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Choreographic Innovation at the Pillow

IMAGE: The Story of Jacob's Pillow, pamphlet produced by Jacob’s Pillow in 1969.

LINKED ARCHIVAL MATERIAL: To read The Story of Jacob's Pillow online, please click on the image. 

Ted Shawn bought Jacob’s Pillow in 1931 as an artistic retreat, and since its nascent stages, the Pillow has served as a home for artistic experimentation and creation. The grounds were the site in which Ted Shawn founded and based Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, over the course of the company’s seven-year tenure 1933-1940. The annual famed summer Dance Festival descends from a series of “Tea Lecture Demonstrations” that Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers used as a means to present their work to the public and earn a living. As the Pillow has grown and expanded in the nine decades since its founding, the site has played host to numerous choreographers in residence, commissioned a number of works, and also been the site of choreographic and company debuts. 

Choreographic Innovation at the Pillow provides a small glimpse as to how Jacob’s Pillow has been a site for dancemakers to create and develop their work. This exhibition is by no means a complete inventory of all the works which have been created and premiered at the Pillow, nor a listing of the many artists who have made and shown work; the Pillow’s long history as a site for dancemaking renders that almost impossible. Rather, what I hope this particular selection of archival materials brings forward is insight into the multiple ways choreographic innovation has manifested at the Pillow over the years, and what is possible when dancemaking is given a space to develop.   

Choreographic Innovation at the Pillow was curated by Emma Clarke as part of a master’s practicum with the Jacob’s Pillow Archives in 2021. My sincere thanks to Norton Owen and Patsy Gay for their invaluable support and insight.

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