Costumes Dance Out Of Jacob’s Pillow’s Past At WCMA
Most people head for the attic to search for hidden treasures from the past. At Jacob’s Pillow, they descend to the basement, where 33 vintage travel trunks that have visited four continents form an Aladdin’s cave of costumes from the Denishawn dance company.
Now through November, Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) will display highlights of this dazzling collection in “Dance We Must: Treasures from Jacob’s Pillow 1906-1940,” co-curated by WCMA’s Kevin Murphy and Pillow archivist and dance costume specialist Caroline Hamilton.
A power couple of their time who graced magazine covers and endorsed gum, modern dance legends Ruth St. Denis and Pillow founder Ted Shawn circled the globe, attracting audiences and adulation “like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda in the 1920s,” explained Murphy.
Founded in 1915, Denishawn’s intercultural experiences in India, Europe, the Americas and the Far East turned ethnic choreography into dynamic dances with exotic costumes. They studied religion, rituals, deities and dance styles, breaking balletic boundaries with bare feet and bendable bodies.
Nowadays that would induce appropriation ire, but in context it offered glimpses of unreachable cultures, an embroidered Japanese kimono, bejeweled Buddhist Kuan Yin headdress and Spanish bullfighter costume providing a wearable world tour.
Curating the exhibit has been a long distance affair — Brit-based Hamilton hopped 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, Murphy logged 3,000 miles between Williamstown and Becket.
Last summer Hamilton (actually an Aussie) excavated one fabulous find after another from the trunks’ depths, returning in January to log the collection.
“I’ve cataloged 20 trunks and 1,600 items,” she said. “The rest are props, hats, boxes of bows and arrows, all kinds of crazy things.”
Thirty mannequins model the costumes, more or less (much less in body-beautiful Shawn’s case), alongside 200 vintage photographic prints, a dozen paintings and five original trunks. Two iconic images of Shawn and St. Denis that normally frame the Pillow’s mainstage received a welcome wash and brush up for up-close viewing beside the costumes they depict.
Headdress, 1919 with later additions. Beads, buttons, costume jewelry, and feathers. Photo by David Dashiell.
After Shawn’s muscular Men Dancers folded in 1940 (Denishawn costumes were stowed a decade earlier), the trunks sat largely untouched. Makeup, sweat, embellishments and patches trace years of use — the earliest 1914 “Legend of the Peacock” costume was worn into the 1940s, its eye-emblazoned train layered with sequins and remedial stitching.
A year ago, an unexpected WCMA schedule opening prompted Pillow director Pamela Tatge and former WCMA director Christina Olsen to explore this collaboration. Pillow director of preservation Norton Owen’s enthusiasm for the costume collection motivated Murphy, a scholar of American art through the early 20th century, to compress what would typically be two years’ work into six months, by far his most complicated exhibition to date.
For Hamilton, who studied ballet costume building in Canada and history and world cultures at international museums, working at Jacob’s Pillow is a dream realized. “Early 20th century ballet is my specialty,” she explained, “so it has been very exciting to move into the modern dance world.”
With no intact collection on this scale anywhere else, Hamilton anticipates the exhibit will make the dance and theater world stand en pointe and take notice, bowled over by the incredible colors of costumes known only from black and white images. These icons of American dance might even give the Met’s Costume Institute lauded summer show some worthy competition.
At the opening celebration on July 2, Hudson-based choreographer Adam H. Weinert and his dance company will recreate historic Shawn solos, and Williams College’s Erica Dankmeyer (a former Martha Graham dancer) will perform St. Denis’ “Bakawali Nautch” dance, the original uber-opulent costume right there for all to see.
This exhibit of costumes and artifacts embraces Shawn and St. Denis through their self-images, celebrity and cultural standing. It will surely satisfy fans of facts and fabulousness alike.
”Dance We Must: Treasures from Jacob’s Pillow, 1906-1940”
Williams College Museum of Art, 15 Lawrence Hall Drive, Williamstown, MA
June 29 to Nov. 11, 2018, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, to 8 p.m. Thursdays.
Opening reception and performance July 2, 5:30 p.m.
Free admission.
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