I’m standing in a gender-neutral bathroom thinking about how I might start writing about this sylvan, curious, almost cultish dance venue in the Berkshires and then I look up. In front of me is a yellowing poster for the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival from 1965, with foam-rubber seats for $4 and shows featuring the Jacob’s Pillow Dancers and there, right beside, “Six American Indian Dancers”.
That same evening I join a small crowd listening to drums and singing, a hypnotic chanting, as members of the Mohican community, who were forced out of these lands centuries ago, celebrate the opening of a fire pit designed by Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr (a member of the local Nipmuc people), alongside a new $30mn dance theatre.
Until 1978, astonishingly, Indigenous rituals were prohibited in the US. So it was a touching, slightly jarring moment; the displaced Mohicans invited back for a little moment of “reconciliation”.
Ted Shawn founded Jacob’s Pillow deep in the Berkshires, the rolling New England landscape that really does look oddly English, in 1933. His “Men Dancers”, an all-male dance troupe, performed in a barn and within a decade the entrepreneurial Shawn had built the first purpose-built theatre for dance in the USA. It’s a brutally simple building, a timber shed designed by local architect Joseph Franz. But it remains perhaps the nation’s most important venue for modern dance.
It is an eccentric place, a site which looks more like a summer camp or a Steiner forest school than a cultural centre. Its buildings are rough and ad hoc, a shaggy collection of timber huts, booths, sheds and barns, although occasionally they reveal themselves to be something more, their huge doors flung open affording glimpses of practice and performance.
In 2020, one of the theatres on site burnt down and it has now been replaced by the more contemporary, though still quite self-effacing, Doris Duke Theatre, designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo. This new structure is the first on the site not to really resemble a barn. Instead its streamlined, curved corners and a broad arcade make it something different, a more contemporary presence but one still super-keen to blend in.
Mecanoo, founded by Francine Houben, emerged from the moment when contemporary architecture was being kicked in the backside by the Dutch, from Rem Koolhaas to MVRDV, smart, cultured designers who navigated high and low culture, the popular and the intellectual. But Houben is a modest character, endearingly unpretentious. There is nothing flashy here: just a simple box with chamfered corners. There are a couple of things I balked at: the columns, for instance, connect to the ground via galvanised slim steel shoes, so that the building seems somehow deracinated. The curving corners feel a little odd too, more suburban than rural. But these are issues of taste rather than quality. This, after all, is a $30mn building in an age of half-a-billion-dollar blockbusters.
Inside, retractable seating sits beneath a technical grid, its underside clad in timber to enhance the cigar boxiness of it all. It seats between 220 and 400. That it is timber is not just an homage to its neighbours. The wood, according to Jacob’s Pillow archivist Norton Owen, allows the audience to feel the dancers, to sense every jump. Small vibrations are carried through the floors and walls so that it seems to come alive with dance.
Intriguingly this is almost exactly how the Mohicans talked about dance themselves. At the moving land acknowledgment, Shawn Stevens (“Red Eagle”), a member of the Stockbridge Munsee band of Mohicans, explains how “Dance is about energy and returning energy to the earth, so that we all feel it together.” It is as eloquent an encapsulation of an architecture of dance as you can imagine.
If I mentioned that Jacob’s Pillow has a slight tinge of cultishness, it is not entirely an insult. There is a constant buzz, thanks perhaps to the proximity of the students, teachers, technicians and audiences. This is a place of freedom in a surveilled society. Anyone can wander in and feel part of it, watching the dancers roaming around the structures like lithe beasts. The devotion to the cause here is evangelical. Everyone who works here tells you how much they love it, how wonderful a place it is, how full of reverence they are for its history. I can’t help approaching a few Mohican stragglers after the ceremony is over to wonder if the acknowledgment might not feel a little patronising (no one here is giving any land back), and even then I only get a gush of gratitude.
I do wonder, then, if the new building is a little too slick. The old barns here are still in use and they are wonderful, their beams, their lofty roof spaces, their walls and well-worn floors so redolent and seductive. But then the new theatre is also crammed with tech in a way they never could be.
AI and all that comes with it is the future, I am told here, which sounds odd to me as dance seems so visceral and embodied. Dancer and curator Katherine Helen Fisher has put on a show in the exhibition space that curves around the edge of the new theatre. I find it unsettling, a slew of interactive images that place the viewer at the centre of an immersive digitality. In the midst of this low-tech retreat you find yourself suddenly surveilled again, captured in AI-generated images which are spewing out carbon from some grim data centre.
Still, this remains an enchanting place, with its haunted barns and shabby shacks and the occasional flash of high-tech present. At the end of my first evening here the site was permeated by the smoky smell of the firepit lit for the first time by StrongBearHeart to honour the land and the peoples who have occupied this place. Those cultures still linger, along with the echoing footsteps of the world’s great dancers.
jacobspillow.org
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