BECKET, Mass. — Jacob’s Pillow founder Ted Shawn may have relocated to the Berkshires to get away from New York — he complained that his first retreat, in Westport, Conn., was too close — but he brought the city’s dance companies and artists with him. The Becket, Mass., dance oasis, which is celebrating is 75th anniversary this year, has long played summer host to some of New York’s biggest names in dance, and the lineup for this season, which includes the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, Paul Taylor Dance Company, and the Mark Morris Dance Group and begins Saturday, is no exception.

New Yorkers don’t just occupy the stage; they fill the seats and the coffers. Today more than half of the festival’s audience and funding comes from those based in New York. The Pillow’s theaters averaged 85% paid capacity last year, marking the most successful season to date. And the Pillow budget — last year’s was more than $4 million — has been balanced since 1998, putting an end to more than 60 years of episodic financial crisis.

“We have our auditions for the school in New York, our summer interns are from New York. We’re only two-and-a-half hours away,” the executive director of the festival, Ella Baff, said.

“We are very New York-centric,” the chairman of Jacob’s Pillow since 1995, Neil Chrisman, a retired banker with residences in Manhattan and Sheffield, Mass., said. “You’re not coming up to a screeching halt in a cab, running to get your tickets 15 minutes before the show,” Mr. Chrisman said. “The whole place is pacifying.”

The dancers feel the difference, too. “Performing in New York, you’re definitely aware that people are judging you, looking at your every move, and you kind of inhibit yourself from letting go,” a guest artist with New York companies American Ballet Theatre and Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, who has performed several times at Jacob’s Pillow, Rasta Thomas, said. “In the Berkshires, it’s the exact opposite: You can never let go enough.”

This summer Mr. Thomas will present “Bad Boys of Dance,” a pickup troupe commissioned by Ms. Baff. Choreographers for the project include New York-based Hope Boykin and Roger Jeffrey. Ms. Baff, who divides her time about equally between the Berkshires and the city, is perhaps most frequent traveler between New York and Becket.

“I often say the Berkshires is really the Upper West Side with a lot more trees,” Ms. Baff said. “There’s really good coffee by the way and really great restaurants.”

Ms. Baff fell in love with the arts growing up in New York, and knows the pressures New York places on dance companies and artists. “In New York, it’s very crowded in terms of companies vying for recognition, for venues to perform and rehearse in. It’s difficult to keep a company together,” she said. “The Pillow offers a retreat, a respite, from all that.”

The choreographer of the Brooklyn-based Big Dance Theater, Annie-B Parson, has found a retreat at Jacob’s Pillow several times as an artist in residence. Her DUMBO-based company — which lost its space this spring — will perform a piece for which she found inspiration in the Jacob’s Pillow archives: a film made in 1925, when Shawn was touring Japan, of a famous Kabuki performer, Matsumoto, dancing on the roof of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. The film helped Ms. Parson create “The Other Here,” which interprets Okinawan dance and pop music to tell a story about an insurance salesman, based on stories about rural life by Japanese writer Masuji Ibuse.

“When we go up to Jacob’s Pillow, we just breathe and we say, ‘Okay, that thing that seemed so hard in Brooklyn, let’s just goof around with it for a day,'” Ms. Parson said. “There’s just a sense of peace. I think only the frogs are there to distract us.”

“You have to see and sense the place. That’s what is inexplicable, this sensory reaction you have,” the executive director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, Judith Jamison, who has performed, danced, taught as a faculty member, and served on the board, said. “It’s a forest, with all that magical quality that goes with the forest.”

Not everyone feels at ease with the surroundings of Jacob’s Pillow. “If anything it might have been a little scary, because I’m not used to being in the woods,” the hip-hop dance pioneer and Philadelphia native and resident, Rennie Harris, who has taught and performed at the Pillow, and will perform at the opening gala on Saturday, said. “A lot of us, we’re from the city, and we were running around scaring each other,” Mr. Harris said. “We’re not used to complete darkness.”