The Yard’s final dance residency of the year culminates this weekend with two performances by Jenna Pollack, a choreographer whose new work explores the half-century history of the Yard itself.
Originally slated for the summer of 2020 season, which was derailed by the pandemic, Ms. Pollack returned to the Yard’s Chilmark campus earlier this month with a team including a sustainable design engineer, a sound designer, performance and video artist, a lighting designer and four dancers.
“I’ve been working inter-disciplinarily for years,” Ms. Pollack told the Gazette outside the Yard studio Tuesday. “It’s the only way I’m interested in working as a dance maker.”
To create the untitled work in progress, Ms. Pollack and her collaborators
have been poring over nearly 50 years worth of archives, going back to the Yard’s 1972 founding by dancer-choreographer Patricia Nanon.
“It felt potent and responsible and of utility to the organization in a way that I’m interested in operating within the dance ecosystem, to honor the campus (and) its history through my practice,” Ms. Pollack said.
On Tuesday, a long table inside the theatre that’s named for Ms. Nanon was piled with bulging three-ring-binder scrapbooks, VHS tapes of performances, draft plans for the theatre and studio off Middle Road, sliding stacks of snapshots and box after box of photographic slides.
“There are probably 1,000 slides,” said Ms. Pollack. To go through them and select her favorites, she borrowed a slide viewer from Martha’s Vineyard Museum research librarian Bow Van Riper, who has become yet another collaborator in the new work.
“We’ve been asking this question of what do we do with these archives? How do we bring this history to life? I can’t think of a better lens than a choreographic, artistic one,” Yard executive director Chloe Jones said. “The way that Jenna and her collaborators are approaching the history of this place and this site — it’s so genuine to what this place is about.”
Ms. Nanon’s three daughters also joined Ms. Pollack’s team, providing more archival material including a rack of costumes worn by their mother during her dance career. Daughter Vicki Woolner Samuels, an early Yard dancer herself, has been spending much of her annual Vineyard vacation with Ms. Pollack.
“It feels so right,” said Ms. Woolner Samuels, who joined Ms. Pollack and Ms. Jones for Tuesday’s open-air conversation with the Gazette as the dancers practiced inside the studio’s open barn doors and the technical team conferred at an outside table.
“The whole thing is just so exciting to me,” Ms. Woolner Samuels continued. “I could not be here a better week of the year — it’s kismet.”
Audience members at Friday and Saturday’s performances will glimpse Ms. Nanon’s costume rack as part of the show, which will move from place
to place on the Yard grounds. “The muse is the campus,” said Ms. Pollack. “We have five sites that we’re activating . . . and we’ll be inviting folks to come around the campus with us,” she said.
“It is unlike anything we have done before,” Ms. Jones said of the peripatetic show, which caps a season of performances in varying formats and venues as the nonprofit tangoed with Covid-19 fears and restrictions throughout the summer.
“We’ve done more outdoor performances; we’ve utilized our studio quite a bit because it’s open-air… I think we had only one weekend of performances in the black-box theatre all summer,” Ms. Jones said.
The Yard opened its season on the lawn of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum with Embarqued, by Company SBB Stefanie Batten Bland, and held two later residency performances on the deck of the Art Barn at Featherstone Center for the Arts.
“That allowed us to bring together a larger audience because there’s more space, and people could be outdoors and spread out,” Ms. Jones said.
Keeping presentation plans flexible until close to show dates was an intentional strategy, she added, and one that served the Yard well in two ways. It allowed the group to respond to the latest Covid-19 conditions on Island, and also provided more leeway for the resident artists developing works in progress.
“Leaving the format… up for discussion a little bit later in the process means that it can be more in touch with what happens here during the residency,” she said.
Following this weekend’s performances, the Yard is taking a break from presentations, Ms. Jones said.
“We are taking this fall to assess all of the programs of this year — we ran a virtual, full winter and spring season and then launched into this summer’s residencies,” she said. “We have a lot of fund raising to do to make sure we can have programming next year, and also we’re going to carve out some space for our staff to do a little bit of recuperation. We want to enter 2022 jazzed and ready to be engaging programs through the winter, spring and summer.”
Jenna Pollack performs at the Yard on August 27 and 28. Both shows begin at 7 p.m.
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