Jacob's Pillow Announces Fall 2021 Pillow Lab Residencies

Jacob's Pillow announces this season's artist residencies offered at the Pillow Lab, its year-round incubator of new work. The annual season of customizable residencies supports U.S.-based and international dance artists during crucial development, research, and technical stages of choreography-driven projects. The Fall 2021 recipients include jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham, Indigenous Enterprise, Taylor Stanley and Shamel Pitts, and Yve Laris Cohen.

"We're thrilled to announce the artists developing new work at the Pillow Lab. As artists continue to create and reimagine performance post-pandemic, additional space, time, and funding is absolutely essential to our field's collective recovery and success," said Jacob's Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge.

Artists and their collaborators receive unrestricted use of the Pillow's state-of-the-art facilities, including the 7,000 square-foot Perles Family Studios. Artists also receive free housing, a stipend, professionally filmed video documentation, access to the Pillow's extensive Archives, and the presence of an "outside eye," an editor or dramaturg to provide important feedback. Artists benefit from the retreat-like atmosphere and generative landscape that the Pillow's remote location provides.

This is the fourth year of the Pillow Lab, reimagined as an anchor of Vision '22, the organization's five-year strategic plan to be complete by 2022. In its years of serving artists, the Pillow Lab improved upon a residency program that has existed in various forms since the Pillow's inception in the early 1930s. Built from a field-wide scan which included interviews with a diverse group of 36 U.S.-based choreographers and examined existing choreographic residency programs at peer institutions, the Pillow Lab fits into the overall national and international dance ecology with a distinctive mission, vision, set of values, and approach.

Choreographers selected for a residency through the Pillow Lab are chosen by Tatge and Jacob's Pillow Associate Curators Ali Rosa-Salas and Melanie George. Most residencies culminate with an informal in-person work-in-progress showing as part of the In Process Series. Showings are limited to an intimate, invited audience of Jacob's Pillow Members and faculty and students from the College Partnership Program, and provide valuable feedback through a structured feedback session.

Previous Pillow Lab residency recipients include Ephrat Asherie, Bryan Arias, Ronald K. Brown, Jean Butler, Zoe Scofield, Bebe Miller, and Liz Lerman. A number of works developed at the Pillow Lab were performed at the 2021 Festival by artists including Dorrance Dance, Brian Brooks/Moving Company, Emily Johnson Catalyst, and jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham.

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