–2025 Pillow Lab residencies. According to Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge, with the construction of the winterized and state-of-the-art Perles Family Studio and performance space in 2017, the intention all along was to bring more year-round programming to the Pillow. And, fulfilling that mission, the Pillow Lab has grown in its scope, its reach, and its funding each year since inception. The breadth of the funding is particularly impressive, coming from an extremely wide variety of sources, including the Pillow; individual family endowments and trusts; dance-focused institutions such as The Yard and The Joyce Theater; and both local and international foundations such as the Catskill Mountain Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
This year, the 10 Pillow Lab residencies will run through the winter, from October 2024 to April 2025. The Pillow thus remains a year-round retreat and refuge for artists, precisely what Ted Shawn himself used it for and envisioned for other artists when, in 1931, he bought the farm in Becket that became the Pillow.
The Pillow Lab residencies offer full support to artists, and their collaborators, in the form of 24-hour access to the Perles studio, housing, and even monetary compensation, for 10 days to two weeks, to allow the artists to focus without distraction on their projects and creative ideas, usually at the early stages thereof. Tatge notes that the Pillow “cares very little about what” the artists will be working on, and there is “no expectation of an end result.” The residencies grant the artists free rein in their creative investigation. One imagines that because the artists are pretty much unconditionally supported, they may feel more open to exploring uncharted territory, and the material generated might therefore be entirely original and ground-breaking.
This year’s Pillow Lab recipients come from a wide variety of backgrounds and from across the gender spectrum. In harmony with Ted Shawn’s vision, the work generated will represent the full range of dance, movement, and performance genres; the artists have backgrounds that encompass ballet, Broadway, tap, Native American, Native Hawaiian, jazz, and traditional modern, among other forms. Some artists have concentrated technology backgrounds, including robotics and artificial intelligence. The recipients are from the United States and around the world and have diverse cultural and personal histories. For example, the first residency will be Hélène Simoneau Danse. Simoneau is a French-Canadian choreographer who will use her residency, which begins this week, to work on a new work which explores “the desire to be included, the consequences of exclusion, survival, and the effects of being ostracized.” The closing resident artist, in April 2025, will be Rosy Simas of the Seneca Nation, Heron Clan. Simas, who creates with a team of Native and BIPOC artists, works with personal and collective identity themes involving family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. And the eight residencies in between will investigate a remarkably broad spectrum of conceptual artistry and performance, including a research residency with former New York City Ballet dancer Emily Coates, working with Ain Gordon (direction and dramaturgy), Derek Lucci (performer), and Charles Burnham (composer). These artists will work on Coates’ new performance project, which draws on George Balanchine’s brief history in New England to reflect on how the body and spirit of a choreographer scatters, living on in unexpected places.
Because the Pillow Labs are not focused on outcome, there are no formal performances at the end of each residency. Rather, most of the artists who are developing performance work choose to have an informal, invited work-in-progress showing. This allows the artists to get outside reactions and feedback, always helpful to the creative process. And although the success of the Pillow Labs is not measured by public approval, it is of course always encouraging when the fruits of a residency result in a piece which enriches our culture and expands our minds, as in, for example, the Camille A. Brown & Dancers piece “I AM.” That piece, which began in a Pillow Lab residency, was performed this summer at the Ted Shawn Theatre at the Pillow and has received wide and very deserving public acclaim. Brown’s piece is not the first work to come out of a Pillow Lab residency and garner acclaim; nor will it be the last.
The Berkshires is known worldwide as a performance-arts and cultural hub in the summer, with the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival being an integral part. The Pillow is somewhat less well known as a dance educator working with public schools during the year, and perhaps even less well known as a year-round incubator of creative artists, dance, and performance. However, the Pillow is in fact a vital part of the cultural fabric of the Berkshire community all year round, and, happily, the ongoing mission of the Pillow is to have that year-round community impact and involvement continue to grow.
