Ron Honsa's documentary about Jacob's Pillow was made in 2012 and recently shown again on PBS. Jacob's Pillow was started in the forties by Ted Shawn, a modern dancer, as a venue exclusively for dance. It's in Becket, Mass. and a couple of times when I was in Southampton Ma. for tennis camp in the 80's I would go there to see dance performances in its wonderfully intimate theatre. Honsa's documentary emphasizes the similarities of all kinds of dance: ballet, modern, folk et al. That is, he is a lumper rather than a splitter; dance is movement.
I have generally preferred ballet to modern dance, feeling that ballet is an attempt to escape from gravity while modern dance uses gravity as a positive element. Honsa's film makes clear that this difference is less true than it ever was, if it ever was. When the great choreographer George Balanchine died in 1983 it seemed to free some modern choreographers -- Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp -- to choreograph more ballet, with extensive use of turnout and women dancing on point, and to see ballet as just another kind of movement. Honsa has interviews with Morris, Taylor and Merce Cunningham, but also with Nikolaj Hubbe of The Royal Danish Ballet and Suzanne Farrell of her own company (which I have seen several times in Washington, D.C. and unfortunately is being disbanded this year). All the interviewees are impressively articulate about the time and opportunity for creativity at Jacob's Pillow.
Honsa also talks to many students, including Rasta Thomas, who was exiled to ballet class when he was seven for misbehaving in martial arts class, learned to love ballet and eventually started his own company Bad Boys of Dance. The dancers all love Jacob's Pillow because it allows them to concentrate completely on dance, without distraction.
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