Shamel Pitts/TRIBE Touch of Red @ Jacobs Pillow (Becket, MA)

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Dancer, performance artist, and choreographer Shamel Pitts creates provocative dance works that “push against the boundaries of identity” (Dance Magazine). His collective TRIBE will perform Touch of RED, inspired by a blend of the rapid-fire footwork of boxing, the African American jazz dance style Lindy Hop, Gaga movement language, and nightlife culture. Set in a stylized ring, this dance duet examines the way Black men are perceived and perceive themselves in contemporary society, and explores male vulnerability and intimacy.

This is a notable homecoming for Pitts and his collective, who were in residence at the Pillow Lab developing Touch of RED just when the original Doris Duke Theatre was lost to a fire in November 2020. Since then, TRIBE premiered Touch of RED in a sold-out weekend in October 2022 at MASS MoCA, co-presented by Jacob’s Pillow, and has been performed at major arts institutions across the globe. The week of June 24-28 will be the first time this remarkable duet is performed at Jacob’s Pillow in its entirety.

Pitts is a United States Artist Fellow (2026), a Stroke of Genius Fellow (2025), a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow (2024), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2020). He received a Doris Duke Artist Award (the largest prize in the United States dedicated to individual performing artists) as well as a Knight Choreography Prize in 2024, and a Princess Grace Award in Choreography in 2018. Pitts’ “BLACK series” has toured extensively worldwide since 2016. The group is now working on its “RED series.”

During the first week of this year’s Festival, Pitts will receive the Jacob’s Pillow Men Dancers Award. This award is presented every two years to a choreographer of any gender who creates an innovative work danced by men dancers at Jacob’s Pillow.

Shamel Pitts was grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvestant section of Brooklyn, where he was teased for not being dark enough. He attended LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts, studied at the Alvin Ailey School, and obtained his bachelor’s degree at Juilliard. He then moved to Tel Aviv for seven years, where he was the only Black American dancer with the Batsheva Dance Company. This is Israel’s premier dance troupe, founded by Martha Graham and Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, was the artistic home of world-renowned choreographer Ohad Naharin and his revolutionary "Gaga" movement language.

TRIBE is a Brooklyn-based nonprofit multidisciplinary arts collective founded by Shamel Pitts in December 2019. The collective is composed of international and local artists, especially but not exclusively black artists, especially Black, queer, non-binary, and alternative artists. TRIBE works across mediums, including movement, choreography, lighting design, video mapping projection, poetry, spoken word, cinematography, scenography, dramaturgy, costume styling, electronic soundscape design, music composition, and “magical lighting.”

“Shamel Pitts is a choreographer who scores emotion in motion,” says Tavia Nyong’o, the William Lampson professor of African American studies, American studies and theater and performance studies at Yale University. Pitts, he says, “teaches us how to move in time with our thoughts.”

Shamel Pitts’ lyrics are evocative, such as “Childhood is such a strong memory/That we hope to flee it with integrity.”

For a really interesting, excellent interview of Shamel Pitts, see:

https://lampoonmagazine.com/tribe-shamel-pitts-touch-of-red-doris-duke-theatre-boxing-masculinity-afrofuturism/

YOU MUST PURCHASE YOUR DISCOUNTED TICKET DIRECTLY FROM JACOBS PILLOW; REGISTERING ONLY ON EVENTBRITE WILL NOT GET YOU A TICKET OR ALLOW YOU TO SEE THE PERFORMANCE.