Get To Know Caleb Teicher

Innovator, choreographer, musician, and “rhythm connoisseur,” (The New York Times) Caleb Teicher’s presence on stage is singular. With humor and wit, Teicher will bring their complex percussive soundscapes to their collaboration with Nic Gareiss this fall when Jacob’s Pillow presents Caleb Teicher & Nic Gareiss, October 24-26 in the Doris Duke Theatre. 

In this playful and innovative duo performance, Caleb and Nic move and sound together in ways that are at once funny, virtuosic, and uniquely their own. We asked Caleb to share a bit about their Pillow history, what it’s like to improvise in live performance, and to name a few moments that have made the dancers laugh out loud while on stage together.

Your relationship with the Pillow goes back several years now. Can you tell us a bit about your Pillow history?

I came to Jacob’s Pillow for the first time in 2010 as a student in the Tap Program. It was the very first Tap Program at The School, and it was also the first thing I did after graduating high school. 

And then I came back, I think almost every summer since then, for one thing or another. I performed in Chet Walker’s A Jazz Happening. I performed with Dorrance Dance on every single stage–on the Inside/Out stage (now Henry J. Leir Stage), at the old Doris Duke Theatre, at the Ted Shawn Theatre. I performed with The Chase Brock Experience and with The Bang Group and with my own company several times on literally every stage at the Pillow.

It feels like summer camp home for me. Most summers, I find myself at the Pillow for one reason or another and it’s always just such a beautiful place to be.

What are you looking forward to about your time at the Pillow this fall?

I haven’t been to Jacob’s Pillow in Autumn since 2016. It’s such a summer space for me. But of course it’s leaf peeping season. It’s the most beautiful time of year to be in the Berkshires. Leaves are changing, the air is crisp. You can hold an iced chai or something like that in your hands and walk around and feel kind of wistful.

All the environmental stuff aside, I’m actually really excited to perform with my dear, dear friend and collaborator, Nic Gareiss. This is one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on and I just think Nic is so singular, so talented, so inspiring as a dancer and musician. It’s going to be very special to share these four performances with Nic and with the audiences that come to experience our particular dynamic together.

What is it like collaborating with Nic?

Nic is one-of-a-kind. I met them 15 years ago. We were at a percussive dance retreat together, called the Beat Retreat, and I wasn’t really familiar with Nic’s background or Nic as a dancer, but we were kindred spirits. We have conversations and speak a language that’s all our own.

It’s just very special to play together. We’re making music and we’re dancing simultaneously, and there’s a way that I can improvise and dance with Nic that I can’t necessarily do with other percussive dancers I work with. There’s just something kind of special. It feels like it’s crackling at all the moments. It just feels like we’re having a very engaging, playful, flirtatious, delicate, powerful conversation every time we dance together.

How did you decide on the music for the work?

Nic and I brought forth ideas we had and some of them were in the abstracts, like, “we should do something where we do this,” or “we should do something where we don’t do that, we only do this.”’ And then we just try to find existing material–often quite old songs–that felt like they match the idea we wanted to explore. 

Nic has a completely different musical and dance background than I do, so it was fun to introduce songs that are so dear to me, and so dear to the Jazz tradition I come from, to Nic who’s not as familiar with that tradition.. He’d say, “oh this is a traditional fiddle tune,” and I’d say, “I don’t know any fiddle tunes.” I’ve learned to love these tunes through this collaboration. It’s very special when you learn a song not from hearing a recording, but just from hearing someone you work with sing it for you or play it for you.

Do you have a go-to hype song before performing?

I don’t. I love to sit in complete silence before performing. I like to get some space in my brain for things to just kind of echo.

It’s what allows the show to kind of crackle. I keep thinking of the word crackle. The show has a particular energy, a spark, and it feels electric.

Regarding the improvisation portion of the work, do you plan on surprising each other on stage?

Very little of the show is completely, totally set. The structure is pretty sturdy, it’s what allows the show to feel like the pacing is engaging for us as performers and for the audience as well, but the whole thing is kind of improvised based on how we feel in the moment and how we feel the audience feels in the moment. 

Some shows are sillier or funnier or more strange. And it’s because we’re music-ing and we’re dancing. We’re performing with the audience’s particular chemistry in mind. So we plan on surprising each other every time, but it’s kind of funny to say we plan on surprising each other. We just plan on doing whatever feels particularly exciting to us in the moment and often that’s something we’ve never done before.

And the same for the audience; we don’t have these old jokes that we just take out again and again. We are creating anew in front of the audience and with the audience each time. It’s what allows the show to kind of crackle. I keep thinking of the word crackle. The show has a particular energy, a spark, and it feels electric.

What have you learned about Appalachian culture that you hope the audience will take away?

I’ve been working in a particular idiom of music and dance for the past 15 years, even though it feels quite broad to me. There’s such a broad world out there of music and dance, and what I love about working with Nic is he always exposes me to something I’m not familiar with that has its own rich cultural lineage, tradition, history, and has its own present-day scene that is finding a way to play this music or do these dances responding to our time. 

So what I love is–Appalachian and clogging and flat footing, Irish step, English clog, other step dances from the North Atlantic region, United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland–they all have steep traditions, but also, they’re being done in 2025 and their people in conversation in the present day with these rich traditions. So I always come away learning something new, a new step, a new tune, a new way of moving and sounding through space. So I’m really excited to share that with audiences at the Pillow.

If you weren’t dancing, what would you be doing?

I have lots of ideas. There are a lot of things that make me happy. I got a yoga teaching certification a few years ago, I kind of side-quested too hard. I don’t have a lot of time to teach, but I really enjoy teaching yoga recreationally. I play a lot of piano these days, probably a couple hours each day.

I’d like to think maybe I’d get good enough and could make that something people pay me to do principally. I know I love working with people. I love contributing to things that allow people to feel hope and inspiration and connect to one another.

Nic and I really crack each other up. He’s very funny. I’m hilarious. And we often do things on stage to just kind of make each other giggle.

Any funny behind-the-scenes stories from this show’s process you’d like to share?

It’s funny on stage all the time. For whatever reason, Nic and I really crack each other up. He’s very funny. I’m hilarious. And we often do things on stage to just kind of make each other giggle.

There was a show where Nic ate a bag of chips on stage, which might make sense when you see the show. It might not. But then while trying to finish the bag of chips, he kind of spilled chips everywhere. And then the chips became part of the texture of the floor. So every time we went to dance on a particular part of the floor, you heard the crunch of potato chips. That’s quite fun.