Live, public dance performances have finally returned to Jacob’s Pillow.
Week 1 of the 2021 Festival brought a tap dance takeover by the remarkable dancers and musicians of Dorrance Dance, who performed on the Henry J. Leir outdoor stage as well as all around the Pillow campus, finding unique ways to explore the property that led audiences on a roving journey that showcased the grounds in a never-before-seen (nor-heard) way.
We were also proud to host an in-person workshop led by Dorrance Dance, an onsite PillowTalk with writer Wendy Perron, and an online PillowTalk with South African artist William Kentridge. We presented The School at Jacob’s Pillow Performance Ensemble in a livestream show on Saturday, in which students from the Contemporary Ballet program provided an inside look at The School experience. And visitors to Blake’s Barn and the Archives found an opportunity to examine all the Pillow’s performance spaces, past and present, in the new exhibit “Build Me a Theater.”
These and many other offerings in our summer-long festival are garnering some strong headlines and positive press. Here are some recent media highlights.
JACOB’S PILLOW IN THE NEWS
“Over the past year and a half, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival has faced greater challenges than the weather. Last summer, for the first time in its then-88-year history, the festival was forced to cancel all performances in its bucolic home here in the Berkshires. Last November, with the pandemic still raging, one of the festival’s two theaters was destroyed in a fire. Jacob’s Pillow has bounced back, scheduling a full summer season of performances, both on-site and online. But the pandemic isn’t over, so all the on-site shows are outdoors … It was a happy reintroduction.”
— Brian Seibert, The New York Times. July 2, 2021 [full article]
“2021 will be a season like none before it … The festival will feature commissioned works and world premieres, including performances created specifically for the Pillow’s forested campus. The line-up gives a platform to hundreds of artists whose performance opportunities over the last year were deeply curtailed, if not entirely shutdown.”
— Felix Carroll, The Berkshire Eagle. July 2, 2021 [full article]
“Tap phenom Michelle Dorrance and her uber-talented, ever-popular company take over Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for five days. An outdoor Leir Stage program features the world premiere of a full-ensemble work by Nicholas Van Young with original live music. The work takes inspiration from the idea of creating order out of chaos, reflecting the past year’s pandemic confusion and isolation.”
— Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe. June 24, 2021 [full article]
“Earlier this spring, [Michelle] Dorrance and other members of the company’s leadership came to the 220-acre campus to scout locations for this roaming piece, which they say is meant to evoke feelings of loss, community and our attempts — both successful and not — to communicate … “We are, of course, experiencing these things of defining communication in isolation and being so close to someone and still entirely isolated from them and not being able to communicate with them” … The abstract beauty of a performance, Dorrance said, is that the audience can decide the meaning for itself.”
— Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post. June 26, 2021 [full article]
Read more recent press coverage of Jacob’s Pillow in Dance Magazine and on MassLive, WGBH, Spectrum News 1, and BroadwayWorld.
Written by Hunter Styles. Published July 2021.
Explore Festival 2021
This summer features intimate, distanced ticketed performances on our outdoor stage, workshops, PillowTalks, site-specific events, and online streaming.
