The Portal

Pillow Lab: In Process with Jean Butler Dance

Jean Butler, creative research score for Jacob's Pillow residency (2019). Photograph by Cori Olinghouse.

After initiating the first archive of Irish solo dances entitled Our Steps, Our Story: An Irish Dance Legacy in partnership with The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library, Irish dance practitioner, contemporary choreographer, and Artistic director of Our Steps Jean Butler uses a developmental residency to re-calibrate this material for a performance installation, currently entitled The Stepping Fields. 

This residency will focus on choreographic and film experiments to create aesthetic and narrative links between live and recorded materials. The Stepping Fields confidently places the Irish body, past and present, under meticulous examination in an aim to reintroduce the form and engage new audiences in the lost cultural dance history of Ireland and the diaspora.