Works & Process Will Will Bring JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL to the Guggenheim
The event is on Monday, April 27, 2026.
Works & Process will present a first look at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, set for Monday, April 27, 2026 at 7PM at the Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10128.
Located in Becket, Massachusetts, Jacob's Pillow is a treasured 220-acre National Historic Landmark, a recipient of the prestigious National Medal of Arts, and home to America's longest-running and largest international dance festival. See excerpts of works incubated by the Pillow that will culminate in Festival 2026 presentations this summer. Highlights of new works bringing together technology and dance by choreographers Brinae Ali and Brian Brooks will be performed, and Jacob's Pillow Executive & Artistic Director Pamela Tatge will moderate a discussion with the artists.
To continue the conversation, Works & Process will host a reception in the rotunda of the museum.
Brinae Ali will return to Jacob's Pillow this summer with Baby Laurence Legacy Project, developed during a Pillow Lab residency in 2024. The show explores and celebrates the artistic genius of "Baby" Laurence Donald Jackson, a Baltimore innovator whose impact on tap dance and jazz music is legendary. This evening-length production traces Laurence's life from Baltimore to Harlem and Washington, D.C. to share his largely forgotten story with audiences, featuring songs by Laurence including "Baby at Birdland" and "An Afternoon of Percussion" reimagined with new arrangements and choreography-interspersed with technology that brings Laurence himself into the production. With music played live by the Baltimore Music Collective, Ali reveals how Laurence embodied the bebop aesthetic, reflecting a defiance of the white gaze and a self-referencing Black consciousness akin to the music of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, and Charlie Parker. This work is the recipient of Jacob's Pillow's 2026 Joan B. Hunter New Work Commission.
Brian Brooks Moving Company will return to Jacob's Pillow this summer to present the world premiere of Elsewhere, featuring eight dancers tracked with motion capture and depth cameras. The dancers' movement produces live video and generative graphics that spill across screens, shaped and guided by custom software. The dance is a meeting place for human bodies and digital systems, generating a shifting choreography that echoes and reframes itself in real time. The program will also include the ensemble work Closing Distance (2020), set to Caroline Shaw's Pulitzer Prize-winning score "Partita for Eight Voices," an innovative a cappella composition created for the vocal group Roomful of Teeth.
In a new work by Brooks, principal dancers with Miami City Ballet, Macarena Giménez and Chase Swatosh, will appear as guest artists with the company, performing Can we be Quiet? (2026), recently commissioned in a collaborative project with New World Symphony and featuring an original score by Kevin Puts.
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