Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival Inc

Education: the continuum of educational programs at jacob's pillow delivers accessible arts education experiences to students both on the pillow's campus, in classrooms, and in community spaces. In 2024 the pillow reached over 900 pittsfield students through programs that include curriculum in motion, field trips, steam team summer camp, and workshops and performances as part of the 10x10 upstreet arts festival. The school at jacob's pillow is where dancers and choreographers define and strengthen their distinct artistic voices, while making the connections that advance their work in the field. In 2024, the school at jacob's pillow received a total of 572 applications making it an incredibly competitive year. Across 10.5 weeks, we hosted 5 programs in the school at jacob's pillow featuring 119 artists from around the globe. In 2024, 61 alumni of the school returned to the pillow in performances throughout the festival.

Engagement: jacob's pillow community engagement programs serve thousands of berkshire residents every year. Throughout the 2024 festival, our community programs reached over 3,140 people via 76 in-person events both on and off our campus. Our annual community day took place on august 16 welcoming 463 attendees for a day of free, family friendly, all-ages activities. Our beloved community class series offered morning classes in ballet, yoga, contemporary dance, pilates, and hip-hop four days a week with 876 participants attending. Additionally, workshops with festival artists held on the jacob's pillow campus provided 307 community members with an opportunity to experience dance with the artists performing on our stages this summer.

Preservation: as jacob's pillow has been shaping the history of dance in america over the past nine decades, it has also been actively documenting and preserving this most ephemeral of art forms, and in the process has created a repository of dance history that is extensive and unique. The collections housed in the archives include audiotapes, board minutes, books, correspondence, costumes, films, photographes, posters, programs, scrapbooks, videos, and more. The archives is one component of the pillow's preservation program, which also documents the ongoing activities of the festival and organizes exhibits exploring various aspects of dance history. The center for most of jacob's pillow's preservation activities in blake's barn, an 18th century building that was relocated to the pillow grounds and reconfigured specifically for this purpose. During the summer, this research facilities is open to the general public daily, and throughout the remainder of the year, the archives may be visited during regular business hours. In 2024 the archives welcomed over 14,000 visitors to blake's barn.

Creation: the pillow lab is jacob's pillow's year-round incubator for new work. The annual season of bespoke residencies supports u.s.-based and international dance artists during crucial development, research, and technical stage of choreography-driven projects. Pillow lab artists and their collaborators receive unrestricted use of the pillow's state-of-the-art facilities. Artists live on campus and receive in-kind housing, an artist fee for each collaborator, a grocery stipiend, professionally filmed video documentation and a mini-documentary about their work, and access to the pillow's extensive archives. In 2024 we hosted 10 pillow labs and welcomed 85 participating artists to our campus.