Gain insight into Souleymane Badolo with a free 15 minute Pre-Show Talk by Pillow Scholars-in-Residence; 30 minutes before each performance.
Born in Burkina Faso and based in Brooklyn, dancer and choreographer Souleymane “Solo” Badolo explores the delicate balance between maintaining roots and beginning again. In Yimbégré, he and fellow dancer Sylvestre Koffitse Akakpo-Adzaku, along with master drummer Mamoudou Konate, demonstrate a powerful, athletic, and incredibly contemporary movement technique. This work is a deeply personal dance, full of intimate gesture and bursts of energy, and strongly grounded in African traditions and history.
Souleymane Badolo is a 2016 Bessie Award Nominee for Outstanding Production for his work Yimbégré: Replanting roots in the name of freedom.
Gain insight into Pacific Northwest Ballet’s performance with a free 15 minute Pre-Show Talk by Pillow Scholars-in-Residence.
Artistic Director Peter Boal’s powerhouse ballet company returns from Seattle to close the Festival with a bang. Sum Stravinsky, danced to the composer’s “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto, is full of bright steps and brilliant pointework choreographed by former Pacific Northwest Ballet soloist Kiyon Gaines, and Benjamin Millepied’s alluring 3 Movements illuminates composer Steve Reich’s urgent, minimalist score. A world premiere commission by prolific choreographer Jessica Lang provides the perfect finish for this thrilling engagement.
Join Pillow Scholars-in-Residence as they provide insight into Pam Tanowitz Dance in a 15 minute Pre-Show Talk; 30 minutes before each performance.
Pam Tanowitz’s dances are celebrated for sharp energy and unpredictable rhythms. This contemporary evening features the eccentric, striking Heaven on One’s Head, which was named one of the best dances of 2014, and the story progresses as if in a dream of glittering surfaces, described as a love letter to romantic ballets. New York City-based ensemble FLUX Quartet performs live for both dances, alongside a commissioned electronic score by Dan Siegler.
Pam Tanowitz is the 2016 Juried Bessie Award Winner “for using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus…”
Pillow Scholars-in-Residence lend insight into FLEXN with a free 15 minute Pre-Show Talk; 30 minutes before each performance.
Flex is an electrifying street dance—characterized by pausing, gliding, hat tricks, ‘bone breaking’, animation, and contortion—that has evolved from the Jamaican bruk-up dance style made popular in Brooklyn reggae clubs. Created by flex pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray and visionary theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, along with an outstanding cast of dancers from the flex community, FLEXN confronts today’s complicated social justice issues by combining raw personal narratives with this powerful and provocative movement style.
Each FLEXN performance will begin with a brief onstage panel discussion, addressing some of the turbulent sociopolitical issues explored during the show.
Please note that FLEXN contains mature content surrounding issues of social justice.
Pillow Scholars-in-Residence lend insight into the history behind Adam H. Weinert’s MONUMENT with a 15 minute Pre-Show Talk; 30 minutes before each performance.
Created by contemporary dance artist Adam H. Weinert, MONUMENT combines beautifully revived works by legends of modern dance with original contemporary choreography. Fueled by his time as a Jacob’s Pillow research fellow studying the work of Jacob’s Pillow founder Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, Weinert recreates classic dances from the early 1920s and 30s. With ingenuity, reverence, and grace, he and an ensemble of stunning dancers perform classic solos by Doris Humphrey, José Limón, and Ted Shawn, then transport audiences to a new world of contemporary choreography that is “fleeting, mysterious and wholly alive” (Gia Kourlas, The New York Times).
Gain insight into New York Theatre Ballet during a 15 minute Pre-Show Talk led by Pillow Scholars-in-Residence.
New York Theatre Ballet, a bright and intriguing chamber ballet company, presents two distinct contemporary works including Antony Tudor’s 1937 masterpiece Dark Elegies, an eloquent, somber ballet danced to Gustav Mahler’s song cycle “Kindertotenlieder.” The evening also includes the rigorous new ballet Song Before Spring, choreographed by Zhong Jing Fang of American Ballet Theatre and New York Theatre Ballet’s own Steven Melendez. Song Before Spring is danced to an exciting arrangement of composer Philip Glass’s “Piano Etudes,” performed by the steel drum ensemble of New York University.
Gain insight into the performance you are about to see at the Compagnie Hervé KOUBI Pre-Show Talk, a free 15 minute talk by Pillow Scholars-in-Residence.
In their Pillow debut, this company of 17 outstanding men from Algeria and Burkina Faso deliver a jaw-dropping performance in What the Day Owes to the Night, packed with backflips, head spins, and a transcending emotional intensity. Created by French-Algerian choreographer Hervé Koubi, What the Day Owes to the Night (Ce Que le Jour Doit à la Nuit) is danced to an eclectic score including Johann Sebastian Bach, Hamza El Din & the Kronos Quartet, and traditional Sufi music.
Gain insight into the performance you are about to see with a free 15 minute briefing by Pillow Scholars-in-Residence.
Under the artistic vision of Israeli-born choreographer Zvi Gotheiner, ZviDance is widely known for its passionate vision, versatile contemporary dances, and lush movement. The company performs the dance triptych Escher/Bacon/Rothko, danced in three distinct sections inspired by the artwork of M.C. Escher, Francis Bacon, and Mark Rothko. Ten dancers perform this stirring choreography, illuminating new perspectives and pulsating with each artist’s startling take on modern visual art, set to a compelling original score by composer Scott Killian.
Join Pillow Scholars-in-Residence as they provide insight into BalletX at a Pre-Show Talk, 30 minutes before each performance.
Founded in 2005, BalletX is Philadelphia’s premier contemporary ballet company. In the ensemble’s Jacob’s Pillow debut, they perform choreographer Matthew Neenan and composer Rosie Langabeer’s ballet Sunset, o639 Hours. This narrative evening-length work interprets the dramatic, true story of pilot Edwin Musick’s 1938 inaugural airmail flight across the Pacific. With stunning dancers and an onstage cabaret-style band, audiences will be transported by the rich sights and sounds of pre-World War II New Zealand, Samoa, and Hawaii through this beautiful and intensely personal narrative of loss, longing, and paradise.