Jacob's Pillow: crossroads of the dance world.

It doesn't look like a major crossroads of the dance world. It's miles from the nearest town, the buildings look a lot like barns, and the laidback atmosphere feels unmistakably quaint. Could this really be an international gathering spot for generations of dancers, dancemakers, and dancegoers? Yes, indeed. This is Jacob's Pillow, now celebrating its sixty-fifth anniversary season as America's oldest dance festival in continuous operation. Dance lovers from all over the world know it simply as "the Pillow." And if these well-weathered walls could talk, they would tell the story of twentieth-century dance.

To some extent, the walls do talk. Rustic buildings bear the names of famous dancers such as Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, Maria Tallchief, and Alexandra Danilova. Inside, the walls are filled with programs, posters, and photographs that tell of the Pillow's past performers; a staggering legacy that includes everyone from Agnes de Mille, Alicia Markova, Alvin Ailey, and Jose Limon to Mikhail Baryshnikov, Trisha Brown, and Mark Morris. To visit the Pillow today is to commune with all the dance spirits who have worked in these same studios, walked down the same paths, and danced on the same stage that continues to play host to nine weeks of performances each summer. The history of Jacob's Pillow parallels virtually the entire history of dance in this country, and it has always mirrored the breadth and scope of the field, embodying the wide-ranging philosophy of founder Ted Shawn: "The art of the dance is too big to be encompassed by any one system, school, or style." The Pillow's range and age are also closely matched by Dance Magazine, which has faithfully chronicled its summer seasons since the very beginning.

Ironically, although the world now beats a path to the Pillow, it wa Ted Shawn's desire to escape the hustle-bustle that led him here. In 1931 he was separated from his wife, Ruth St. Denis, and the Denishawn era was coming to a close. He owned a Japanese-style estate in Westport, Connecticut, and conducted summer training programs there. but he was increasingly frustrated by the lack of space and constant stream of New York City visitors. When he learned of an abandoned 150-acre farm in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, he jumped at the chance to buy it. From some old letterhead he found in the house, he learned that the place was known as "Jacob's Pillow -- A Mountain Farm." (It took this unusual name from a large pillow-shaped boulder in back of the farmhouse. The Book of Genesis tells the story of Jacob laying his head upon a rock and dreaming of a ladder to heaven, and the nearby stagecoach road -- now Route 20 -- had long been known as Jacob's Ladder.)

Even though the house was little more than a shell without modern conveniences -- no telephone, no electricity, no running water -- the first order of business was to create a space for dance. The cow barn was converted into a studio, and Shawn installed the big mirrors and barres from his Westport place. During the summers of 1931 and 1932, he used this barn studio to quietly prepare his touring programs with a small group of holdovers from the Denishawn company, including Jack Cole and Barton Mumaw. It was this group that first presented a program in Boston devoted entirely to men's dances, an experiment which led to the establishment of Ted Shawn's Men Dancers in 1933 and signaled a new era for Shawn, the American dance scene, and Jacob's Pillow.

As with the Denishawn company, Shawn planned extensive cross-country tours with his new men's group, performing everywhere from high school auditoriums to Carnegie Hall. The summer months at the Pillow were intended for the creation of new programs that would begin touring in the fall. But times were hard, money was tight, and it was suggested that a bit of grocery money might be raised by allowing the public to visit the barn studio. And so, twenty-five chairs were set up and the neighbors were invited to pay seventy-five cents for an afternoon lecture-demonstration and a high tea served by the dancers. There were more than twice as many people as chairs for that first tea-lecture in July 1933, and the crowds have been coming ever since. With annual attendance now hovering around 40,000, tea is no longer served, but this quaint custom did continue at matinee performances well into the 1950s.

The Pillow's early function as a training ground for dancers branched out in 1936 with the establishment of the "Shawn School of Dance for Men." Women were allowed as day students, but the emphasis was clearly on the kind of physical training that Shawn favored for his company, which included manual labor. An early school catalog warns, "A period is set aside each day for work such as building, chopping wood, and gardening." During the heydey of the Men Dancers, an unknown Boston photographer named John Lindquist first visited the Pillow and recognized the creative potential for capturing dancers in this unique setting. He would continue photographing Pillow performers each and every summer until his death in 1980, producing tens of thousands of original negatives, prints, and color slides. A mere fifty of these images comprise an anniversary exhibition entitled "John Lindquist at Jacob's Pillow: 42 Summers of Dance Photographs," a joint venture between the Harvard Theatre Collection (which owns and maintains the Lindquist archive) and the Pillow, where it will be on view throughout the coming season.

In 1940, Shawn felt that his crusade for dancing as a legitimate career for American men had been successful and he disbanded the Men Dancers. He was prepared to sell Jacob's Pillow, but no one was prepared to buy. So the place was leased to a dance teacher from upstate New York named Mary Washington Ball, who initiated "The Berkshire Hills Dance Festival" with nine performances of ballet, modern, Oriental, and Spanish dance. This was the first time a full range of dance had been presented at the Pillow, and Shawn credited Miss Ball with the idea for the diverse programming that became the hallmark of the Jacob's Pillow season. The following summer Shawn again leased the property, this time to Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin, who presented a stellar list of artists in the barn studio including the young Ballet Theatre with such dancers as Lucia Chase, Nora Kaye, and Antony Tudor, who spent his free time in another barn nearby, creating his masterpiece, Pillar of Fire.

Audiences were large, but also hot and uncomfortable in the cramped studio space, and a movement began to incorporate as a not-for-profit institution and raise $50,000, half to buy the property from Shawn and the other half to build a theater. The fund-raising campaign was successful and ground was broken for the new theater in November 1941, just a month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor catapulted the U.S. into World War II. Today's visitors can appreciate how organically the allwood theater building fits into the rural landscape, but they may not be aware that this design was necessitated by wartime restrictions on most other building materials.

When it opened in 1942 as the first theater in this country built especially for dance, the New York Times dance critic John Martin noted, "Everything about it is designed for use with a functionalism that is both modern and, in the frugal, straightforward New England tradition, classic." Also new that year was an expanded school program known as "The University of the Dance" with a faculty that included Bronislava Nijinska and Joseph Pilates. Both the festival and the school continued throughout the war years, even though gas rationing kept audiences to a minimum and other area attractions, such as Tanglewood and the Berkshire Playhouse, closed down until peacetime. Shawn himself performed one-third of each program, and other artists paid their own traveling expenses to come to the Pillow and perform for free.

With peace came a golden period for the Pillow which was to last through the 1960s. Shawn established his trademark three-part programs, mixing ballet stars, modem companies, and "ethnic" groups performing in every imaginable style. Among the mixed programs were Alicia Alonso and Erik Bruhn, grouped with the Merce Cunningham Company and the Spanish dance Mariquita; a choreographer's workshop program featuring new works in styles described as Hindu, Americana, modem ballet, and classic ballet (the latter represented by a young Robert Joffrey's first major ballet); and a combination of Melissa Hayden and Michael Maule, a rare East Coast appearance by the Lester Horton Dance Theater (featuring the twenty-two-year-old Alvin Ailey and a teenaged Carmen de Lavallade), and La Meri in dances of India, Burma, Java, and Japan.

Beginning in the 1950s, Jacob's Pillow became known as a major importer of international dance treasures, offering U.S. audiences their first look at the National Ballet of Canada, the Royal Danish Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Ballet Rambert, the Netherlands Dance Theater, and Indian soloists, such as Balasaraswati, Indrani, and Ritha Devi. (The current season's international offerings include the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Lyon Opera Ballet, Min Tanaka, and Lakshmi.) The San Francisco Ballet made its East Coast debut at the Pillow, and Shawn was also actively involved in the regional ballet movement, promoting it by offering the first national exposure to budding companies from Miami, Atlanta, Washington. and Boston.

Ted Shawn's devotion to the Pillow always extended far beyond the public view. In one of his many articles for Dance Magazine, an August 1953 piece entitled "The Secret Life of a Summer Impresario," he described the annual preparations for the season, explaining that his days were consumed with "scrubbing, scraping, painting, wallpapering, carpentering, laying cement, cooking, washing dishes, making the daily trip to Lee ... for mail and groceries, answering the mail from registering students, getting copy ready for the printer for the festival schedules, the theater programs, the souvenir programs, the window cards; and after dinner at night my faithful staff of three and I address ten thousand envelopes to be ready to send out the schedules as soon as they are off the press."

Shawn's waning health in the 1960s and shifting currents in the dance world inevitably diminished the Pillow's preeminence. Ted Shawn's death in 1972 placed the Pillow's very existence in peril, as his personality was inextricably linked with the festival. A succession of one-year directors was followed by a solid five-year tenure by Norman Walker, proving that the Pillow could continue in other hands.

Liz Thompson's decade-long leadership in the 1980s reclaimed worldwide attention with its ambitious combination of artistic residencies, commissions, collaborations, and new initiatives. Thompson began a program of structural refurbishment and expansion which was continued by her successor, Sam Miller: a new 180-seat Studio/Theater, an outdoor performing space, an expanded stage and entrance for the Ted Shawn Theater, a visitors' center, renovated housing, and other improvements. Miller also spearheaded a number of forward-thinking alliances with other institutions such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the winter programs with various cosponsors in Philadelphia. This expansionist phase, while crucial to the Pillow's physical health, took a terrible toll on the organization's financial stability.

When Sali Ann Kriegsman left her post as dance program director at the National Endowment for the Arts to become the Pillow's executive director in 1995, she immediately recognized the distress signals. One of her first accomplishments in her new position was to secure a $1.25-million loan from the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, which together with emergency assistance from the board, individual donors, and foundations, enabled the Pillow to reduce its debt by $4 million and operate in the black in 1996.

Having assured that Jacob's Pillow would continue, Kriegsman has set about charting a course for the next five years with a challenging document entitled "A National Treasure: Moving Towards the Millennium." In some hundred pages of careful analysis and visionary thinking, the plan outlines the ways in which the Pillow will pursue its mission to "nurture artistic development, creation, presentation, learning, and preservation, and to engage and deepen public appreciation and support for dance."

In the current season, this mission is manifested through 135 performances by dozens of companies (including ten making their Pillow debuts), six dance training workshops, audience enrichment programs, in-schools activities, an intern program for administrators and technical theater specialists, dance-related exhibitions, conferences for dance presenters and choreographers, a first round of "Pillow Works" commissions, and an increased number of creative residencies. Many performing and teaching artists on this summer's schedule are in the midst of long-term relationships with the Pillow, such as Bessie Schonberg, Bill T. Jones, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham, Eiko & Koma, Joanna Haigood, Milton Myers, and Danny Buraczeski. The 1997 roster also features a number of artists who first came to the Pillow as students, including Meredith Monk and Susan Marshall.

With reverence for the "inspired vision" of Ted Shawn and appreciation for the dance field's current needs, Sali Ann Kriegsman is leading Jacob's Pillow into a new era while preserving the special qualities that have made it unique. This dual focus promises a 65th-anniversary season that is truly cause for celebration.

Norton Owen is director of preservation for Jacob's Pillow and institute director for the Josi Limon Dance Foundation. This article is adapted from a brief history of the Pillow which will be published this summer.