Photo by Rick Guest with Olivia Pomp
March 19, 2024
Acclaimed Choreographer Pam Tanowitz To Receive 2024 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award
Tanowitz will be honored at the Jacob’s Pillow Season Opening Gala on June 22, 2024
The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award is presented each year to an artist of exceptional vision and achievement and carries a cash prize which the artist can use in any way they wish. Tanowitz, who creates “sublime dance theater of the highest caliber” (The New York Times), is an influential collaborative and creative force, admired for her abstract treatment of classical and contemporary movement ideas, informed by rigorous research. Tanowitz has created or set work for New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Martha Graham Dance Company, Paul Taylor American Modern Dance, Juilliard Dance, Ballet Austin, and more. She has been commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival as well as The Joyce Theater, The Kennedy Center, The Barbican Centre, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, Guggenheim Works & Process, and manyother leading arts institutions.
This summer, her work Secret Things will receive its U.S. premiere at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival from July 3-7, commissioned and performed by The Royal Ballet of the United Kingdom in the company’s only U.S. engagement this year. Tickets to this engagement go on sale to the general public on April 11. Based in New York City, Tanowitz is also an Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers University, and is the first-ever choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center at Bard. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance, an accomplished company of world-class artists working across disciplines. “There are very few contemporary choreographers who have created their own singular and theatrical language as Pam has done,” said Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge. “It’s one grounded in ballet, but through the bodies of the amazing dancers she casts, it is transformed, personal, and new. When she creates on ballet companies, she gives those dancers the opportunity todiscover new ways to express themselves, and they are better for it. Her collaborations with artists from other disciplines have been hugely inventive and ambitious in ways that the field needs right now. It is an honor to celebrate 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 outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage as part of the Inside/Out series in 2009, Jacob’s Pillow welcomed Pam Tanowitz Dance into the former Doris Duke Theatre for Festival 2016. Tanowitz expressed her thanks for receiving this year’s Dance Award with a nod to the past as well as the future. “I am very much a dance history lover, and I am honored to be a part of the continuum of history at Jacob’s Pillow,” she said. “When I make my work, from day one, I never think of myself in a vacuum; I try to see the whole timeline of dance, and where I fit in. A lot of what drives my work is the constant question to myself of what has been done before, what I can do that is different, and what perspective I might add to history.” Tanowitz added that she has many more dances to make. “Some will succeed, and some won’t,” she said, “but an opportunity that allows me the chance to make more dances is something I am grateful for. So, I am grateful for this honor from Jacob’s Pillow.” Tanowitz joins a list of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award honorees that include Misty Copeland, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Dormeshia, Ronald K. Brown, Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, Kyle Abraham, Michelle Dorrance, Camille A. Brown, Liz Lerman, and Faye Driscoll, among others. The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award was established in 2007 and is philanthropically supported by an anonymous donor.
Select Writings on Pam Tanowitz Dance
