At the Jacob’s Pillow Festival in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, the barnlike theatres and studios are made from the pine of the dense surrounding forests. The Pillow grounds blend in with their bucolic setting. But the performances – running from June to September – may be anything but peaceful. They may be anything at all.

The man who happened on this once-dilapidated farm and way station on the Underground Railroad in 1930 was Ted Shawn. With his glamorous wife Ruth St Denis, Papa Shawn – as he was affectionately known for presiding over the festival for four decades – stands at the root of American modern dance. Denishawn, the school the couple founded, initiated Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey into the mysteries of modern dance, and these choreographers in turn tutored Merce Cunningham, José Limon and Paul Taylor. Yet the festival has long had a deliberately eclectic bent, never limiting itself to a single lineage.
In 1955, a young Cunningham troupe shared an evening with international ballet stars Alicia Alonso and Erik Bruhn, and flamenco dancer La Mariquita; in 1953, the roster included Robert Joffrey and classical Indian dancer Shivaram. Although a single troupe now commands its own week and one of the two ample theatres, the eclecticism remains.

In “Moon Uprising” on the outdoor stage on Wednesday, the Erica Essner Performance Co-Op moved with magically soft vibrancy. Essner is known for the evocative power of her gestures and for making old-fashioned angst feel new again, but in this sextet to Miguel Frasconi’s percussive score, a wafting peace prevailed. The steps seemed not to end so much as float away – over the deep valley that serves as the stage’s backdrop, or into the feathery canopy of trees overhead. Meanwhile, in a lovely exhibition up the hill, cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s barefoot “Lady of Interpretative Dance” offers odes to the seasons – and the times. Feiffer himself was there to tell us about the famous Village Voice dancer and his drawing life. He was very funny. About Jerome Robbins testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he said: “ ‘Choreographer’ wasn’t known back in the ’50s. It was an arty word. Probably a Jewish word. The committee members thought if you were some kind of Jewish fairy, sure, you might know it.”

In spite of the range of offerings, a common thread does run through this year’s Festival: hip-hop. The form is so pervasive that it has transcended its original values and circumstances. The Canadian troupes Rubberbandance (August 9-12) and Kidd Pivot (August 19-23), for example, use the low-riding, sideways-loping legs, the jigsaw body and the pliant use of the floor to create delicate interior worlds.

Rennie Harris, whose PureMovement troupe is this week’s main attraction, has probably done more to make that expansion possible than anyone. The one-time dancer for Run-DMC and Kurtis Blow has turned hip-hop towards narrative, with a West Side Story set in present-day North Philadelphia, where he grew up. He’s tackled big social questions via dancing as silken as a cloudy midnight. And he’s masterminded a variety show that demonstrates how rapping, DJing, bucket-drumming and so forth form a whole with b-boy tricks and hip-hop steps. But whatever he’s done, Harris has never forgotten the form’s social origins.
“Students of the Asphalt Jungle” (1995) – one of three early works on the programme – begins with eight buff men in Adidas work-out trousers crouched in a sprinter’s start. They blast off into b-boy manoeuvres, presented in the usual fashion: one dancer at a time trying to outdo the rest, spinning like a disc, tumbling through enough flip-flops to turn into a blur, tying himself into a tangled knot. The other men lie on their stomachs in push-up position with noses and eyes pressed to the floor. Harris doesn’t offer hip-hop exhibitionism and machismo blindly. He’s wondering what’s driving us – or who – and what are we getting for our effort? The audience on Wednesday didn’t hear the question. They cheered wildly at the spectacular moves.

P-Funk, another early work, offers a less allegorical portrait of men together: these brothers cluster, clown, copy, and, yes, one-up each other. But only “Something to Do With Love, Part One” – a recent work with an excellent cadre of women dancers – expands the steps so they’re not just a representation of or protest against how things are, but a hope for how they might be. At one point, the extraordinary Dinita Askew pops and locks so frantically she seems to be drowning in the air. She’s revealing not only this woman’s robot circumstance but her feelings about it – the frustration and helplessness. Harris changes the tenor of an iconic hip-hop move so it signifies not only a prisoner of circumstance but also a woman digging herself free.