Family Vacations at Jacob’s Pillow

In 1930 the modern dance innovator Ted Shawn bought a Berkshires farm called Jacob’s Pillow as a retreat. Within a couple of years, after the dissolution of Denishawn, the pioneering modern dance company he created with his wife, Ruth St. Denis, the place became a venue for summer workshops and public demonstrations featuring his new troupe of male dancers. In 1941 ballet stars Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin staged an International Dance Festival at the Pillow. It proved a hit and led, in 1942, to the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and the construction of the 620-seat Ted Shawn Theater, designed specifically for dance. Though some hardscrabble years followed, the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival has grown into a vigorous annual summer-long celebration of all varieties of dance, one of the nation’s best. Companies typically remain in residence for a week, giving a handful of well-attended public performances while using the Pillow studios for rehearsal and the creation of new work. Audiences range from Berkshires retirees and summer people, to young students, to families taking advantage of free outdoor performances by up-and-coming troupes, on a stage with the Berkshire Hills as its breathtaking backdrop. As a scenic designer, nature can be hard to beat.

The music situation at the Pillow marks one of the venue’s few shortcomings. The Shawn Theater, while wonderfully intimate, has no orchestra pit, so as a rule Pillow performances resort to recorded music, the usual state of things for most of the cash-strapped modern dance companies—even well-known ones—that typically make up the summer schedule. An upcoming report will detail performances by two companies—the Mark Morris Dance Group and Dance Heginbotham—that broke the rule by giving stunning performances accompanied by small live ensembles.

But how does ballet fare in these intimate conditions? Ballet companies regularly perform at the Pillow—Markova and Dolin put the Festival on the map, after all—though the Shawn’s modest stage would be hard pressed to accommodate Swan Lake or Symphony in C. In mid-July ten dancers from the New York City Ballet family, convened by principal Daniel Ulbricht and including principals, soloists, and corps members, appeared under the ad hoc name Ballet 2014 in a program ideal for the setting—four pas de deux and one solo, followed by Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free—after the parent company’s annual summer residency in Saratoga Springs, New York. Three weeks later, Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet performed mostly modern work by four choreographers. PNB, for three decades the demesne of NYCB alumni Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, and since 2005 directed by much-loved former NYCB principal Peter Boal, has made the most of its Balanchine style, winning praise for its interpretations of his works and becoming a kind of upstart sibling to NYCB. For better or worse, though, both troupes’ programming constituted a brief vacation from the master whose creations put both on the map.

Nevertheless, the name Ballet 2014 sounded inspired by that of Balanchine’s last, short-lived European nonce company, Les Ballets 1933, and like its predecessor, it presented an occasion for new choreography that the crowd seemed to enjoy and the dancers seemed to like performing. Furiant, a 2012 pas de deux by NYCB soloist Justin Peck for Teresa Reichlen and Robert Fairchild, to Dvořák, opened the evening, one week after this remarkably talented young choreographer was named NYCB’s new choreographer in residence. Peck has made a handful of impressive, bigger ballets for NYCB, including 2012’s joyous Year of the Rabbit and 2014’s more thoughtful but still winning Everywhere We Go. Though small in scale, Furiant allows both Reichlen and Fairchild to flash and dazzle. In Dvořák-appropriate folksy garb, they lean against each other at the shoulder. Peck immediately violates our expectations by having each solo instead of dancing together. Fairchild opens by separating from Reichlen, launching little leaps and tight spins, hands on his shoulders. Then Reichlen leaps and spins, kicks backward, and lyrically sweeps her arms...