For the Duke
Today would normally be the fourth day of the two-week Jacob’s Pillow Curriculum in Motion residency at Monument Mountain Regional High School. Every year for over 25 years, the Monday after Thanksgiving meant the beginning of the sometimes socially awkward but always rewarding and remarkable journey of teaching and learning high school curriculum through dance. I first joined the co-founder of this program, Celeste Miller, in the mid-2000’s, returned as an artist educator in 2015, and have helped to lead the program at Monument since. Cumulatively over the years, I have spent more than seven months at the Pillow and at Monument, making dances with teens about everything from DNA transcription, heart function, and valence electrons to the Scarlet Letter, wreath making, and sexual health.
Today, in any other year, my colleagues Margot Greenlee, Liv Schaffer, and I would spend the day in the high school wrestling room, then head to the studio to collaborate and create choreography using the same tools and processes (and often content) we explored with the students. For years, that studio was the Doris Duke Theatre—the same space in which I had my first stage performance as a company member with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in the summer of 2000. One of the works in that concert, In Praise of Fertile Fields, researched the farming history of the Jacob’s Pillow land and mined the archives for choreographic inspiration. My body still knows a plowing phrase from Ted Shawn’s men dancers (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5...pull back) and the solo that started with Shawn’s choreographic notes (“bend forward from waist until hands touch floor).” For that performance in the Duke, we brought kids from our local Youth Exchange program to do a dance about bug jars, and a few of the girls danced with their dads in another section of the work. One of those dads would eventually become our Board Chair for many years, and one of those girls grew up to join our Board, as well. I still have a picture of those excited kids on the Pillow rock in my car glove compartment (I have no idea why I store it there), and the Pillow season poster from that year still hangs on my living room wall.
Today marks just over two weeks since I got a text from Liv that Doris Duke Theatre had burned to the ground. My heart sank—it was unreal. So many hours, such formative memories contained within those walls. How much can 2020 take? Oh, how the staff, and Pam in particular, have held so much this year—the first without a live festival in 87 years. It is so much to endure. I had a hard time explaining to my kids, who were on lunch break from their virtual school, why I was crying, how one can grieve over a building on a mountain top in a place far away. That afternoon, I had a previously scheduled Zoom meeting with Thasia, the Director of Community Engagement at Jacob’s Pillow and a dear friend, along with Celeste, Margot, and Liv. On the agenda was strategizing about what we could offer Monument in a year when we wouldn’t be onsite. I was expecting Thasia might need to cancel given all the staff was holding, but at the scheduled time, we all appeared on Zoom with tear-stained faces. We said what we could, but no words were right. Celeste suggested we dance—and so we did, together while apart. And then, after an explosion of activity, we settled and made a plan for encouraging teachers to embrace three-dimensional learning in a two-dimensional screen world. The work moves forward, and we move forward in a year that requires so much letting go.
Today, I reflect with gratitude for all there was and all that will be.