DANCE: The Pillow's music festival

 

The most adventurous, eclectic music festival in the region this summer includes works by Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Philip Glass, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Also on the program is contemporary French electronica, traditional Portuguese fado, and Tito Puente, as well as Arvo Pärt, Radiohead, and Marvin Gaye, with some P-Funk, Vivaldi, and Benny Goodman also thrown in for good measure.

 

 

The only thing is, you won’t find this music festival listed anywhere. You won’t find a list of these composers anywhere. And while some of this music will be performed live, and the rest heard via recordings, you won’t see it marketed, packaged, or sold as such.

 

It’s one of the best-kept secrets (until now) that the most wide-ranging, well-curated festival of traditional and experimental music, including classical, jazz, blues, pop, soul, and avant-garde, is the accidental festival created by the programmers and choreographers at Jacob’s Pillow Dance in Becket, Massachusetts. While the emphasis of the ten-week festival is on dance and choreography, with tickets sold to the events on the basis of ensembles and choreographers, music is an essential element of virtually every performance that takes place at the Pillow. Frequent visitors there will confirm that a summer spent in the Ted Shawn and Doris Duke theaters exposes one to as diverse and profound an array of music as it does to movement.

 

Choreographers, it turns out, are some of the most adventurous music listeners. Presumably they hear or listen for things in music that the rest of us may overlook or take for granted. But music, in many cases, serves as the framework, or the lifeblood, of a dance, and as such deserves more prominent regard than typically afforded when speaking of or looking at dance.

 

Music and dance are, at some level, of course, inextricably linked. It’s only in relatively modern times that the two have been considered totally separate art forms. Throughout much of human history, music and dance were united—a reading of the Biblical psalms, which are really songs, confirms the point with their many references to dancing. Even much of what we now refer to as classical music was written on commission for royal or aristocratic dance parties—the post-Renaissance equivalent of square dancing or raves, if you will.

 

It was really only in the post-classical, romantic period in the West that music and dance were separated, music becoming an art form intended solely for listening in the concert hall. But music and dance always exerted a magnetic pull, and classical composers wrote some of their greatest works as commissions for ballet. Popular and folk forms also retained their close connection to movement and dance; early jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, and ethnic musics were essentially dance music; it was only once academics got their grips on each genre that it was presented as “art music,” an intellectual exercise to be heard in isolation from dance and gesture.

 

In addition to liberating dance from the formal strictures and positions of ballet, one of the great innovations of modern dance was to break the stranglehold that classical music exerted on dance in favor of the entire world of ordered (and sometimes chaotic) sound. And just as today’s global village makes music from everywhere available to anyone with an Internet connection, so too do our cutting-edge choreographers avail themselves of the iPod gestalt—they don’t call it a shuffle, after all, for no reason.

 

 

As a result, one could spend a summer going to Jacob’s Pillow to hear great music, with dance just being an afterthought or a visual add-on. It’s not a bad strategy to adopt, especially for those less acquainted with or perhaps intimidated by modern dance. Since dance, often enough, begins with music, by the end of the summer a novice may well be on his way toward becoming an expert, having seen a broad array of approaches to translating music into gesture.

 

This summer, for example, fans of Radiohead will undoubtedly flock to Radio and Juliet by Ballet Maribor (July 1-5), a Slovenian company whose choreographer, Edward Clug, recontextualizes Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet as a modern ballet performed to the electronic sounds of the popular British alternative-rock group. Clug digs deep into the ensemble’s corpus of work and draws upon well-known and lesser-known tracks, including “Bullet Proof … I Wish I Was,” “Fitter Happier,” “How to Disappear,” “Idioteque,” “Like Spinning Plates,” “Sit Down, Stand Up,” and “We Suck Young Blood.” His choreography is incredibly sympathetic to both the incessant pulse and the eerie mood of Radiohead’s music, and could well restore one’s faith in modern ballet as a viable form.

 

 

Radiohead’s music will return to the Jacob’s Pillow stage the very next week, when Gallim Dance (July 8-12) from New York City also makes use of the English alternative rock ensemble’s sound for Blush by artistic director Andrea Miller, a veteran of Ohad Naharin’s Ensemble Batsheva. Miller’s full-length work, which she describes as an exploration of human instinct and sexuality, will also expose dancegoers to the music of Manyfingers, the stage name of twenty-nine-year-old British composer Chris Cole, who could well be England’s answer to the Tin Hat Trio with his dreamy, ethereal, folk-roots chamber music. Miller, recently named one of “25 to Watch” by Dance magazine, also incorporates the piano music of Frederic Chopin and Canadian rock group Wolf Parade, whose guitar and synthesizer progressive-rock fusion sounds like a blend of the Cars, Dire Straits, and the Strokes. The stark difference between Chopin’s gentle pianism and nightclub dance rhythms hints at the range of Miller’s choreography, which can be delicately lyrical to intensely fierce.

 

 

Soul and R&B music is nothing if not dance music, and several choreographers at Jacob’s Pillow this summer are taking advantage of that groove. Rennie Harris goes directly to the source in his work P-FUNK, named after George Clinton’s seminal funk collective Parliament-Funkadelic. Harris’s Puremovement (August 5-9), which brings hip-hop street movement, including popping, locking, and electric boogaloo to the stage, will also incorporate music by Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, and the Afro-German singer Ayo, a star in Europe who recently settled in New York City and whose music has an international flavor.

 

Rubberbandance (August 12-16) offers a full-length multimedia work, Punto Ciego (Blind Spot), choreographed by Victor Quijada to music by Canadian hip-hop producer Jasper Gahunia, better known as DJ Lil’ Jaz, the former musical and life partner of pop star Nelly Furtado, who taught the first-ever DJ class at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music.

 

 

Folk music from around the world will also be widely represented at the Pillow. David Roussève’s REALITY (July 15-19) will perform his full-length work, Saudade, about black life in the American South, from slavery to Hurricane Katrina, to the sounds of Portuguese fado, sometimes described as the Portuguese blues for its longing quality, which is the meaning of the word saudade. Somewhat ironically, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal will be responsible for bringing traditional songs of Southern Italy to Jacob’s Pillow, where they will be performed live onstage by Gruppo Musicale Assurd. More logically, perhaps, Ballet Hispanico will feature Cuban dance music by Israel Lopez, Rubén Gonzales, A.K. Salim, Perez Prado, and Francisco Repilado in Club Havana, choreographed by Pedro Ruiz. And Belén Maya and Rocío Molina will utilize traditional Spanish flamenco performed live by vocalists, percussionists, and guitarists for Mujeres.

 

Contemporary classical music, especially minimalism, is a favorite of modern choreographers. Thus Doug Varone and Dancers will use Philip Glass’s piece, The Light, for its work, Lux (August 12-16), and Arvo Pärt’s Cantus In Memory of Benjamin Britten will power Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven (August 19-23), as apt a description of Pärt’s music as you’re likely to find. Downtown avant-garde composer Mikel Rouse will be represented by two different companies; the Pacific Northwest Ballet is using his Quorum for its Vespers, and his music is at the root of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s eyeSpace (July 22-26).

 

 

And for those who still like their dance with a hint of the romantic, Doug Varone and Dancers will draw upon Prokofiev’s Waltz Suite and Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C for its own Castles and Short Story, respectively. And classicists will undoubtedly be pleased to hear the soothing strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons when Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal (July 29-August 2) uses that Top 10 hit of the classical repertoire for its dance of the same name. (JULY 2009)

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s editor-in-chief and award-winning cultural critic.

 

THE GOODS

Jacob’s Pillow Dance
.
Becket, Mass.

www.jacobspillow.org

 

Images courtesy Jacob's Pillow.

From top: Gallim Dance, photo by Steven Schreiber

The dancers of Rennie Harris Puremovement bring the music of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic to life, photo by RObert Day

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal presents Four Seasons to music by Vivaldi, courtesy Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal

Ballet Maribor performs choreographer Edward Clug’s Radio and Juliet to a score by British alternative-rock group Radiohead, courtesy Ballet Maribor

Composer Philip Glass provides a score for Doug Varone and Dancers’ Lux, photo courtesy Nonesuch Records

Canadian rock band Wolf Parade, photo by Meqo Sam Cecil

Eric Rivera and Angelica Burgos of Ballet Hispanico dance to Cuban music, photo by Eduardo Patino

Pacific Northwest Ballet uses music by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, photo by Luciano Rossetti/Courtesy ECM Records

Flamenco artists Belén Maya and Rocío Molina perform Mujeres, photo by Javier Suarez