Jacob's Pillow: America's Dance Landmark
Near Lenox, Massachusetts
In the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, just off the back roads of Becket township, a farm property became the most important dance institution in American history. Jacob's Pillow started with a single visionary, and the story of how it got here is as unconventional as the art it champions.
Ted Shawn was one of the pioneers of American modern dance. He and his wife Ruth Saint Denis had founded the Denishawn Company, which trained a generation of performers, including Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. When his marriage ended, Shawn purchased the old Carter Farm in Becket in nineteen thirty-one with a specific and radical ambition: to prove that American men could be serious professional dancers.
In the early nineteen thirties, during the depths of the Depression, Shawn assembled a company of men, many of them former athletes, and trained them rigorously in his Berkshire barns. From nineteen thirty-three to nineteen forty, Shawn and his Men Dancers performed at Jacob's Pillow and toured the country, giving lecture-demonstrations that challenged the cultural assumption that dance was exclusively feminine territory. The dancers built their own cabins on the property, cleared fields, and helped construct the theater that now bears Shawn's name.
The Ted Shawn Theatre opened in nineteen forty-two. It remains the heart of the campus, joined over the decades by additional performance spaces, studios, and a research library.
In two thousand three, the federal government designated Jacob's Pillow a National Historic Landmark, making it the first and only dance venue in the United States to receive that recognition. The New York Times has called it the dance center of the nation. The annual summer festival has presented companies from every tradition, from classical ballet to West African dance to cutting-edge contemporary work.
The farm Shawn bought for a few hundred dollars in nineteen thirty-one is now recognized as the crucible in which American concert dance found its public identity.
