An Adventure in Driving and Dance

Yesterday we took a trip down to Becket, MA, to see a free performance at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. We rejoice that it was free. The dancers were a troupe of talent show rejects (except for one who really needs to find a better troupe to work with, honey!), just slightly above the level of your average liturgical dancer, and the choreography was unintelligible. All put to a half-hour of repetitive electronic droning done with a modicum of imagination by the lone electric guitarist and a tape loop machine. I kept wondering if perhaps a real stage with lighting might have provided some clues as to what they were trying to convey (free performances at Jacob's Pillow are done on an outdoor platform, with a lovely view of the surrounding hills—something to enjoy looking at when the dance performance ain't so hot). The arts reviewer in my head said, "Even the dancers appear not to understand the meaning behind the moves. They've memorized the steps but have no idea why they're doing them." Neither did we.

Be that as it may, it was free and the grounds at Jacob's Pillow are beautiful and the weather was terrific and the mosquitoes kept a polite distance, so it was a good evening. We knew we were really on vacation when our back roads route took us up a narrow winding mountain road—we seem to have a knack for finding motion-sickness mountain roads on our vacations. And then a detour kicked us off my Google map directions onto an even narrower, winding-er road with sketchy pavement that took us down into the bowels of the Berkshire forest before spitting us back up onto route 8. When Becket looks like thronging civilization, you know you've been in the boonies!

Maybe we'll start saving up now so we can afford tickets (over $50 a pop!) to one of the real dance shows at Jacob's Pillow next summer. Back in 1986 when I spent a miserable summer during seminary as "music counselor" at Camp Lenox in the Berkshires (a sports camp for rich kids where I had all of 2 music students, one of whom actually enjoyed them and made great strides on the recorder, having never done anything with music before in his 8 years of life), the camp took us all to Jacob's Pillow to see Laurie Anderson in a multimedia dance performance. It was great! One of the 3 good things about that summer. The others were my recorder student, and attending a rehearsal at Tanglewood. OK, 4 good things: I was in the best physical shape of my life by the end of the summer, what with all the running up and down the hill between our cabins and the main camp area for 8 weeks. The rest was miserable.

Today we're looking forward to the arrival of Jesse & Mike Lumsden Piscatello—they're back from their honeymoon and will spend tonight and most of tomorrow visiting with us. Always a joy. Tomorrow we might go up to Mass MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, one of Jesse & Mike's and James's & my favorite places. Or we'll come up with something else fun to do. Who knows—we're on vacation! No plans…