In the gallery of the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow last week, the walls were flanked with large screens, installed as part of the immersive exhibition “Dancing the Algorithm.” One appeared blank until a dancer began improvising in front of it. Then the choreographic interface multiplied her image, turning simple arm movements into a rippling stream of limbs spilling out across the white space.
The exhibition mediates on how the dancing body can shape and challenge technology and includes a mix of uncanny and trippy video art. In one, a dancer’s body morphs into forests, oceans and deserts. In another, code and blockchain determine sequences of choreography.
The rebuilt Duke, which opens tomorrow after being destroyed by fire in November 2020, is now one of the most technologically advanced dance theaters in the world. “Dancing the Algorithm,” curated by Katherine Helen Fisher, introduces the theater’s focus on the intersection of performance and evolving tech and runs for the duration of this year’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
With dance still feeling financial stress from the pandemic and amid increasing anxiety about national arts funding, the reimagined Duke is making a bold and optimistic statement about experimentation in the field.
“At a time when we’re all bemoaning how technology is ruling our lives,” said Pamela Tatge, the executive and artistic director of Jacob’s Pillow, “how can we flip that on its heel? And how can it shape new possibilities for dance?”
Plans to rebuild the Duke were made during the Covid-19 performing arts shutdown, a time when the leaders of Jacob’s Pillow were rethinking its mission and vision. “Were we going to come out of the pandemic as a hybrid institution?” Tatge said. “And if so, what sort of artists might we begin investing in?”
Wednesday’s celebration opens with a movement score from Annie-B Parson, performed by 12 artists associated with the old theater, and culminates in a dance party in which the dance floor will be animated by dynamic and responsive digital sculptures. A new site-specific performance from Eiko Otake and a virtual reality experience from the disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light come later in the week.
The Duke’s inaugural season also includes the Jacob’s Pillow debut of Shamel Pitts and Tribe, the multidisciplinary artist collective that Pitts directs. When the fire broke out in 2020, Pitts was in residence at the theater developing the duet “Touch of Red.” It will now be performed on Aug. 6, showcasing the new theater’s capabilities as the work’s all-encompassing sound design and video-projection lighting envelop both the boxing-ring-like set and the audience.
“Every time I think about bringing this work back to the new theater,” Pitts said, “there’s a softening, a gratitude, a sense of full-circle resolution. I’m hoping for this deep exhalation.”
At the time of the fire, the Pillow’s live programming had been canceled because of the pandemic; and the festival’s flagship space, the Ted Shawn Theater, needed renovating. “It really felt like the physical manifestation of all the loss that we were experiencing,” Tatge said.
Tatge and the board began with an assessment of the sprawling 220-acre campus before deciding to rebuild on the same site. They also did an accessibility audit and a research study that brought in artists and members of the Indigenous community in the region. This process led to the development of the Digital Futures Think Tank, a working group that includes Fisher, Pitts and the interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider, along with longtime tech innovators like Sydney Skybetter.
The group advised on technical specifications and considered the distinctive needs of performing artists working with emerging technologies.
“The first thing they did was ask us for a technical rider of a show already made,” Schneider said, referring to the document that outlines a production’s logistical requirements, “and one for a show that you would love to make in the future.”
Schneider sent in a rider for his work “The Stars,” which used volumetric lighting from 4,000 individually controlled points of light and an audio technology called wave field synthesis, that required 382 channels of sound.
“You were literally in among the stars, and it would track you and tell stories about how you got there,” he said.
For the world premiere of Schneider’s “Here,” on July 16, he and his collaborators have continued experimenting, this time with dancers, a responsive lighting sculpture and spatialized audio that can throw the performers’ voices. Audiences can use their smartphones and headphones to explore a binaural sound experience that cross-fades with reality.
“Traditionally, when you’re trying to design these systems, it is almost impossible to access what you need,” Schneider said. “You can’t just go rent it and bring it to a theater.”
A $10 million gift from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, along with insurance and other gifts, has changed that. The theater is now wired for the future, with fiber-optic cables to meet the demands of powerful computing systems, an advanced acoustics system, and infrastructure for virtual and augmented reality.
“We’re living in a society whose most profound transformation in social, political and economic life is a digital transformation,” said Sam Gill, the president and chief executive of the foundation. “When Pam and the team came with a vision for the new Duke theater, it felt to us the perfect frontier.”
What was a simple black box theater is now an elegantly curved building, eschewing right angles in favor of organic shapes. Designed by the architecture firm Mecanoo with input from the Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson, the flexible theater has large garage doors that open the stage up to nature and to a garden recently planted with medicinal herbs, designed by Stockbridge-Munsee members Misty Cook and Kathi Arnold.
Back at the exhibition, Fisher demonstrated how the “Bodies in Hyperreality” installation uses the Pillow’s extensive archives to train the artificial intelligence interface. The text prompt, “Ruth St. Denis swirling fabric in an open field,” yielded an image of St. Denis, one of the founders of modern dance, that mirrored Fisher’s movement in front of the screen.
“A lot of the work in this exhibition is about coming to terms with what this new intelligence is and looks like, and marveling at the stage it’s in now,” Fisher said. “It prompts us to look at our own identities and temporal, corporeal existences in a different light.”
Scanning the gallery, where an artist was making sculptures of a dancer with his phone, Fisher mused on the collaborative and generative opportunities of the theater and its ambitious programming.
“We’re creating choreographic structures that don’t just reflect what is possible now but are designed to evolve alongside emergent futures.”
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