MAKING DANCE

THE PILLOW LAB PROVIDES A NECESSARY SPACE FOR ARTISTS TO CREATE.

By Anastasia Stanmeyer
March 4, 2022

IN 2017, DEBORAH GOFFE presented an early work-in-progress at a gathering of New England dance artists. They were the first group of witnesses, as she puts it, of the developing material. Prior to that, she says, it was a phantom piece—something that Goffe only imagined could be something. To have her peers put their eyes on it was a catalyst in the process. It set the work in motion.

Taylor Stanley, principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, will be in residence in mid-March and will perform at the Pillow July 27-31. GIONCARLO VALENTINE, COURTESY JACOB’S PILLOW

Five years later, Goffe has returned to the space, this time in residence at the Pillow Lab with the same work, in a much more advanced form. Liturgy|Order|Bridge is informed by her religious and spiritual upbringing, inspired by communal embodiment in the Black church and the absurdity of Fellini’s ecclesiastical fashion show. The modern dance piece is an attempt at building a liturgical frame with body movement and connecting with witnesses. She has presented the work six times, all in small portions, since 2017. She anticipates its completion by the end of the year.

It is within this extraordinary space—the 7,000-square-foot Perles Family Studio—where Goffe is reflecting, examining, and advancing her work. The generative power of nature matches the creative energy within these towering glass walls. Goffe, founder of Hartford-based collaborative dance theater company Scapegoat Garden, is one of eight artists in residence at the Pillow Lab, a year-round incubator of new works that supports dance artists during crucial development, research, and technical stages of choreography-driven projects. As associate professor of dance and performance curation at Hampshire College, Goffe has brought students to witness the presentations by other artists at the Pillow Lab. Now she is one of those artists doing the presenting.

Jacob’s Pillow obviously has a stake in the artists that they select for residencies. This summer—its 90th season which opens June 22—several Pillow Lab residents will be presenting their finished works at the newly renovated Ted Shawn Theatre. They include A.I.M by Kyle Abraham’s highly anticipated work, An Untitled Love, which was a Pillow co-commission developed over two Pillow Lab residencies as an exploration of love in the Black community, set to music by R&B legend D’Angelo (July 13-17); I Didn’t Come to Stay, performed by tap and live music dance company Music from the Sole, which celebrates tap’s Afro-diasporic roots (July 20-24); Dichotomous Being: An Evening of Taylor Stanley (July 27-31), with Stanley’s third Pillow Lab residency happening in mid-March; and Liz Lerman’s Wicked Bodies, a multidisciplinary piece designed specifically for a unique setting at Jacob’s Pillow, taking inspiration from the powerful and grotesque portrayal of witches throughout history (Aug. 10-14). Irene Rodríguez, who debuted at the Pillow in 2017, will be in residence in June for a new work that will premiere at the Pillow’s Season Opening Gala on June 18. Born in Cuba and settled recently in the U.S., Rodríguez is a leading international figure of Spanish dance and choreography.

Deborah Goffe performs with collaborators. Founder of Hartford-based collaborative dance theater company Scapegoat Garden, Goffe is one of eight artists in residence at the Pillow Lab. PETER RAPER, COURTESY JACOB’S PILLOW

These artists residencies are exactly why Jacob’s Pillow was created. Since its inception in 1932, the Pillow’s rural location in Becket has been a safe place for dancers to develop works, when founder Ted Shawn created a place of refuge and retreat for himself and his Men Dancers. When Pamela Tatge became artistic director in April 2016, she hired an outside consultant to interview 35 choreographers about what they thought the Pillow should be doing. They talked about research and development time in the form of residencies. It was out of that study that the Pillow Lab was born and became one of three anchors of “Vision 22,” the strategic plan from 2017 to 2022. The three goals of the plan have been to boost the artistic core, to expand community engagement, and to renew campus facilities that began with the Perles Family Studio, home of the Pillow Lab.

In 2020—when many accelerated their work in terms of equity, diversity, inclusion, and access—Tatge decided to expand the Pillow Lab curatorial team beyond herself, and associate curators Melanie George and Ali Rosa-Salas were named. George is an educator, dramaturg, choreographer, scholar, and certified movement analyst who is also the Pillow’s director of artists initiatives. Ali Rosa-Salas is a curator of live performance, music, and visual art. “I have artists who I’m passionate about,” says Tatge. “Who are these two curators passionate about? Who do they believe should be amplified and celebrated at a place like Jacob’s Pillow? Both of them are very conscious about who hasn’t been represented in our programming. To have two people who can speak about why an artist matters and do that in a collaborative way has been terrifically exciting to me. I do believe that we are going to be a more future-leaning organization because of their input and expertise.”

The move not only strengthened the dance festival’s ability to identify new voices in the field, it also widened the perspectives involved in programmatic decision-making.

The Pillow Lab aligns with Tatge’s goal of making Jacob’s Pillow a year-round festival. Supporting residencies is critical, especially during the last few years when being a working artist has been even more challenging. “Without this investment in residency time, we don’t have jobs,” says Tatge. “When the bubble residencies started in October of 2020, we really realized that the economics of the Pillow Lab had to change. In other words, companies had nothing. So how were we going to rethink how we compensated artists? We found ourselves paying for testing, transportation, a daily rate for each collaborator, groceries to be delivered because we had contactless engagement with the companies. We have maintained that compensation level moving forward because we realized that this reckoning is about equity, as well.”

Jacob’s Pillow is able to maintain this approach with the support of The Mellon Foundation, which awarded the Pillow Lab $600,000 in June 2021 to continue its year-round bubble residencies for the development of new work, often a collaborative effort among artists.

CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN, COURTESY JACOB’S PILLOW

“There was a time in the 20th century where it was all about the individual artist’s vision, that sort of American individualism,” says George. “That’s not how contemporary art gets made anymore. It’s collaborative. And so what do you do when your collaborators live in different states or even different countries and have jobs in which they have to pay their bills? Rehearsal schedules are tight. You need that opportunity to be able to get away collectively and work on the thing and have it not come out of your own pocket, because, again, artists also aren’t paid enough.”

It’s not uncommon for a piece to have a three-year development span and have visited different institutions at different times based on what they need at that moment. Because of that, there are dance residencies all over the world, and the organizations that offer those residencies stay connected with one other. “There are different times within a process that the Pillow can be really super supportive to what artists are doing,” says George. “That’s what makes what we do unique. I don’t see us as being in competition with any other residency. We’re all part of the same field that we’re all trying to help everyone make better work.”

Works that are grown in the Pillow Lab, now in its fifth year, have gone on to be part of the national touring scene or the international touring scene. Reggie Wilson recently brought his Fist & Heel Performance Group to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to perform Power. It was developed over the course of one research residency, two Pillow Lab residencies and premiered at the Pillow in 2019. While here, Wilson and his creative team researched and were inspired by the Hancock Shaker Village archives, which included Shaker costumes, labeled seed packages and boxes, domestic artifacts, photographs, journals, letters, and manuscripts.

JOSH COE, COURTESY JACOB’S PILLOW

“We’re seeking to have a breadth and a range and varied representation of who we’re inviting and that extends across identity and movement genre and visibility within the field,” says Rosa-Salas. “Every stage of the process is important, especially in the beginning when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

The last time Goffe worked on her project was in February 2020, and she was close to reaching a conclusion with the piece. Then everything stopped—like it did for many other artists. The Pillow Lab residency has allowed her to immerse once again in her project with collaborators Lauren Horn, Arien Wilkerson (dance artists), and Abena Koomson-Davis (musician).

“It feels like it’s really about to launch, and that there’s still a lot we don’t know about it,” says Goffe as she she was finishing up her residency. “I’m building a path to the culmination of this project.”

GREG NESBITT

It’s an insular experience. Goffe’s group stayed in the Derby House on the Pillow campus. They saw each other in the kitchen in the morning and headed to the studio by 10 to begin by sharing movement practices, as well as voice elements. Then they took a lunch break and returned later in the afternoon to work until after dark, moving through sections, building their stamina back up, reviewing videotapes, sitting in a circle just talking. What’s important is the time, space, and control of this experience. There’s no pressure of starting and stopping. Everything is within walking distance. There’s a van that they could use—but the only big excursion they’ve done was to go grocery shopping.

“We keep saying that we’re going to go outlet shopping, but then we’re too tired,” jokes Goffe.

The Pillow Lab not only offers retreat time; it provides documentation and access to the archives. One key resource is Director of Preservation Norton Owen, who sets up a kiosk of materials that relate to the artists who have been to the Pillow before or what they’re working on now. The Pillow also works with Nel Shelby Productions in terms of live streaming, capturing, producing visual materials for the artists. The hours of recorded video don’t just get edited into a three- to five-minute video that Jacob’s Pillow posts on its website. The artists actually get all that raw footage. They also can tap into George’s dramaturg expertise.

Most importantly, the artists don’t have to worry about being evaluated by the public while at the Pillow Lab. At the end of the residency, an artist puts on a performance to a select group of Pillow members, as well as individuals from area colleges. During the pandemic, those performances have been live-streamed. The audience members change with each residency, depending on which college instructor wants to incorporate the visit into their syllabus. Area colleges involved in this include Bard, Williams, Smith, Springfield, UMass Amherst, Berkshire Community College, Mount Holyoke, and Tufts.

Another work on the verge of completion is Yes, And, which is being developed by Gesel Mason, artistic director of Gesel Mason Performance Projects and associate professor of dance and choreography at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. She is also director of MFA in dance and social justice at UT. She has spent time at Jacob’s Pillow in different capacities, but this is the first time she is there as an artist focused on her work. She’s excited to bring with her other artists who have never been there.

Deborah Goffe, here with collaborators, was in residence this winter at the Pillow.

The premiere of her piece is soon after the Pillow residency, at the Fuse Box in Austin from April 14-16. She has been working on Yes, And since 2019, when she was in residency at Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. She went to a thrift store and came across a ballgown—this beautiful, light-blue Grecian dress with rhinestones around the collar that was several sizes too big for her. She would put herself in different settings—driving around in a golf cart, eating pie, going to a mailbox, walking in the forest, stepping into a hot tub, rolling on a beach—all while wearing the dress. One day, she got into the shower to wash the sand off of her. “I just started crying. I wasn’t sad. I felt free. I felt available. I felt open. That release was my tears.” This character she embodied was named Josephine, and she was documented in photos and in video.

She has done several residencies with this project, creating different portals of possibilities. Installations have happened in Austin; Washington, D.C.; and Queens, New York. “When I go into spaces, I call these performance avatars. I feel like each of these locations has something to say,” she says. In each location, local voices, community voices, and creative voices are combined with her team which is the center of the installation. The core is made up of 10 people—herself, dancers, a dramaturg/actress, a technical director, a music composer, a costume designer, visual artists, a photographer, and videographer.

Mason is treating her residency at Jacob’s Pillow in the same way—as another site, another chapter, while at the same time fine-tuning the methodology. “I can’t ignore the location in the space that I’m in. Jacob’s Pillow will spill into the fabric of what Yes, And is. I’ll be primarily listening to the land. What does it mean to be in this space? What does it mean for our bodies to be in this forest? What is the knowledge that’s in the land, that’s in our bodies, that shows up when we’re in conversation with it?”

Mason is eager to be in residence at Jacob’s Pillow. “This is our time; we know why we’re here. We’ve made arrangements in our lives so that we can show up in a certain way, and we’re in this space together. It’s a real gift.” And she will bring with her the land, the wildness, the space of Jacob’s Pillow to other locations where she will perform.