In 1977, Norton Owen, a young dancer from Alabama, was working at the box office of the annual Jacob’s Pillow dance festival in the Berkshires, when he noticed a few trunks in a storeroom.
He decided to investigate.
The trunks contained costumes used by Denishawn, an influential early American modern dance company created by Ted Shawn and his wife, Ruth St. Denis, in 1915. Shawn went on to found Jacob’s Pillow in the early 1930s, and Owen decided the festival audiences should understand the connection. He borrowed mannequins from a local department store and displayed the costumes in a studio open to Pillow visitors.
“It’s an origin story that speaks to what I already felt impelled to do, to bring together past and present, and share that with others,” said Owen, the Jacob Pillow’s director of preservation. His 50th anniversary at the festival was celebrated on June 21 at a gala, where he received the 2025 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.
Owen, 71, has been the festival’s unofficial and official archivist ever since that first impromptu exhibition. In the decades since his box office stint, he has worked in the press office, run the summer school for students, and done development work. But along the way, he began to stage exhibitions and work his way through the programs, films, photographs, posters and other documentation that filled boxes and shelves in the festival offices.
“The thing that blows my mind is that no one told him to do this,” said Wendy Perron, the curator of this year’s festival exhibition “Connecting Through Time: 50 Seasons with Norton Owen.” Displaying the Denishawn costumes, she added, “was a whim, but behind the whim was a faith that this would be valuable to audiences. Then he made a 50-year career of bringing the past and the present together in a myriad of ways.”
It wasn’t until 1990 that Owen’s role as the festival’s unofficial historian was acknowledged with his current title. Over the past decades, in addition to maintaining the archives and overseeing new acquisitions, Owen has curated over a hundred exhibitions; conceived and organized the Pillow Talks with artists that happen weekly during the two-month-long festival (June 25-August 24 this year); and conceived Jacob’s Pillow Interactive, an online collection of dance videos, multimedia essays, playlists and podcasts.
“I knew of him as someone who gave extraordinary context to dance, but I had no idea of the depth of his job description until I got here,” said Pamela Tatge, the executive and artistic director of Jacob’s Pillow since 2016. Owen, she added, has made the Pillow “a place where we are holders of the history of our form.”
In a recent video call from his headquarters in the handsomely refurbished Blake’s Barn, which houses the archives that audiences can visit during the festival (and by appointment at other times of the year), Owen talked about his decades-long career, describing himself as “an accidental archivist.”
The interview has been edited and condensed.
You came to Jacob’s Pillow after studying dance and theater, and never really left. What drew you so strongly to the place?
I right away felt a pull, something about the tension between the past and present here felt meaningful to me, and still does. In my early years at the Pillow, there were still people around who were connected to Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, the company that Shawn founded at the same time as Jacob’s Pillow. One of them was Jess Meeker, the company’s composer, and I realized history isn’t just something you read in a book; I can hear these stories of the past directly. It created a lightbulb moment for me: If we keep our ears and eyes open, we are connected to our past and to place.
How did you begin to create an archive?
Early on I did a couple of years in the publicity office. Journalists would ask me questions and I realized that although we had the information in programs and documents, none of it had been compiled. So I was always researching and assimilating what we had.
At one point I found silent black-and-white films of Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers. Jess had written music for many of these pieces, and knew what went with what, so I wrote a grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts, proposing that Jess reconstruct the scores and add the sound. We still have all that and we use it.
Then in 1982, for the 50th anniversary of the Pillow, I was involved in bringing back many of Shawn’s dancers, and it was such a thrill hearing them talk and tell their stories. We made a documentary about it. There was no official job in this, I was just doing it. Somebody once said to me, you could have a job as the historian of the Pillow, and I said, don’t be ridiculous, that’s not a job!
The building that became Blake’s Barn was donated to the Pillow in the early 1990s by Marge Champion, a former dancer and choreographer, and it became the official home of the archives. Did that change things?
It gave us a place to do exhibitions, but the archival materials were still mostly under lock and key. Then Sali Ann Kriegsman came in as director in 1995, and said, let’s we do something with all this. There was a fair amount of stuff: programs from the beginning of the festival, black-and-white silent films, loads of correspondence, about 30 trunks of costumes. Plus, we had started filming performances at the festival in 1982.
I had an old television monitor, two old file cabinets and some books, and that’s where we began. We made a rudimentary database in 1998, but apart from summer interns, I was mostly a one-man band until 2015. I didn’t have a library science degree, but I knew what I didn’t know! Everything had to be systematized.
Initially, we weren’t sure if people would be interested, but they were. I realized we had something here that others didn’t: an engaged, on-hand public. But I always felt I had to make a case for the importance of the archives; it wasn’t anyone else’s priority. The two expansions we have done happened because I worked with the development department to raise the money. It’s not common to have a 50-year tenure anywhere, but that’s what made it possible, just consistently working at it.
Pamela Tatge said to me that “the overall idea of Jacob’s Pillow as an online field was born with Norton.” You had an extensive online presence much earlier than most dance organizations: Why?
I was aware that we had these wonderful resources, but you had to come here to access them. In the early 2000s I had done a touring exhibition with the historian Lynn Garafola, “America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures,” and we worked with a multimedia designer to create a touch-screen kiosk. You could press a button and see the Nicholas Brothers or Fred Astaire, and people loved it. In 2007, we got some funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and we did a version of that with Pillow history.
People kept asking if they could get it online, and that was the inspiration for Jacob’s Pillow Interactive. It was redesigned in 2015, and is about to evolve again — we are asking artists to create work specifically for online consumption and have commissioned Andrew Schneider and Shamel Pitts as pilot projects this summer. The online stuff has been huge and I love it: It connects me and the institution with people all over the world.
What changes have you seen in the dance world over the decades?
There is much more respect and acknowledgment now of non-Western dance forms. It’s something the Pillow has always stood for, but it wasn’t necessarily a popular thing. Now I see a real appreciation for many different forms of dance. Tap, too, wasn’t respected as a serious concert dance form when I first started here, and this year we are opening the festival with tap artists: Michelle Dorrance and Ephrat Asherie. These are changes that have resonated through the dance world.
What are stand-out moments of the last 50 years at Jacob’s Pillow?
So many! Getting Mark Morris, right at the beginning of his career, to do a Ted Shawn solo, “Mevlevi Dervish.” Having the great British dancer Freddie Franklin, a walking vessel of memories, here to do a Pillow Talk. A 2001 series with Ann Carson, where she selected photos from our archives and restaged them as tableaus vivants. Curating an exhibition of the photography of John Lindquist, our in-house photographer between 1938 and 1980, which really brought the Pillow’s past vividly to life. Carmen de Lavallade performing a Geoffrey Holder solo in a long red dress.
There is one permanent stand-out. When the backstage wall of the Ted Shawn theater opens and you see the trees behind the stage, you always hear an intake of breath from the audience. It’s magical.
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