Performances Archives

Miguel Gutierrez

This performance took place on July 17, 2024.

Pillow Lab Artist | Live Music

The outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage hosted Miguel Gutierrez for a special one-night-only performance on July 17. This performance included a “Choose What You Pay” ticketing option, with a suggested ticket price of $25.

A living legend of contemporary dance-making in the downtown New York scene, Miguel Gutierrez is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY and Tovaangar/Los Angeles, CA. He creates empathetic and irreverent spaces for queer and trans people of color to dream. While at the Pillow, Gutierrez will perform sueño, a new music project that “incorporates dancers and live musicians, offering the audience a heightened world of fantastical drama” (The Highline).

His work has been presented internationally in venues such as Festival d’Automne/Paris, the Walker Art Center, and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, four NY Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, and a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award. He is an Associate Professor of Choreography at UCLA in the department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

ASL interpretation will be available for this performance.

Please note: adult themes will be referenced in this performance.

Find Gutierrez’s music projects on the following platforms:

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo

This performance took place on June 26-30, 2024.

Festival 2024 opens with the trailblazing comic ballet company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (the “Trocks”), celebrating their 50th anniversary this year.

In crowd-pleasing performances around the world, the Trocks “delight with fabulous charm” (The New York Times) while staying true to their roots. Founded in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising in New York City as a gender-skewering company of professional male dancers, the Trocks perform a full range of ballet and modern dance repertoire, offering humorous yet faithful renditions that are both “delightful” and “rebellious” (The New Republic).

After fifty years of globe-spanning performances, the company now plays to a world that is, as they put it, “catching up with their once highly-subversive viewpoint, allowing their style of ballet to be viewed simply as sheer entertainment.” In their long-awaited return to the Pillow, the Trocks will perform the second act of Swan Lake, plus their singular take on Paquita, among other favorites.

Watch Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive:

Le Lac des Cygnes (Swan Lake, Act II) from 2010

Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève

This performance took place on July 10-14, 2024.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this program did not include the full version of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Noetic. The adjusted program included Faun, as well as Noetic in excerpt. In addition, the company performed the U.S. premiere of Strong, a piece by beloved choreographer Sharon Eyal. The decision to adjust this program was made on Tuesday, July 9.

“One of the most original and inventive in Europe” (La Presse de Tunisie), Switzerland’s acclaimed ballet company returned to Jacob’s Pillow for the first time in over a decade, featuring classically trained dancers performing breathtaking contemporary choreography. Boasting a rich, century-long history, the company is praised as “without a doubt one of the best European companies” (Paris Capitale).

This appearance at the Pillow marked the company’s first U.S. engagement under the artistic direction of the groundbreaking Belgian and Moroccan choreographer, dancer, and director Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, who received the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2022. Winner of the Olivier Award and Kairos Prize, Cherkaoui is also the artistic director of his own company, Eastman, and former artistic director of Belgium’s Royal Ballet of Flanders. In 2018, he choreographed the music video “Apeshit” for The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z), and supported the couple on their subsequent live tour. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his work on Jagged Little Pill, featuring the music of Alanis Morissette.

Ticket buyers were granted free entrance to the Pillow Pride Party on July 13, 2024. Learn more here.

WATCH Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève ON JACOB’S PILLOW DANCE INTERACTIVE:

Funded in part by Sana Sabbagh and the Leviant Foundation.
This program is supported in part by the Neil Chrisman Fund for International Dance.

M.A.D.D. Rhythms

This performance took place on June 27-28, 2024.

Based in Chicago, M.A.D.D. (Making A Difference Dancing) Rhythms is a multi-generational tap dance collective with one passion: to spread the love and joy of tap worldwide. Featuring dancers with wide-ranging backgrounds from all over Chicago, the company’s versatility and sense of play is a potent draw for all ages. Pillow audiences will see the full-length work A M.A.D.D. Mixtape, created by Donnetta Jackson, which combines the rhythmic connection of Tap and Footwork into an inspiring onstage party, featuring a live DJ spinning some of hip hop and R&B’s most treasured musical gems.

M.A.D.D. Rhythms has performed widely across Chicago and neighboring cities, as well as at conferences, festivals, and community events. Through live shows as well as their Tap Academy—which has educated hundreds of students—the company is committed to bringing tap history and culture front-and-center for youth in underserved communities and unexpected places. In their words: access to tap dance “gives a child a greater chance at a positive life… Therefore, we will spread the joy, love, discipline, and expression of tap to as many children as we humanly can!”

M.A.D.D. Rhythms’ founder, Bril Barrett has recently been named a National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellow. Read more about this honor and Bril’s work to found M.A.D.D. Rhythms here.

Social Tango Project

This performance took place on July 17-21, 2024.

Founded and based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Social Tango Project’s mission is to share the social value of dance, celebrating the tango community through live performances, music, and film. Under the artistic direction of Agustina Videla, the company provides “a journey into the heart of Tango” (La Nación Newspaper), and aims to inspire individuals to join the dance floor and cultivate tango communities worldwide.

Social Tango Project offers a stunning interactive and immersive dance performance that blends movement and live music with cinematic documentary film projection, offering a colorful window into tango’s power to create and maintain social cohesion at times of political unrest. Because the company encourages the audience to embrace the tango and make it their own, each performance will also feature onstage appearances by local and regional dancers.

Social Tango Project offers audiences a deep dive into this very special social dance—which originated in the 1880s along the border of Argentina and Uruguay—showcased on the Ted Shawn Theatre stage like never before. The company comes to Jacob’s Pillow following a spring appearance in the RiverRun Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Milonga Dance Party on Saturday Night!
Tickets to the Saturday evening performance included entry to a one-night-only dance party celebrating milonga—an Argentine precursor to tango—beginning right after the performance in an adjoining space.

This program is supported by the Neil Chrisman Fund for International Dance.

MOMIX

This performance took place on July 24-28.

Famous across the globe for exceptional inventiveness and physical beauty, MOMIX is a company of dancer-illusionists under the direction of Moses Pendleton, one of America’s most renowned and widely performed choreographers.

A co-founder of the groundbreaking Pilobolus Dance Theater in 1971, Pendleton formed his own company in 1980. Based in Connecticut, MOMIX conjures thrilling and family-friendly performances that move from humorous to athletic, sensual to physical, and dynamic to lyrical, always using props, bodies, costumes, and screen projections in new and unique ways, with eye-popping visuals and an extraordinary sense of fun.

Returning to the Pillow for the first time since 2002, the company performed VIVA MOMIX, a magical collection of the company’s most astonishing works. The company’s “wondrously agile human dancers” (The New York Times) combine with innovative stage magic that have delighted audiences around the world for decades.

Watch MOMIX on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive:

Passion from 2002

Funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.

Camille A. Brown & Dancers

This performance took place on July 31-August 4, 2024.

Recipient of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2016, four-time Tony Award-nominated director and choreographer Camille A. Brown continues her meteoric rise creating new work on stage, TV, and film as the founder of Camille A. Brown & Dancers. During this special five-day engagement at Jacob’s Pillow, Brown herself took the stage to perform in an unforgettable world premiere.

Brown is a “prodigious” (VOGUE) Bessie, Obie, and Princess Grace Award-winning choreographer and director. She made history as the first Black director at the Metropolitan Opera to direct a mainstage production when she co-directed Fire Shut Up In My Bones (2021). With the Broadway revival of for colored girls… in 2022 (which earned her a Tony nomination for Best Direction of a Play), she became the first Black woman to direct and choreograph a Broadway play since Katherine Dunham in 1955.

Following her work earlier this spring as the choreographer of the new Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen—which led to a Tony Award nomination for Best Choreography (her third Tony nomination in this category)—Brown returns to the roots of her own dance company, deepening her exploration of Black joy in the world premiere of I AM in the Ted Shawn Theatre, developed in part through a Pillow Lab residency in 2023. The company will also be performing Turf (an excerpt from ink).

About the World Premiere

While Brown has often disrupted our understanding of the past, in this new work, she imagines a creative space for cultural liberation—conjuring the various ways that joy lives within Black culture, querying the possibilities of imagination, and boldly investigating the future.

Inspired by the “I AM” episode of the HBO series Lovecraft Country and the rhythms of the movie Drumline, this new work picked up where ink (2017) left off by blasting us into a universe where anything is possible. Featuring various dance and music genres of the African Diaspora, I AM included live and original music by Deah Love Harriott, Juliette Jones, Jaylen Petinuad, and Martine Wade. Camille A. Brown performed in this piece along with company dancers.

Lead commissioning support for I AM has been provided by Jacob’s Pillow’s Joan B. Hunter New Work Commission, The Joyce Theater, the Meany Center for the Performing Arts, and the Apollo.

The creation and presentation of I AM was made possible with major support from the Mellon Foundation and additional support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project (with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and Mellon Foundation); the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Princess Grace Foundation-USA; Masterwork Music and Art Foundation; the Harkness Foundation for Dance; Ford Foundation; and the Howard Gilman Foundation. Public support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

I AM received creative development time and funding support for residencies through Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s Pillow Lab (Becket, MA) and the Catskill Mountain Foundation’s Orpheum Performing Arts Center (Tannersville, NY). The work also developed at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park (Tivoli, NY).

The presentation of Camille A. Brown & Dancers was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, and YoungArts, the National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists.

Watch Camille A. Brown & Dancers on Jacob’s Pillow On Demand:

Inside the Pillow Lab: Camille A. Brown, 2023

Parsons Dance

This performance took place on August 7-11, 2024.

Summer 2024 marked 25 years since the last Pillow appearance by Parsons Dance, the internationally-touring contemporary dance company based in New York City and led by David Parsons, “one of the great movers of modern dance” (The New York Times). Beloved for their high-energy and athletic ensemble work, Parsons dancers have wowed audiences in more than 30 countries, performing selections from a repertory of more than 75 works created by David Parsons, as well as established choreographers like Jamar Roberts and Rena Butler.

The return to the Pillow was a celebration of the company’s roots and staying power, the go-for-broke energy that Parsons dancers are known for and the vision of David Parsons: “to bring life-affirming performances and joy to audiences worldwide.” The program at the Pillow featured signature works including Caught (1982), choreographed by David Parsons, and Takedeme (1999), choreographed by Robert Battle.

Watch Parsons Dance on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive:

Sleep Study from 1995

Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca

This performance took place on August 14-18, 2024.

Bessie Award-winning dancer and choreographer Soledad Barrio and her husband, artistic director and choreographer Martín Santangelo, formed Noche Flamenca in 1993 in Madrid, Spain. Alistair Macaulay has written for The New York Times that “there has been no company I have been so glad to discover as Noche Flamenca and, above all, its lead dancer, Soledad Barrio. I can think of no current ballet star in the world as marvelous as she.”

Flamenco is rooted in dance, song, and music traditions from Sephardic Jews, North African, and Roma people, from Andalusia. It is a form that is, in the company’s words, “born of ancestral cultural repression and racial expulsion.” Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca’s mission combines onstage performance with educational outreach and residencies to educate people of all backgrounds “and to evoke in them the vivid and expansive sea of passion and emotion that is flamenco.”

After two back-to-back Pillow seasons in 2000 and 2001, this marked the company’s long-awaited return. The program included their newest work, Searching for Goya (2023), inspired by the transformative art of Francisco de Goya, as it references the prolific Spanish artist’s response to the turbulent social and political changes occurring in the world around him, its relevance to our present times, and its revelations of human nature.

Hailed by critics around the world, Noche Flamenca performs regular seasons in New York City, including at Lincoln Center, The Joyce Theater, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, and at its home base at the West Park Presbyterian Church. The company has received awards from the National Dance Project, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bessies, and Dance Magazine, among many others.

Searching for Goya was developed in a residency and work-in-progress showing at Williams College’s ’62 Center that included research at the Clark Art Institute with Anne Leonard, Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

Read a recent review of Searching for Goya in The New York Times:

Review: Noche Flamenca, Raising the Dead With Goya
“There is little in dance as intense as a solo by Barrio.”

Watch Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive

Solea from 2000

This program is supported in part by the Neil Chrisman Fund for International Dance.

Dance Theatre of Harlem

This performance took place on August 21-25, 2024.

Dance Theatre of Harlem was founded by Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook in 1969 to create a new vision of ballet, as well as an opportunity where none had existed before. With previous Pillow appearances spanning from 1970 (in their very first performances) to 2019, Dance Theatre of Harlem has used their singular artistry to challenge expectations, provide a platform for new voices, and break down barriers for more than 50 years.

Along with treasured classics, this beloved and multi-ethnic company presents innovative, culturally inclusive works that propel ballet into the future with “earnest and potent” performances (Los Angeles Times). Dance Theatre of Harlem returned to the Pillow for its 55th Anniversary Season celebrating both newly-named Artistic Director, former principal dancer, and longtime company choreographer Robert Garland, as well as the 90th birthday of the Company’s legendary late founder Arthur Mitchell. The program included Robert Garland’s Higher Ground (set to music by Stevie Wonder), Robert Bondara’s Take Me With You (set to music by Radiohead), George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante (set to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky), and William Forsythe’s exhilarating Blake Works IV (The Barre Project), set to music by James Blake.

Watch Dance Theatre of Harlem on Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive:

Generous underwriting support by Natalie and Howard Shawn and Helene and Jerome Dreskin.