Dance writer Gregory King explores the work of Garth Fagan from his own perspective as a scholar and former cast member of Disney's Broadway hit, The Lion King, which Fagan choreographed. Topics range from what it means to be a Black dancer / choreographer for a (mostly) white audience, being Jamaican in a Eurocentric dance ecosystem, and the power of embodied recognition stemming from identical cultural origins.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I’m Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it’s my pleasure to introduce dance writer and professor, Gregory King, who will be your host for this exploration of Garth Fagan. Professor King shares insights into Fagan's work from the perspective of his own journey - both artists originating from Jamaica, migrating to the U.S., and building their dance careers in this country.
GREGORY KING: I’ve often told the story of growing up in Jamaica. Of moving to America and becoming a dancer, and now, a professor. It never occurred to me that my story really had a meaning—until now.
When asked to engage with the archive of Jacob Pillow, I wasn’t sure who to research. Sure a few choreographers jumped out: Donald Byrd, Ronald K. Brown, Robert Battle, Bill T. Jones, Camille A. Brown. But I had more in common with one choreographer, at least on paper, than any other, forcing me to make sense of all the links from place of birth to his work on Broadway. This is not to say we had the same journey, but Garth Fagan’s story offered me an opportunity to relive my own dance story and, in the process, to memorialize and celebrate the totality of the journey that brought us here … to PillowVoices.
GARTH FAGAN: Hello.
GROUP: Hi.
J.R. GLOVER: We have spent two and a half days talking about how you talk and write about dance.
GARTH FAGAN: Uh-huh.
J.R. GLOVER: Mm-hmm. And looking at that through many different ways.
GARTH FAGAN: Mm-hmm.
J.R. GLOVER: And I wondered if maybe you would share with us, as a choreographer, as an artist, when you put your work out there, what do you hope that people who are looking at it get out of it?
GARTH FAGAN: Hmm, very simply, that they really look at it and analyze it. We’re still at a time where too many critics are at an old-fashioned Broadway stage of looking at dance. Where they get the obvious outline of the dance, but never dig deeper. I love the critics who will put themselves on the line and even make, come to a conclusion that I didn’t intend. But if I said, “Hmm, that’s nice. I mean, why didn’t I think of that?” Ok. But too many want that obvious space.
GREGORY KING: I grew up on the sun-soaked island of Jamaica, where music and dance are intertwined into your everyday existence without much thought. School dances, neighborhood gatherings, weddings, and funerals all came alive with rhythmic bodies in various forms of self-expression. One of my earliest memories as a child was watching my mother’s back as she stood chopping vegetables in the kitchen. I could hear the sounds of a pumping dance hall beat perforating the air. I knew she heard it too – the quivering cheeks of her buttocks told me. Yes, my mom was in the kitchen twerking. This was long before I knew what twerking was. Years later, my 45-year old self sits with that memory as a procession into my own time with dance.
Garth Fagan also grew up in Jamaica, though years before me. He was born in 1940 and grew up in Kingston where he studied with Ivy Baxter at the Jamaica National Dance Company. He migrated to the US to attend Wayne State University where he studied psychology. However, he continued his dance training and studied with dance icons Katherine Dunham, José Limón and Alvin Ailey. In 1970, he founded his own dance company, originally called The Bottom of the Bucket, But … Dance Theater, which later became Bucket Dance Theater and is now known as Garth Fagan Dance.
I was 17 years old when I heard about Bucket Dance Theatre; I think it was about the same time I heard about Dance Theatre of Harlem. I was living in Jamaica and my exposure to the arts came from the artistic influences of Cathi Levy, Paulette Bellamy and Joseph Robinson. While I participated in dance activities, I wasn’t seen as a dancer. But the engagement kept me interested, and hearing about Garth Fagan’s work made me curious.
Perusing the Garth Fagan archives, I was immediately drawn to “PillowTalk: Garth Fagan: Barefoot to Broadway.” The title was suggestive of a journey….his journey from his humble beginning in Jamaica to his status as an internationally renowned choreographer. It was intentional and direct. I imagine there was no need for pretentious subtitles. It simply told me that we were about to take a journey back in time, encountering space, and unpacking the creative process. The first thing I saw in the onscreen credits for the archival video of this June 2000 talk was the image of an unidentified male dancer on the grounds of Jacob’s Pillow. He vigorously rotated his arms as if performing a welcoming gesture. In a way, Garth Fagan was that gesture for me, because learning about him and his company welcomed me into a possible world of dance, not really knowing where it would lead. But it didn’t matter. He was of Jamaica, and that’s what mattered.
So, I’m watching the opening scene of this video. In it I see patrons chatting, exchanging pleasantries. It’s an older crowd; the plethora of white hair gave it away. I was later told that most of this audience was a group from a local lifelong learning institute. An older crowd that was predominantly, if not all, white. I shouldn’t have noticed because after all we live in a “post-racial world,” where the antidote to racism seems to be not seeing color, not seeing race. But I saw. I saw what was present and I saw what was not present. Four minutes into the video was the first sign of Blackness…and it was Garth. Garth Fagan. He was accompanied by a young lady. She too was Black, and I later learned that she was a Pillow intern. I wasn’t supposed to notice. But I did. I did notice.
This PillowTalk was twenty years ago and it is not my responsibility to comment on who should or shouldn’t make up the audience. It hit me as an important observation in relation to the Pillow given a July 2019 Berkshire Eagle op-ed written by the Pillow’s Executive & Artistic Director, Pamela Tatge. This article revealed an unsavory incident of racism at a Jacob’s Pillow gala. Maybe it’s fair to assume that because of its history and where it’s located – The Berkshires -- the audience is expected to be white. If this is the rationale, is the statement on the Pillow’s website enough as it addresses strategies for a more inclusive audience?
GREGORY KING: Ella Baff, the then-executive director of Jacob’s Pillow welcomed the audience at this 68th season event with candor and humor. She explained it was the first in a series of “picnic talks.” Remembering the expanse of white folks from the beginning of the video, the word picnic jumped out at me. I know ‘picnic’ didn’t originate from the racist, extrajudicial killings of African Americans, but the word planted itself in my consciousness because history corroborated that these brutal killings often occurred in gatherings referred to as picnics. But I digress. This sea of art patrons and dance lovers gathered to celebrate the man critics have hailed, “one of the great reformers of modern dance.”
He eased into the conversation. He admitted to having been a painter but confessed that his canvas “never spoke back to him.” You could hear the response to his humor.
GARTH FAGAN: It is the 30th anniversary of Garth Fagan Dance and I am happy to say I’ve spent half of my life with Garth Fagan Dance ‘cause I just turned 60 in May. So, I’m pushing 70, too! But when you give half of your life to a dance company, you have to love it, you have to love the art form. As you know, alas, dance in America is the step-child of the arts. We get the least funding, exposure, what have you. But my mentors—Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, José Limón, Pearl Primus—they spent years working on this art form to push it forward and bring it to more universal acceptance. The wonder and the problem with dance is that human beings bring my art form to life. I used to paint, and my canvas and my oils never spoke back to me. They just sat there on the canvas and did what I said. ‘More green, more blue, little touch of yellow.’ It was fine. But with human beings, they come into the studio one day and the same person that you knew yesterday is suddenly a complete ditz because he or she is madly in love, and you appear, or in one case, the parakeet had died and it was a time for mourning. And I did not know this and I had to find this out. So all the joys and wonderment of human beings can be a problem at times when you want them to do movement the way you perceive it on a particular musical phrase with an exact dynamic, a little more, a little less. And the, the greater the talent, the more inquisitive, the more curious they are and can be. The Hollywood movies that show you all the neurotic artists, those are Hollywood movies. I mean, I know several great, wonderful artists who are not neurotic. That just makes for better movies. Because we work too hard to go there. But we are very demanding creatures. Demanding first of all on ourselves. We always have to remember that one. The next dance for me has got to be better than the last one, it has to approach new areas, investigate new areas. And it’s just very difficult and then I pass this on to my dancers. The upside of the human being dilemma in the dance is Steven Humphrey, who you’ll see perform tonight. He’s been with me from the very beginning. He is now 48 years old, and at the Gala a lady said ‘he looks like 30!’ And I said that’s what I believe. But I…from a wild young man of 17 that I had to drive across town to go to his home to yank him out of bed for rehearsal because he was just sleeping. And his mother didn’t dare awake the prince, “Oh no, I love him too, but he’s got a rehearsal, he’s got to learn this right now. Steven, let’s go.” He’s now a wonderful, mature gentleman with a lovely family, and that is the joy. When you see people grow as human beings. That’s…that’s the plus side of the drama you can sometimes get from human beings.
When I was dancing, and the last time I performed here was in 1974 when I was a wee babe… well, I told you my age already so I can’t tell that lie. Ok, I wanted something else to dance. I wanted, I mean there were wonderful, wonderful companies. I mean, the Graham Company, the Ailey Company, the Limón Company, the Taylor Company— just brilliant companies. So it’s no criticism on the companies that existed, it’s just that I wanted to do something else. And Alvin, rest his soul, said “Well, you know, Garth. I couldn’t agree with you more, but why don’t you do it?” And a bell went off, bing, and I said, “OK, I will.” I had no idea how difficult it was going to be.
Being a great dancer is wonderful, it’s superb. Great dancers bring my work to life. But choreography is a whole other ball of wax. I have to deal with the movement, with the architecture of the movement, the use of space, the use of music. And those of you who know my work, my musical choices are slightly avant-garde. And we are at place, movement, within the phrase, or upon the phrase, is also quite unique..
GREGORY KING: Like most choreographers, Fagan is a storyteller. He is charismatic and witty. Here, his Jamaican accent was girdled by his passionate tone. His stories dated back to 1974 when he recounted his first dancing at the Pillow. He acknowledged that the dance companies that existed at that time were ‘brilliant,’ but that ‘he wanted something else to dance.’ I took that to mean he wanted to move in radically different ways – that he wanted something else from dance. Later, it was Alvin Ailey who said to him, “You know what, Garth … why don’t you do it.”
A new journey for Garth Fagan had begun.
GARTH FAGAN:Thanks to my parents, I had a wonderful musical education growing up. I hated it at the time. I had to go to lunch-hour concerts and sit quiet. And I was quite a frisky, robust child, as my grandson is now proving to be. I was quite fidgety and busy, and always in, in the middle of everything. But I had to go to lunch-hour concerts and sit very quietly while a fat lady sang, or the boring man played the horrible violin and I just didn’t get it. But when I looked at my parents they were spellbound. And then I’d listen to the conversation afterwards. Oh, the treat was they’d take me for a malted milk after the concert, and that was it, that was the payoff. But then I’d hear them going on with such enthusiasm about the artist that I said, “Well, something’s got to be good about this. I don’t hear mom and dad acting like that.” You know, so it must be something. And I started to pay attention. And before I knew it, I was punished by not going to the concerts. And I had no idea when that switch came around, but it did. I mean, I heard Horowitz, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, all kinds of fabulous people. They’d come to Jamaica for vacations and then do a concert. So I got to hear the very, very best. And one of the greatest experiences in the 30 years of Garth Fagan Dance, was we were playing Amsterdam. And as we were driving from the airport I saw a sign saying that Horowitz was playing. And it was so loud. And I said, “Oh no, this is my favorite, this is my family’s favorite, we are going.” And I contacted him and his manager and we sat on the stage with him. Those were the only seats left. And I was about in heaven, ready to die. And I am so sorry my dad wasn’t alive then because he was a big, big, big Horowitz fan, and explained to me who Horowitz was, and, and is, because his music lives beyond him and after him. Which is something that can happen to great artists, is that the work can go on after we’re gone.
Anyway, and of course my dancers who are very bright and have to be bright to work with me. I would not, that old fashioned notion about ‘shut up and dance,’ I don’t think it ever was, but it’s not true. Dancers around the world, and we’ve performed every place, every major city in the world, and I’ve taught in every major city in the world, dancers are some of the brightest, most inventive people you can imagine. So that old fashioned Broadway notion, even on Broadway now, dancers are very, very bright. The ones that work with me, or come my way. And I really want to underscore that because they have a lot of things going through their brains while they are appearing to be so relaxed and so happy or so upset before you. They’re dealing with phrasing, who they are going to catch next, how many spins to the turn, yada, yada, yada. So please understand this, dancers are the very, very best. And they bring choreographers' work to life.
GREGORY KING: My own professional dance journey began at The Washington Ballet, where I loaned my body to a genre outside of the natural cadence of Caribbean folk, dancehall, and reggae – familiar genres I either witnessed watching members of The National Dance Theatre or participated in while I lived in Jamaica. I was later introduced to modern dance, training with Don Martin from the Lester Horton Dance Theatre. And without discounting the value of my ballet training, modern dance felt more like home. It gave my spine, and my pelvis, permission to move in ways ballet didn’t.
I never danced in a modern dance company but have worked with choreographers whose aesthetics were grounded in the sensibilities of weight and the mobile back. In 2001, I joined the Broadway cast of Disney’s The Lion King. My interest in the show was piqued because it was the only show at the time boasting a majority Black cast, and there was something slightly kismet about being a part of the show, as it offered me a chance to parallel my dance journey with Fagan; from the streets of Jamaica to the Broadway stage.
I wasn’t a part of the original cast so I never learned the choreography from Fagan himself, but once a year, he led rehearsals for the entire cast, reiterating information he offered to those present when the show was being created. In these rehearsals, I became familiar with his movement vocabulary and his musical intentions.
I think back to one particular rehearsal where the wildebeest dance was being reviewed. The counts were a little incongruent to the music—the down beat, the ball change, and the hop on one leg done in a peculiar, unanticipated way—but the apparent contrast only aided the choreographic curiosities of Fagan’s intentions. Those musical and choreographic exceptionalities lived as embodiment of Fagan’s interest – of his artistic intelligence. He was not attentive to the predictable, but the probability. All these counts and leg actions were performed while thrusting a 6-foot tall wildebeest head, intimating the action of the animal advancing towards the audience, simulating a stampede.
Fagan rarely speaks of dance without referencing music as if to anoint it his guiding principle. With careful placement in and around his choreographic phrases, he declares that his musical choices can sometimes be seen as slightly ‘avant garde.’ A bit of a risk taker, Fagan finds artistic pleasure in avoiding the status quo. With humility, he also admits those risks sometimes come with failures, saying they ought not to be witnessed by a paying audience. Some would argue that not all failures stay in the studio, as some artists preserve their unused ideas, reshaping them for upcoming projects.
Fagan thanks his parents for his musical education, remembering them taking him to lunchtime concerts, rewarded with a malted shake for sitting through the performance. And while he didn’t understand it at the time, he was being primed to appreciate even that which he didn’t understand. Eventually, he did understand. He understood timing, and phrasing and choreo-musicality. He understands how to layer music with movement and how to extract complexity from a seamlessly straightforward score.
ELLIS ROVIN: Hello, this is Ellis Rovin the composer andeditor of Pillow Voices. If you’d like to learn more about Garth Fagan and witness the dances he’s created, many of his performances at the Pillow are online at Dance Interactive [dot] Jacob’s Pillow [dot] org. Continuing with the podcast we are going to hear directly from an original member of Garth Fagan Dance, Steve Humphrey, recorded here in a 2005 PillowTalk with Maura Keefe.
STEVE HUMPHREY: But you gotta remember, we’re starting from the beginning. We started with no dance training whatsoever. I mean, came in as just a rough, or a little piece of putty to be made. I mean, my experiences definitely was not involved in dance. But, like P.J. was saying, I was vulnerable. I wanted to get into something, and look for something different.
MAURA KEEFE: How, how did you come into contact with Mr. Fagan if you weren’t already knowing you wanted to be a dancer.
STEVE HUMPHREY: Well, see, it started at a prep school and it involved a different variations of the arts. I happened to be involved in music, vocals. And it was fortunately, or unfortunately, when I was about to go into college, we had to take a dance class. And I just figured if I were taking it at prep school, I’d pretty much eliminate it when I really get…
MAURA KEEFE: Oh, you were gonna get it over with? Uh-huh.
STEVE HUMPHREY: Right, right. And by being with a singing group, it also would help thinking that if we’re going to take this thing further we would at least have some kind of choreography…
MAURA KEEFE: Oh so you’d have some sense of staging and presence on the stage, to sing better.
GREGORY KING: In listening to Steve Humphrey talk about how he happened into dance, I was once again forced to reflect on my own barefoot to Broadway trajectory, and it led me down this path of “nothingness.” What does it mean to start from nothing - to have nothing? And not just the referential nothing alluding to the fact that you didn’t have what you currently have, but nothing as in no money, being homeless, and feeling alone. Maybe it’s a construct designed to put things into perspective, or maybe it’s a resounding reminder that nothing will always be in the beginning. In looking back at the beginning of my dance life, I felt like I had nothing.
So much so, that in 1994 I auditioned for the dance program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts dance department without ballet slippers; literally from barefoot to Broadway. I left Jamaica and I felt like I was existing in a world where I was hoping, but never quite knowing how to dream. I had to teach myself that skill because dreaming was for those with possibilities and I kept digging to find mine. At my lowest, I saw none.
STEVE HUMPHREY: Now Mr. Fagan, he has this aura about him that tends to make you sort of change your decision about life. Well, he would give you a, he would give you a standard, those two things, standard and a discipline. And being a youth of 18, those are the kind of things that I, I think I pretty much, maybe no knowing it, wanted. You know, some kind of, like a direction.
GREGORY KING: Humphrey’s commentary on how he happened into dance resonated with me. Humphrey noted his attraction to the possibility as the thing that drew him to work with Fagan— this would later become a bedrock of Garth Fagan Dance. ‘Standard and Discipline’ were words he used to convey Fagan’s values and looking back at my time in The Lion King, those values were always accompanied by veracity and benevolence. Fagan speaks of chance, of coincidence, of openness. But he also speaks of serendipity, of trust, of destiny. In this excerpt from his 2000 PillowTalk, he talks about the beginnings of The Lion King and mentions Disney CEO Michael Eisner, Director Julie Taymor, and Designer Michael Curry.
GARTH FAGAN: And most recently in Lion King when I did my beautiful dances and when I showed Julie Taymor and Michael Eisner what the gazelles would do, and the gazelles were paper cut outs, that was fine. But when I got the exquisite three-dimensional gazelles that only Julie Taymor and Mike Curry could have come up with, I mean they were absolutely works of art, then it was a different story. Because suddenly there was more weight to them, there’s a difference to the dancer’s center because they now have on a big headpiece of, you know, three, four feet. And there is a wildebeest thing hanging off your back and you want to do a turn and that’s whipping around. So, I had to grow. I had to grow into that situation. I had to go back and retool some of the dances to make them work. And Julie has a background in dance so she understood what was happening, and those of you that have seen Lion King, she is an amazing woman and an amazing artist. And it was, it was tough, it was really difficult and hard, but, boy, the end result was worth every two o’clock meeting, 2am meeting we had and all of the hours we put into the changes and what have you. But that’s what real choreographers do. They work until they get it right. They are going to blow it sometimes, but they work until they get it right. Movement invention is my favorite thing, is a thing that interests me most. So if you see some movement onstage that looks a little meshugganah to you or a little out to lunch, I intended it. I was trying to give you something other than what you have seen for the past 400 years. Not that they’re bad, not that they’re wrong, it’s just that I, as an artist living today, should push the art form forward. And my penché arabesque is okay ‘cause Baryshnikov and Makarova love it, it’s not like the ballet penché arabesque at all because the back goes completely to the floor, it’s the pure contemporary diagonal, it is very hard to do.
GREGORY KING: If you watch Fagan’s work, and you notice a moment that looks oddly confusing, it is most likely intentional. He likes to give you something you may not have seen before. He curates his intention by saying he wants to push the art form, hoping you don’t view his movement vocabulary as either “right” or “wrong.” I was a bit disheartened when he defended his dancers performing a penché, saying, “It’s alright, because Baryshnikov loves it.” Unintentionally, my mind wandered back to the predominantly white audience who may now consider his work significant simply because it has received a stamp of approval from whiteness. I don’t say these things to be provocative, but as a Black man from a small island in the Caribbean, when I enter certain spaces, I sometimes contend with how much of myself I may have to leave behind. In a way, seeking validation from the dominant culture.
Sometimes, I am oblivious to these approval seeking encounters, but I wonder if Fagan has ever felt those feelings? I ask this in reference to Fagan’s journey and also as context to his success. I wasn’t in the room when The Lion Kingwas being created, but what I do know is that Garth Fagan was one of the few Black people on the original creative team (musical genius Lebo M. being another). Having his own dance company, he gets to have the final say, making decisions as he sees fit to serve his creative vision. But for The Lion King, there were many voices shaping and molding this colossal artistic endeavor, and taking nothing away from The Lion King, I still question, what of his creativity was lynched at any of their creative meetings – the metaphorical picnics?
In dance spaces, Garth Fagan is a disruption of the white centrality that has guided the American modern dance movement for decades. His physical and allegorical voice is a reminder that, too often, the study of modern dance doesn’t include the meaningful contribution of aesthetics like Fagan’s, which lend the rhythmic strength of the Caribbean folk sensibilities to the linear exactitude of ballet, combined with the abstract experimentation of postmodernism. The complexity of his empirical Fagan Technique is in direct opposition to the ballet canon. But there is another opposition.
When modern dance is taught in some dance history courses, the people discussed are usually Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Mary Wigman, Hanya Holm, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Alwin Nikolais, and Alvin Ailey. This is not to say the list doesn’t change from institution to institution. But when academic discussion around modern dance occurs, the profound impact of Black dancers and choreographers are often sidelined or omitted entirely. Pearl Primus, Katherine Dunham, Donald McKayle, Rod Rodgers, and Garth Fagan are rarely inserted into the critical discourse. These Black modern dancers didn’t only disrupt ballet, they disrupted the white regularity of modern dance.
GARTH FAGAN: I also wanted to give an image of people of color that was more positive. I was tired of all the pimps and whores and mammies that I saw on television and on the Broadway stage. And the exotica that I saw on, I just wanted human beings dancing, that’s all, very simple, human beings dancing.
GREGORY KING: When Garth Fagan speaks about wanting to portray an image of people of color that’s more positive, he may have inadvertently been talking about the disruption of the gaze: the white gaze. I thought about the gathering of white folks around him who so gallantly soaked up his stories and I wish I saw myself. Where were the Black folks who may have benefited from watching a concert with people who looked like them? Where were the Black folks who may have smiled back at Fagan with a familial grin, hearing the twang of his Jamaican accent? As I write this, as I speak this, I know a lot of historically white arts institution like the Pillow are slowly shifting to diversify both their programming and their audience. By continuing to provide opportunities for Black artists to create, teach, and perform, Black, Indigenous, people of color may feel more welcome, at least with what’s on the stage.
I can’t help but wonder if the conversation with the audiences and patrons would have been different if the space had more melanin. I don’t know… but I wonder.
GARTH FAGAN: I always insist in all my contracts, and thank god I can do that now, that whenever we go to a foreign country we have two days off. And we spend those days off actively. Going to the art galleries, going to whatever dance concerts, theater, flea markets. Whatever is happening in that country, we spend time in that country. So, and of course, eating the food. We’re very, we will eat most anything. I’ve had it all, snake, wildebeest, crocodile ribs, I’ve had it all. If I don’t like it, I won’t eat it, but I’ve got to try it, I have to know what it is. But all the things that different countries have, the things that are on the ground, the things that you have to go into the home to see, not the touristy things. The things that you have to go where the people, the concerts, the parties to get. It’s very important to my dance company that we take advantage of that, that, where we are. I mean, we were in…Australia were dancing with the Aborigines, New Zealand. Wherever we go we get right into the thick of things because we can learn so much, because what you thought was absolute at home is 360 degrees elsewhere. And you can learn so much when you put that plan into yourself and decide what’s the best for you. So we do spend a lot, and we have been to every gallery around the world. And I used to have to fuss with them to go and now they’re dragging me along. When I want to stay in the hotel and rest they say, ‘oh, no, no, so-and-so is doing a concert, we have to go.’ So it’s very important that we use that time, and difference in culture, and language, and food to help us along.
GREGORY KING: Garth Fagan is a man of robust cultural intelligence. In the spaces where he gathers, he holds the audience with his stories. The intellectual candor with which he seizes their attention, is reflected in how his work resonates on stage. He catalogues remnants of time in Jamaica, Detroit, Rochester, Broadway, and the many stages of the world, so he will have more stories to tell, and more dance stories to make.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
NORTON OWEN: That’s it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today. On behalf of Jacob's Pillow, we look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays, and podcasts at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, and of course through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or onsite.