Little, big
Remembering the Doris Duke Theatre, a tiny venue, now lost, that was an incubator of powerful dance performance.
The first time I saw the back wall of the Doris Duke Theatre open to the summer night was at a performance by the dance duo Eiko & Koma in 1997. There was no music, so the chirps and rustles of the forest served as their score as they moved, painfully slowly, across the floor. The piece felt like a poem of suffering, even more so as a cloud of gnats, drawn by light and sweat, began to collect around the dancers’ nearly naked bodies.
A newbie reviewer at the time, I suffered with them. I didn’t get it, but I never forgot it.
That fusion of beauty and discomfort, of the weird and the lyrical, in some ways epitomized the Duke, the smaller of Jacob’s Pillow’s two theaters, which was destroyed by fire on Nov. 17. You never knew exactly what to expect there — you might be confused or irritated or deeply touched or all those things at once. If the statelier Ted Shawn Theatre is Queen Elizabeth, then the Duke was Princess Margaret — edgier, hipper, quirkier.
Perhaps due to the proximity of the dancers to the audience, or the chameleon-like quality of the black-box theater itself (e.g., the removable back wall), performances in the Duke often left visceral imprints, visual and emotional. A bizarre struggle between man and puppet in Crystal Pite’s eerie “Dark Matters.” A series of freighted interactions unfolding on a giant, rotating lazy Susan in Chunky Move’s “Tense Dave.” Children running across the floor, eliciting sound and movement from color-saturated interactive “carpets” created by the Italian dance-theater company T.P.O. Rome cradling the dying Merc in “Rome & Jewels,” Rennie Harris’s hip-hop version of “Romeo and Juliet”; and a tall, balding male dancer embodying Leisl in Doug Elkins’ campy take on “The Sound of Music.”
These works, and so many others, were original, risky, refreshingly free of the familiar markers of the form. We had never seen dance like this before.
The Ted Shawn is small in comparison with other renowned venues, but it couldn’t match the intimacy of the Duke. At a 2002 in-the-round performance of
the Wally Cardona Quartet, viewers were invited to walk around to different vantage points during the show, sometimes literally sitting at the dancers’ feet. I wrote that night about the vulnerability and the power that are revealed when we are so close: a bruise on an elbow, muscles bunching under the skin. In the last show I saw at the Duke, in July 2019, choreographer Caleb Teicher suddenly began to sing a melancholy lament, and the theater seemed to shrink to the size of a tiny nightclub. “I thought I would have more time,” he mourned, as his dancers trickled sand through their fingers onto the stage.
The Duke is one more thing lost in a time of great losses. It would be easy to frame its disappearance as a symbol of what’s been taken from artists and audiences this year, what has gone up in flames and smoke. But let’s celebrate this place instead, knowing that the innovation and dedication it nurtured for 30 years are the very qualities that will bring dance back to us, more brilliant despite suffering, and because of suffering.