Summer Delight

• The longer you live, the older you get. Hmm. This not-exactly-apocalyptic statement refers  (obliquely) to recollection. When I attended Jacob’s Pillow’s 90th Anniversary Gala last week, memories crowded in. Sixty-eight years ago, I made my debut on the Pillow stage in Taken With Tongues: A Study in Fanaticism by Harriette Ann Gray. Crammed into two cars (or was it three?), we dancers and pianist Yale Marshall had driven all the way to the Pillow from the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School in Steamboat Springs, Colorado to share three programs with Ram Gopal and the American Mime Theatre. Ted Shawn, Jacob’s Pillow founder, introduced us to the audience from the stage. In 1954, air seeped through the cracks in the theater’s walls. 

My memories are fragmented—detailed flashes whose tentacles squirm out in search of anchorage. In charge of writers participating in New Dance Workshops at Connecticut College in the 1980s, I took my gang of fourteen or so to Saratoga Performing Arts and then to Jacob’s Pillow, after which they wrote and critiqued one another’s offerings. Later, some of those workshops took place at the Pillow, and the critics stayed in one of the slightly ramshackle cabins along George Carter Road and swam in Goose Pond.  

I drove to the Pillow on Saturday, June 18th, 2022, armed with Siri’s directions for a route I once knew well, parked in a small area designated for I forgot whom (press?), took a remembered shortcut, and ended up in the gigantic tent that was sitting on the Great Lawn, with a glass of wine in my hand, looking for Table 6 and choreographer-dancer Wendy Perron, who’d be coming home with me.

Whom did I talk to, whose name did I forget? I was delighted to run across my friend Norton Owen Director of Preservation. (at  https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org learn more). There were people I knew, people I had forgotten I knew, people I was happy to know, and people ready to take charge of me.  Projected films and slides chronicled the site’s history, background and familiar faces of    those who’d inhabited it (Michelle Dorrance, Trisha Brown, Nikolai Hubbe, et al). 

The program in the Ted Shawn Theatre began with references to both the Pillow’s school and to its history. Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s world premiere featured the site’s Contemporary Ballet. In only four days, Lopez Ochoa had expertly manipulated twenty-two Pillow students and former students (men and women) into pleasing patterns. And after Pamela Tatge, the Pillow’s Executive and Artistic Director, and Christopher Jones, chair of its Board of Trustees, had welcomed us, we watched Adam Weinert’s restaging of Shawn’s 1938 Dance of the Agesfor himself and nine performers (almost all male), beginning as immobile uncovered shapes. Brought to life, they dance to music by Jess Meeker, who accompanied classes at the Pillow for many years. In those earlier days, the men were more roughly hewn; they sent a firm message: dancing is not for sissies. No need for that now.

And then we saw (oh joy!) Sara Mearns and Gilbert Bolden III dancing four duets from Justin Peck’s 2015 Rodeo, set to the ravishingly tender “Saturday Night Waltz” from Aaron Copeland’s score for the original work. Premiered by American Ballet Theater in 1942, its choreographer, Agnes de Mille, danced the role of a girl who wanted to be one of the guys. (It was performed many years ago at Jacob’s Pillow, its music played by two pianists and conducted by Leonard Bernstein). As I wrote admiringly of Mearns recently, “she doesn’t play to the audience and seems always to have some sort of story running in her head.”  

There, Found, Here is another kind of celebration. The duet (by Alice Sheppard in collaboration with Laurel Lawson) from Kinetic Light’s Wired offers a question about virtuosity and how the word “dancer” can be defined.  The program also credits  a Flight Director (Catherine Nelson) and an Automation Operator (Yoni Kallai). The special wheelchairs in which the two powerful performers sit can fly, rotate, rise, fall, separate, and come together. And, oh lord, how the women do all those things—creating images of friendship, of trust, of strength!

Before the world premiere of Antidote,its choreographerSidi Larbi Cherkaoui received the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. As his piece begins, Ghalia Benali is onstage singing along with her recorded composition. Translated, its lyrics (by Al Suhrawardy the murdered) personify a lover: “He is my healing spell and my antidote.” The two dancers—Andrea “Drew” Bou Othmane and Robbie Moore—move antithetically to each other. Rugged, low to the ground, they harrow the air. Yet in the end, they’re close.

Jacob’s Pillow’s founder Ted Shawn and his wife Ruth St. Denis were accustomed to perform many styles of dance, some of them misleadingly called “ethnic.”  It’s suitable, then, that the closing number,My Roots, featured Irene Rodriguez (the piece, from the play No Turning Back, was created during a residency at the Pillow). Gowned in red, she stamps with intricately rhythmic fervor, while singer-composer Cristian Puig urges her on with clapping hands. Whew! 

In the middle of this program, those of us come to celebrate Jacob’s Pillow’s 90 years and to inaugurate the new Ted Shawn Theatre Stage, were taken from our seats to wend our way backstage and reappear onstage, grouped (the program tells me) by decades ranging from 1930 to 2010. There I was, standing with those from the 1950s, including Marianne Preger-Simon (from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company) and Carmen de Lavallade. Fortunately, Dante Puleo from the Limón Dance Company and Michael Novak from the Paul Taylor Dance Company kindly saw to it that I made it through the doors and up the truly difficult stairs to appear in the line that stretched across the stage, ready to bow as Tatge introduced each of us. Fame and fortune! And, yes, here was the wonderfully scarfed Mark Morris who had quickly stepped in and made our “choreography” a little more orderly. Practice makes perfect. Yes, we know. And didn’t we help each other across the grass to where our dinners awaited? I think that was Mark. You can tell my memory fades. . . .

But there I was. Table #6. Wendy Perron. Dinner. Lively conversation. Table hopping. And then, thank God, Wendy and me finding our car via cellphone flashlights, and she getting  Siri (or whomever) to guide us home again. 

What a day! Happy 90^thbirthday Jacob whoever-you-are.