ROCKPORT — Still savoring two sensational sold-out weekend performances by the Limon Company that brought audiences to their feet with explosive applause and round after round of bravos, Windhover Executive Director Lisa Hahn has her sights set on the performing arts center’s gala Tuesday night. The annual event this year will celebrate what an “elated” Hahn calls a “stellar” but far from over season.
From 5 to 9 p.m., Aug. 25, Windhover’s 5 acres of former farmland and cluster of former farm buildings will host an intimate evening that starts in the chapel with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then moves under the big tent for a three-course catered dinner accompanied by no fewer than eight “thoughtfully curated wines” served by two sommeliers.
It’s about as formal as Windhover gets, Hahn says, but casual with guests in summer whites, sandals and jeans.
The main course, as is always at Windhover, is on stage, where the evening will begin with “one-man band” Stan Strickland, who will give the audience his jazzy take on big Broadway show tunes. Strickland, best known as a tenor sax player, has performed internationally and at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Washington’s Kennedy Center. Part Cherokee, his repertoire includes Native American chanting and rhythmics. “People love Stan,” Hahn told the Times, “It’s great to have him back.”
Next up, and also for a return performance, will be Amanda Stevenson, who, as a Paul Taylor dancer was part of Windhover’s three-day Taylor 2 festival in 2018. Now manager of the Taylor School, she’ll be performing Taylor classics and choreographic pieces and will be joined by current Taylor Company manager Bridget Welty, who will oversee stage lighting and sound design.
Windhover’s connection to the late Paul Taylor began with a passion he shared with Hahn’s mother, Windhover founder and renowned dancer Ina Hahn, for the early choreography of Doris Humphrey. Her work and technique influenced the young Taylor and the young Ina Hahn, who, with her storied dance career winding down and a baby — Lisa — on the way, founded Windhover.
That was in 1969, when she and her husband Herb bought an old Rockport dairy farm and converted it into what was originally a summer dance camp for young girls. Ina Hahn had by then founded a Cambridge-based dance company which she brought to the farm as the Windhover Dance Company.
Since Ina’s death in 2016, Lisa Hahn has carried on her mother’s dream of seeing Windhover as a full-fledged modern dance center like Jacob’s Pillow, where she spent her 19th summer. Today, a world-famous summer mecca for dance aficionados nestled in the Berkshires, iacob’s Pillow’s facilities are 21st century, its audiences monied.
The Jacob’s Pillow that Ina Hahn knew, the one founded in 1939 by early American modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn, was a rustic cluster of run-down barns, stables and fields that were laboratories where aspiring young barefooted dancers were free to experiment and invent the new techniques and moves that modern dance was built on.
Those barns, stables and fields spawned the likes of great 20th century modern dance icons Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, Merce Cunningham and Ina Hahn herself.
“I’ve always thought my mother modeled Windhover on her experience at Jacobs Pillow,” Lisa Hahn told the Times. “She loved that place and I think she wanted to recreate it as it originally was, here at Windhover.”
Want to experience Jacobs Pillow before it became Jacobs Pillow? Welcome to Windhover.