Wednesday evening, August 12, 2026 – Blake’s Barn – Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival – Becket, Massachusetts – My wife, Roberta (who took this picture) and I had half an hour to spare before the season premiere of The Martha Graham Dance Company on the McCain Stage of the Ted Shawn Theatre, so we stopped into Blake’s Barn to walk through Oliver Tobin‘s masterfully-curated exhibition, Call to Action, spotlighting Graham’s incendiary dances of the 1930s.
And, of course, across the room, presiding over the Archives, I spotted the ubiquitous and ever-charming Norton Owen, Historian and Founding Director of Preservation at Jacob’s Pillow — and we chatted for awhile.
I first met Norton in the summer of 2012, (I believe it was), when I had just begun research on my biography of Martha Graham. Back then, the Archival “study room” footprint was a small chamber with room for two desks – Norton’s and mine. I spent three days under his watchful, benevolent eye leafing through treasured vintage photographs and papers and “ephemera” from the early careers of Ted Shawn and Ruth St.Denis.
Norton was generous enough to narrate those hours with a congenial stream of expertise — verbal footnotes — on all things modern dance. His encyclopedic voice can be heard throughout my book.
And I had an opportunity to reciprocate two years later, during three entertaining, anecdotal days in the autumn of 2014, when I sat down to interview Norton for the Oral History Project in the New York Public Library Jerome Robbins Dance Division.
Those hours flew by — and, subsequently, I have lost track of the multitude of dance concerts, receptions, and awards ceremonies in our burgeoning field where we always greet each other with affection (even though I am “the [momentarily] serious one” in the photo you see here.).