How to Build a Festival

Every year, Jacob’s Pillow becomes a summer home for dance. Audiences from across the globe and from our home in the Berkshires experience a Festival season that feels expansive and meticulously considered. Artists and audiences alike get to see a beautiful range of dance–performances by beloved companies that call the Pillow home and emerging artists making their Pillow debut. But how does a Festival season come together?

Enter: the curatorial team. Made up by a triad of curators each year, the 2026 curatorial team was led by Artistic & Executive Director Pamela Tatge, Associate Artistic Director Kim Chan, and Associate Curator Melanie George. Each curator comes with their own distinct artistic sensibilities, and together, they strike the careful balance of the Pillow’s artistic identity, personal interests, and practical factors to build a Festival which sparks curiosity and sings to authenticity.

Curation at Jacob’s Pillow is an intentionally collaborative process, shaped by vision, building trust within audiences, and the realities of Pillow’s physical spaces. Since 2020, the curatorial process has been headed by a multi-person team to encourage discourse and different perspectives when making decisions, a model established by Tatge. In years prior, curation of the Festival and other programming landed almost exclusively on the Artistic & Executive Director.

“I decided it was no longer acceptable to have a sole gatekeeper at the Pillow,” Tatge said.

The decision to create a curatorial team was inspired by multi-disciplinary approaches in universities, and intended to generate dialogue and accountability among curators. This intention was all the more important in 2020, a moment in the arts field when conversations around access and representation were being brought to the forefront of decision making.

The result was a curatorial team made up of three distinct voices. Different generations, backgrounds, and artistic lenses strengthen the season, bringing a breadth and depth of the work being presented.

“If you have three people, you have to defend your choice. By defending the choice, you reaffirm to yourself why something is important,” Tatge said. “Each of us brought our passions… all of our lenses are different.”

This collaborative approach allows the curators to recognize not only the artists who have made Jacob’s Pillow an artistic home, but also artists from disciplines and backgrounds that aren’t represented in the Pillow’s Archives. In recent years, the Pillow has welcomed more social dance and street dance artists–like Social Tango Project in 2024, or The Center Will Not Hold: A Dorrance Dance Production in 2025.

When creating a season, the curators work alongside producers and production managers to build the Festival piece by piece, asking key questions that evaluate both the work’s artistic integrity and its practicality for the Pillow’s physical realities. Sometimes, physical constraints can be a major deciding factor.

“We could love it to death, but if it can’t work in our venue… we have to let go of that thing that we love,” Chan said.

When it comes to artistic integrity, Tatge and Chan echoed that a strong, authentic artistic voice is more important than anything else. To the curators, intention and the ability to transport an audience somewhere else is what makes an artist stand out.

“When that moment of ‘I am in the presence of brilliance’ hits and they take me to a different place…I just love that,” Chan said.

“Who are the audiences that we have, and what is the right fit for the audience we want to engage?” Chan said. “Is the audience we want to engage an audience we already have, or is it a totally new audience that we need to work toward?”

For Chan and Tatge, cultivating curiosity, and building the trust to follow it, is key to both artistic and audience development.

“Part of our responsibility is to build a certain level of curatorial trust within our audience so that they will journey with us to see companies they’ve never heard of before,” Tatge said.

Underlying every curatorial decision is the goal that audiences will leave the Pillow differently than how they arrived. The best outcome of a Festival season isn’t that every person will love every performance–it’s that they leave changed, challenged, or curious enough to come back.

This Pillow Pick was written by Lucy Kudlinski and published on July 3, 2026.