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This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Sometime after graduating college, in 1999, Jaka Pearl Porter concluded Pittsburgh was the place to be. What exactly Porter would do here, however, was something of an open question.
Porter, then known as Pearlann Porter, grew up in New Jersey, studied in Point Park University’s nationally known dance program, then started teaching there. In 2004, Porter (who now uses they/them pronouns) debuted The Pillow Project, the troupe which would become the vehicle for many of their best-known works.
This year, the Pillow Project turns 20. Porter, 47, is looking both back and ahead with “The Long Dream,” a big anniversary show Fri., Sept. 6, and Sat., Sept. 7, at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture.
The program includes a restaging of Porter’s first-ever choreographic work, “Zzzz,” and a performance piece about the Pillow Project itself, followed by the debut of Porter’s newest work, cheekily titled “Turmoil, Romance and Debauchery in D Minor.”
“Zzzz,” a work for 10 dancers, is set to music by Brahms and Berlioz, and incorporates pillow fights. The 25-minute “Turmoil” is for 16 dancers moving to music by Sibelius.
Ever since they started dancing as a toddler, inspired by MTV and performers like Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul, Porter has remained a music-first choreographer, the movement a way of making the sound physical. But with this new show, Porter wants audiences to see what’s changed and map the length of Porter’s journey through the contrast between the two dance works.
Porter completed “Zzzz” as a student, at age 20. “My first piece is very straightforward, whimsical and innocent, you know, dare I say, naïve,” they say today. “But the work I'm creating now has depth and there's more meaning and range and far more dynamic that's going on. The story is much more fleshed out.”
The Pillow Project’s name has its roots in Porter’s collegiate bouts of insomnia, when they were kept awake by all the dance ideas they were dreaming up. Writing those ideas down helped; the “pillow projects” were the ones Porter jotted in notebooks but hadn’t yet put on their feet.
The troupe’s very first show was titled “Kinda Sorta” because “I really didn't know what the Pillow Project was at that point,” Porter says. “It was like kinda-sorta jazz. It was kinda-sorta hip hop. I had tap in the show.”
Spectacles like the rock-infused “The Concept Album Tour,” staged at Shadyside’s cavernous Hunt Armory, followed. And Porter continued to refine the style they call “postmodern improvisational dance.”
In 2007, Porter launched the Space Upstairs, an industrial-loft-style venue in Point Breeze, above Construction Junction, where the Pillow Project staged full-scale works like the poignant and technically ambitious “Paper Memory” and other experimental projects.
Since 2007, the Space Upstairs has also been home to the troupe’s monthly Second Saturdays series of informal, lounge-style jazz happenings, melding live music and improvisational dance.
Porter continued to work off-site, too. In 2013, she organized the Jazz Furnace, the first-ever all-day dance event at the Carrie Furnaces. And a series called Thought Pockets brought recurring pop-up dance performances to public streets from Downtown Pittsburgh to New York City, Paris, London and Dublin.
Porter recently came out as trans. While “The Long Dream” does not directly address this milestone, it does mark a new chapter of sorts. The spoken-word/movement performance that falls between “Zzzz” and the show’s new title work will constitute a rare turn on stage for Porter, who usually remains behind the scenes as co-artistic director with their partner, John Lambert.
Porter notes that none of the dancers in this staging of “Zzzz” was born when it debuted. Those same dancers are helping debut “Turmoil.”
“Even they say, like, ‘This seems like it's choreographed by two separate people,’” said Porter. “And I'm like, ‘It was.’”
More information on “The Long Dream” is here.
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