Sacred Ground
- Jun 19
- 8 min read
THE PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY RETURNS TO JACOB’S PILLOW
By Scott Edward Anderson
May/June 2026
The story of Paul Taylor and Jacob's Pillow stretches back to 1954, when a lanky, 23-year-old Taylor first slept on the floor of a one-room cabin at the Pillow as a member of the Pearl Lang Dance Theatre. Over the 72 years since, the relationship has grown into one of the most sustained partnerships in American dance history, a story of creative exchange, institutional firsts, and shared dedication to a truly American art form.
“The Pillow is the origin place of modern dance,” says Michael Novak, artistic director
of the Paul Taylor Dance Company. “Our art form literally came from there. It’s sacred ground, and it means a lot to perform there.” This summer, Novak directs the dance company at Jacob’s Pillow for what will be its 19th engagement there. The June 24–28 visit marks the first appearance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company since 2019, when Novak led the ensemble on its first-ever tour following Taylor’s death a year earlier.
With a program featuring three Taylor masterworks—Brandenburgs (1988), Company B (1991), and Esplanade (1975)— and more than half the current company making their Pillow debut, the upcoming engagement offers Berkshire audiences both a reunion with beloved classics and a window into the future of one of America’s most enduring dance institutions.
Paul Taylor: A Defining Figure of Modern Dance
Taylor was born in 1930 in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the Washington, D.C., area. He arrived at dance late and circuitously, first as a painting student and competitive
swimmer at Syracuse University in the late 1940s, where he discovered dance through books in the campus library. He choreographed his first piece, Hobo Ballet, with Syracuse dance students. Later, Taylor transferred to the Juilliard School in New York, earning a B.S. in dance in 1953 under Martha Hill and went on to become one of the defining figures of American modern dance.
Taylor’s early career was one of remarkable versatility and ambition. In addition to the Pearl Lang Dance Theater, he danced with the companies of Merce Cunningham, Charles Weidman, José Limón, and Doris Humphrey; even George Balanchine invited him to be a guest artist with New York City Ballet. Most significantly, he joined the Martha Graham
Dance Company in 1955 for seven seasons as a soloist, creating the role of the evil Aegisthus in Graham’s Clytemnestra, among other major roles.
Norton Owen, Jacob’s Pillow’s historian and founding director of preservation, marvels at Taylor’s range. “He could dance for Graham and dance for Pearl Lang and dance for himself and Merce Cunningham and wherever else,” Owen says. “He was even in the original Broadway cast of Peter Pan, which Jerome Robbins choreographed.”
In 1954, Taylor assembled a small company and began making his own work. His early choreographic experiments were strikingly conceptual. Seven New Dances (1957), performed at the 92nd Street Y, included collaborations with painter Robert Rauschenberg and composer John Cage, most famously the notorious Duet, in which Taylor and another dancer stood completely motionless onstage while a pianist “played” Cage’s silent score,
4’33”. Dance Observer critic Louis Horst responded notably with a completely blank column for his review.
The turning point came in 1962, when Taylor premiered his Aureole at the American Dance Festival, a plotless, lyrical, baroque-set work that was so well-received it convinced him to leave the Graham company and devote himself full-time to his own choreography.
From that moment forward, Taylor built a body of work over six decades that totaled 147 dances—from joyful athleticism to harrowing American mythology to quiet splendor. Over the years, he received the Kennedy Center Honor, the National Medal of Arts, the MacArthur “genius grant,” the French Légion d’Honneur, and three Guggenheim Fellowships, among dozens of other honors.
When he died of renal failure on August 29, 2018, in Manhattan at the age of 88, he had already chosen his successor: 35-year-old Novak.
Taylor and the Pillow: a 70-year Relationship
Taylor’s connection to Jacob’s Pillow began in the summer of 1954, when Lang, a former Graham dancer who had founded her own company, was on the Pillow faculty and brought her dancers to the Berkshires for a residency. Owen describes the living conditions with
characteristic directness.
“There were four dancers put into this one room cabin,” Owen says. “Taylor was one of them.” This was the “Fred” cabin, built on the campus in the 1930s by Fred Hearn, one of Ted Shawn’s Men Dancers.
Among Taylor’s fellow dancers in Lang’s company that summer were Glen Tetley, Harvey Lichtenstein (later the longtime director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music), Bruce Marks, and Cora Cahan. Owen traces the web of
connections between Taylor and the Pillow back to Graham herself. (The Martha Graham Dance Company will perform at the Pillow this August as part of the company’s centennial.)
Taylor was, by that time, already making his own dances. The Pillow had caught him at the precise moment when he was becoming himself as an artist.
The Paul Taylor Dance Company made its official Jacob’s Pillow debut in a 1964 season that coincided with the 50th anniversary celebration of the wedding of Pillow founders Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis. The engagement carried a footnote that only deepened with time. Among the company’s dancers was a young Twyla Tharp, making her first professional
performances on the Pillow stage.
After its debut, the company would not return until 1978, but from that point forward, it performed regularly at the Pillow. The engagements tell a story of both institutional depth and accumulating firsts. In 1982, there were the Paul Taylor Workshops in the School at Jacob’s Pillow, the Pillow’s first educational programs devoted to a single choreographer. Taylor’s second company, Taylor 2, made its world debut in 1993 at the Pillow, returning for a
residency three years later.
Taylor’s 70th birthday year in 2000 was marked with an extraordinary double- company engagement: the main company in the Ted Shawn Theatre and Taylor 2 in the Doris Duke Theatre simultaneously, the first and only time both indoor Pillow venues had been given over to the same choreographer. That year also included the world premiere of Fiends Angelical, which the Pillow commissioned. And Taylor mounted his first visual art exhibition at the Pillow that year, as well: Assemblages, a show of collages made from found objects.
In 2007, the program included De Sueños que se Repiten (Of Recurring Dreams), co-commissioned by Irene Hunter in honor of the Pillow’s 75th anniversary, presented just after its American Dance Festival premiere. For the following ten years, the Paul Taylor Company was in residence at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. And in the last Pillow engagement of Taylor’s lifetime in 2017, the program concluded with Esplanade.
Two years later marked the first Pillow engagement under Novak’s leadership, part of the company’s multi-year legacy tour commemorating Taylor’s death. The Assemblages exhibition was shown again in the Ted Shawn Theatre lobby at that time, and a piece of it was included in an exhibit honoring Owen last year.
Over the decades, more than a dozen former Jacob’s Pillow School students have gone on to dance with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, among them Christopher Gillis (who was long considered a possible successor to Taylor as director); Linda Kent; Victoria Uris; and, more recently, Yuniel Betancourt.
Enter Michael Novak: A Surprise Appointment
When Taylor hand-picked Novak as his successor in 2018, there was no formal search, no interview process, and—in keeping with Taylor’s famously laconic manner—not much explanation. Novak describes the moment as “a complete surprise, humbling, really, which brought all the feelings.”
As it happened, Novak had been at a crossroads. Having danced with Taylor since 2010, he was winding down his own performing career and had been asking himself what he could contribute to the art form going forward, when Taylor approached him with the answer. “Paul was a man of few words,” Novak says. There was no formal mentoring process either. The window between Novak’s appointment and Taylor’s death turned out to be brief, but Novak feels Taylor’s presence everywhere.
Novak says he spends considerable time with Taylor’s writings, especially those from around the time Taylor was in his early 40s, which informs Novak’s own thinking at this same stage of his life. “Paul was a beautiful writer, and his writing makes it seem like he’s still here,” says Novak.
Having led the company now for seven years, Novak has guided it through a period
of growth and institutional evolution. The company currently has 17 dancers and carries a repertoire of 24 to 30 works—a substantial catalog of which Novak says reflects “a mix of young dancers, new to Taylor, and older, mature dancers with more lived experience.”
For the company’s 60th anniversary, Novak opened the programming to
contemporary choreographers outside the Taylor legacy, a significant expansion of the company’s curatorial identity. The thinking, he explains, was that dancers benefit from “a consistent creative presence in front of the company.” This led to the appointment of Lauren
Lovette as the company’s first resident choreographer, followed by Robert Battle, the former Alvin Ailey artistic director.
Three Masterworks, One Evening
With the help of Pillow artistic director Pamela Tatge, Novak has programmed three Taylor works for the company’s upcoming engagement, each with its own deep resonance, and each with its own particular history at the Pillow. Taken together, they represent the breadth of Taylor’s genius: the baroque sublimity of Brandenburgs; the bittersweet Americana of Company B; and the joyful, pedestrian poetry of Esplanade. Fittingly, Bach bookends the evening, with the Andrews Sisters sandwiched in the middle.
There are a couple of layers to his programming philosophy, Novak says. “First, I scan the performances and the venues, what dances haven’t we performed there or haven’t been around in a while, what do the venue’s audiences want to see, what are their expectations. Are there iconic works that should be revived or seen again? Then, thinking of the dancers and how they can grow as artists by performing certain pieces.”
Novak describes what it means to dance Esplanade, both as a performer and as the
person who now stewards its legacy. “It’s so life-affirming and fulfilling,” he says. “One lives a whole life in those 30 minutes. It gives you all this material about what it means to be human.”
Taylor helped define the Pillow and it defined him in return. The Pillow acted as a creative home where Taylor could experiment and grow, while Taylor’s frequent, iconic performances helped transform the festival into a premier destination for modern dance.
Essentially, the Pillow provided the stage for Taylor to find his voice, and in doing
so, he helped build the institution’s legendary reputation.
This summer, the festival will welcome dancers who may not have been born when Company B was last performed on its stage. That continuity—the sense of a living lineage stretching back to those sleeping bags on the floor in a one-room Pillow cabin in 1954—is the deeper subject of this story.
“Performing at the Pillow signifies you are part of the legacy, the family tree,” Novak says. “The sense of lineage is palpable.”
The art form, Novak suggests, is sacred. The ground is sacred. And on a summer evening in the Berkshires, when the lights go down and the dancers begin to run and leap across the stage of the Ted Shawn Theatre to a piece of music their choreographer loved 50 years ago, it will feel, as it always does, like something entirely, joyfully alive.
Paul Taylor Dance Company performs
June 24–28 at Jacob’s Pillow Ted Shawn
Theatre. Program: Brandenburgs, Company B,
Esplanade. jacobspillow.org
Bilgiler sade ve herkesin anlayabileceği şekilde verilmiş, gerçekten faydalı olmuş. tıklama sayacı kullanımı CPS ve mouse click hızını ölçerken performans ve saniye bazlı skor takibini kolaylaştırır.
Playing Cute Games always puts me in a good mood, as their cheerful sounds and playful animations create a relaxing and uplifting experience.