Jacob's Pillow, America's Dance Center

Deep in the Berkshire hills a few miles off the highway, a hilltop farm became, against all odds, the most important dance institution in the United States.

Ted Shawn purchased the property in Becket in nineteen thirty-one as a retreat. Shawn was half of the Denishawn Company, the celebrated partnership with Ruth Saint Denis that had introduced America to modern dance drawing from South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Egyptian traditions. But Shawn had a mission beyond style: he wanted to prove that dance was honorable work for men, at a time when the American cultural establishment viewed male dancers with deep suspicion.

In nineteen thirty-three he recruited eight men and built a company from scratch. He opened the studio to public performances the same year, offering something radically informal: he would give a talk in his bathrobe, the men would perform, and everyone would share tea afterward. Dance as conversation rather than spectacle.

In nineteen forty-two, the first theater in the United States dedicated exclusively to dance opened on the property. The Ted Shawn Theatre held two hundred twenty seats, intimate enough that audience members could hear performers breathe. Shawn directed Jacob's Pillow until his death in nineteen seventy-two at age eighty.

What he built outlasted him by decades and grew into something he could not have fully imagined. Jacob's Pillow is now America's longest-running dance festival, hosting companies from more than fifty countries, running from late June through August every year. The New York Times called it the dance center of the nation. It holds National Historic Landmark status.

The name, for those wondering, comes from the biblical story of Jacob sleeping with his head on a stone. The glacial boulder at the entrance to the property was called Jacob's Pillow by the farmers who settled here, and Shawn kept it.