Jacob’s Pillow has introduced that critically-acclaimed American choreographer Pam Tanowitz will obtain the 2024 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Tanowitz will settle for this award at Jacob’s Pillow’s Season Opening Gala within the Berkshires on Saturday, June 22.
The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award is introduced annually to an artist of remarkable imaginative and prescient and achievement and carries a money prize which the artist can use in any method they want. Tanowitz is an influential collaborative and inventive pressure, admired for her summary therapy of classical and up to date motion concepts, knowledgeable by rigorous analysis.
Tanowitz has created or set work for New York Metropolis Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Firm, Paul Taylor American Fashionable Dance, Juilliard Dance, Ballet Austin and extra. She has been commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow Dance Pageant in addition to The Joyce Theater, The Kennedy Middle, The Barbican Centre, Vail Worldwide Dance Pageant, New York Dwell Arts, Guggenheim Works & Course of, and plenty of different main arts establishments.
This summer season, her work Secret Issues will obtain its U.S. premiere at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Pageant from July 3-7, commissioned and carried out by The Royal Ballet of the UK within the firm’s solely U.S. engagement this 12 months. Tickets to this engagement go on sale to most of the people on April 11.
Primarily based in New York Metropolis, Tanowitz can be an Assistant Professor of Skilled Observe at Rutgers College, and is the first-ever choreographer in residence on the Fisher Middle at Bard. In 2000, she based Pam Tanowitz Dance, an completed firm of world-class artists working throughout disciplines.
“There are only a few up to date choreographers who’ve created their very own singular and theatrical language as Pam has carried out,” mentioned Jacob’s Pillow Government and Creative Director Pamela Tatge. “It’s one grounded in ballet, however via the our bodies of the superb dancers she casts, it’s reworked, private and new. When she creates on ballet firms, she provides these dancers the chance to find new methods to specific themselves, and they’re higher for it. Her collaborations with artists from different disciplines have been massively ingenious and impressive in ways in which the sector wants proper now. It’s an honor to have fun her with this award.”
The Season Opening Gala in June marks a return to Jacob’s Pillow for Tanowitz. Following her Pillow debut on the outside Henry J. Leir Stage as a part of the Inside/Out collection in 2009, Jacob’s Pillow welcomed Pam Tanowitz Dance into the previous Doris Duke Theatre for Pageant 2016.
Tanowitz expressed her thanks for receiving this 12 months’s Dance Award with a nod to the previous in addition to the long run. “I’m very a lot a dance historical past lover, and I’m honored to be part of the continuum of historical past at Jacob’s Pillow,” she mentioned. “Once I make my work, from day one, I by no means consider myself in a vacuum; I attempt to see the entire timeline of dance, and the place I slot in. Loads of what drives my work is the fixed query to myself of what has been carried out earlier than, what I can do that’s completely different, and what perspective I would add to historical past.”
Tanowitz added that she has many extra dances to make. “Some will succeed, and a few received’t,” she mentioned, “however a possibility that enables me the possibility to make extra dances is one thing I’m grateful for. So, I’m grateful for this honor from Jacob’s Pillow.”
Tanowitz joins an inventory of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award honorees that embrace Misty Copeland, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Dormeshia, Ronald Ok. Brown, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Invoice T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, Kyle Abraham, Michelle Dorrance, Camille A. Brown, Liz Lerman, and Faye Driscoll, amongst others. The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award was established in 2007, and is philanthropically supported by an nameless donor.
Alongside the presentation of the Award, the Jacob’s Pillow Season Opening Gala will embrace The Faculty at Jacob’s Pillow Up to date Ballet Efficiency Ensemble, performing a world premiere by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Moreover, in honor of the 100th Anniversary of George Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue, the Gala will function faucet dancer and choreographer Caleb Teicher and pianist Conrad Tao of their extremely acclaimed interpretation. This would be the second time the Pillow has showcased the inventive collaboration between Teicher and Tao, whose work Extra Eternally was developed within the Pillow Lab and had its world premiere on the Pillow in 2019.
In-person tickets to the Season Opening Gala at the moment are on sale. Along with in-person occasion tickets for the one-night solely efficiency, dinner and dancing, the Gala efficiency will probably be livestreamed and accessible via a “select what you pay” mannequin. To be taught extra in regards to the Gala, go to jacobspillow.org/gala.
Tanowitz has acquired quite a few grants and awards over her profession, together with a Basis for Up to date Arts grant in 2010, the Herb Alpert Award in 2019, a Doris Duke Award in 2020. In 2016, she acquired theJuried Bessie Award “for utilizing kind and construction as a automobile for difficult audiences to suppose, to really feel, to expertise motion; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical imaginative and prescient with astounding rigor and focus.”
Tanowitz holds levels from Ohio State College and Sarah Lawrence School, the place she clarified her inventive voice beneath former Merce Cunningham dancer and choreographer Viola Farber. She immersed herself in dance by working in administration on the New York Metropolis Middle whereas additionally learning the Middle’s archived dance movies and creating her personal work.
Her first worldwide tour with Pam Tanowitz Dance got here in 2018, with the Fisher Middle world premiere of 4 Quartets — her work impressed by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho — which toured to the Barbican Centre in London, the Middle for the Artwork of Efficiency at UCLA, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Along with her meticulous research of dance historical past, Tanowitz additionally brings curiosity and mental change into her collaborations with dancers and artists within the studio. “I’ve to fall in love with a dancer to work with them,” she mentioned. “We categorical ourselves by coming along with an idea, then separating, then coming again collectively. There’s a back-and-forth between construction and instinct. I all the time wish to work with individuals who have their very own distinct imaginative and prescient and strategy to work. When the work makes me look good, it’s as a result of I work with superb artists.”
