New Doris Duke Theatre
To Open This Summer at Jacob's Pillow
By: Pillow - Nov 20, 2024
Jacob’s Pillow announces the opening date of and artists to perform in, the new Doris Duke Theatre, a landmark international venue for dance and America’s only purpose-built new dance theater to open in 2025. The multi-day opening celebration will begin on July 9, 2025, with programming continuing throughout the summer as part of the nation’s longest-running dance festival, located on Jacob’s Pillow’s beautiful destination campus in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts.
Designed by the leading Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo, the reimagined Doris Duke Theatre occupies the site of the former studio theater from 1990, destroyed by fire in November 2020. The new theater aims to become one of the world’s most technologically advanced dance venues, providing a makerspace for artists seeking to integrate artificial intelligence, extended reality, robotics, and immersive platforms into live performance. The Doris Duke Theatre will include such capacities as a spatial audio system, infrared camera tracking of performers for interactive video content, and live performance interactions with recorded/projected dance content, among many other capabilities.
The first group of dance and technology makers invited to present work at the Doris Duke Theatre are interactive-electronics dance and theater artist Andrew Schneider, with the world premiere of HERE; Shamel Pitts (2020 Pillow Lab resident) with Touch of RED; the return of Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn with her innovative ensemble work, Dragons; and the Pillow debut of Taiwanese dancer/choreographer and robotics inventor Huang Yi. The inaugural season will also host the U.S. debut of Indigenous Sámi choreographer Elle Sofe and her Elle Sofe Company from northern Norway, performing Vástádus eana – the answer is land. The season will also feature Faye Driscoll (2022 Pillow Lab resident) and her masterpiece Weathering. Additionally, Shamel Pitts and Andrew Schneider will each create a digital-first work, designed to be experienced virtually and available to audiences around the world. Grisha Coleman will lead the first Pillow Lab residency in fall 2025 to develop The Movement Undercommons, a new motion capture movement project creating kinetic haiku from movement data.
Pamela Tatge, Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director, said: “We envisioned and built the new Doris Duke Theatre grounded in the Indigenous history of the land on which we dance. At the same time, it is a global hub for innovation. I am excited to see how artists and audiences join together and move beyond the limits of a traditional performance venue. In the new Duke, we will offer not just compelling and wide-ranging works that already exist today—but also some of tomorrow’s most innovative mixed reality movement and dance experiences, which meld the virtual and the physical in deeply affecting ways.”
Francine Houben, Mecanoo’s Creative Director and Founding Partner, said: “At the heart of the new Doris Duke Theatre lies a celebration of movement, space, and connection. Inspired by Mecanoo’s core values of ‘people, place, purpose, and poetry,’ the new theater captures the essence of dance, not only as an art form but as a deeply human experience intertwined with the landscape and community. Rooted in the rolling hills of the Berkshires, the theater honors the rich heritage of Jacob’s Pillow while pushing the frontiers of the performing arts. The design draws on the rhythms of nature, mirroring the fluidity and grace of dancers.”
Sam Gill, President and CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation, said: “There is one constant at Jacob's Pillow: pushing boundaries. The new Doris Duke Theatre exemplifies this tradition, making possible new forms of expression and new ways to move audiences. It's not just a new theater—it's a new chapter for Jacob's Pillow and for American dance.”
The New Doris Duke Theatre
The reimagined Doris Duke Theatre will be approximately 20,000 sq. ft., compared with the former Duke’s roughly 8,500 sq. ft. footprint. The design allows for multi-use flexibility, so that the building can support performances, events, residencies, and more, sometimes simultaneously. The theater will seat up to 220-400 patrons in the main performance space, with an array of seating and stage configurations.
The theater's mass timber structure is clad in thermally treated pine, designed to weather gracefully over time. The building transforms with the seasons, its natural materials telling a story of light and shadow, time, and change—an organic register of the dance of nature. Rainwater is collected for future reuse, and the generous veranda provides natural shading, a quiet gesture of harmony between sustainability and design. Through its form, function, and connection to the land, the new Doris Duke Theatre embodies the poetry of place—an enduring testament to the power of dance, nature, and human creativity intertwined.
Inspired by the region's natural beauty, the new Doris Duke Theatre's landscape designed by Marvel harmonizes with its surroundings, reflecting the rich local ecology of the Berkshires. This design not only nurtures a deep connection between the performing arts and nature but also honors the area's Indigenous history. To the west of the theater, the landscape design creates a central quad, framed by a sculptural “scramble” made from locally-sourced stone to welcome dancers and visitors and provide spaces for lounging, rehearsal, and celebration. To the east, landscapes designed by Indigenous artists celebrate Indigenous knowledge, with a garden and a communal fire pit that reflect the land’s cultural traditions and recognize the original inhabitants that inform Jacob’s Pillow and its quintessential identity.
Netherlands-based architecture firm Mecanoo, led by Creative Director and Founding Partner Francine Houben, is serving as the lead architect for the new building project, in partnership with New York-based architecture firm Marvel as the local architect and landscape architect. Charcoalblue are consulting on theater and acoustics design for the project. Jeffrey Gibson, Choctaw/Cherokee, is serving as a consultant on the building’s relationship to the site and Indigenous values, a key element of the building’s design.
Opening Celebrations
The opening celebration week at the Doris Duke Theatre—highlighted by a ribbon-cutting and opening performances on Wednesday, July 9, 2025—will activate many of the communities and stories that have defined and shaped Jacob’s Pillow. This multi-day celebration will feature gatherings and pop-up performances by world-class artists, bringing the Duke and the Jacob’s Pillow campus to life from all angles. The opening-week celebration will also include open houses, community events, and a gathering to activate the communal fire pit and Indigenous garden, designed by Indigenous artists Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines, Jr., Kathi Arnold, and Misty Cook in collaboration with Marvel. Inside, a new visual art installation by Indigenous artist Brenda Mallory will serve as a focal point of the lobby in the Doris Duke Theatre. Emmy-nominated director, choreographer, and performer Katherine Helen Fisher will create the inaugural exhibition in the new Duke’s gallery space. The interactive exhibition, Hyperreal Futures: Choreographing the Algorithmic Body, invites audiences to experiment and play within embodied installations that challenge the perceived boundaries between performer and spectator, physical and digital, human and machine.
The boundary-pushing program of artists featured in the new Doris Duke Theatre will appear as part of Jacob’s Pillow’s renowned international dance festival, which will return for a 93rd summer. The Festival will offer nine weeks of performances on its campus in the Berkshires, as well as streaming and online events for audiences worldwide, from June 25 through August 24, 2025. The 2025 summer festival will mark the first time in six years that all three onsite performance venues are open to the public: the historic Ted Shawn Theatre, the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage, and the new Doris Duke Theatre.
The Duke’s opening date of July 9 holds a special significance to Jacob’s Pillow, as this was the same date in 1942 that the dance festival opened the Ted Shawn Theatre, the first performance space in America designed exclusively for dance, which continues to serve as Jacob’s Pillow’s flagship venue for festival performances.
Lead support for Doris Duke Theatre is provided by the Doris Duke Foundation
Notable artists who have created or premiered dances at the Pillow include choreographers Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Donald McKayle, Kevin McKenzie, Twyla Tharp, Ralph Lemon, Susan Marshall, Trisha Brown, Ronald K. Brown, Wally Cardona, Andrea Miller, and Trey McIntyre; performed by artists such as Mikhail Baryshnikov, Carmen de Lavallade, Mark Morris, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Edward Villella, Rasta Thomas, and hundreds of others. On March 2, 2011, President Barack Obama honored Jacob’s Pillow with a National Medal of Arts, the highest arts award given by the United States Government, making the Pillow the first dance presenting organization to receive this prestigious award. The Pillow’s Executive and Artistic Director since 2016 is Pamela Tatge. For more information, visit www.jacobspillow.org.
MAJOR INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT FOR JACOB’S PILLOW IS GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY: Arison Arts Foundation, Barr Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Doris Duke Foundation, Ford Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund, The Shubert Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. As of November 1, 2024.
Artist Biographies and Works to be Presented
Andrew Schneider (United States) is an Obie Award-winning, Drama Desk-nominated performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist creating original works for theater, dance, sound, video, and installation. In HERE, commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow, Schneider joins with Berlin-based dancers and collaborators Margaux Marielle-Trehouart and Joel Suarez Gomez (Sasha Waltz & Guests, Mouvoir, Lausitz Festival) to tell the story of a single space over eons, in which innumerable lives, dreams, and travesties float through the present moment. We know what it's like to miss someone because they are not here, but what does it feel like to miss someone because they are not now? Inspired by concepts of simultaneity and quantum entanglement, and using wireless in ear technology and spatialized audio, Schneider and company explore the limits of connection and storytelling through hyper-precise attention to synchronicities of bodies in space over time—both cosmic and mundane.
To complement his week-long performance run, Schneider has been commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow to create an immersive / binaural sound experience that crossfades with reality. Audiences can access this experience using their own devices and headphones as they navigate the world around them. In his words: "I can't control what's in your periphery, but I can help you notice what's there." The piece deals with the hidden choreography of the universe and casts each audience member as the mover in the work, and their world as the stage. What if everything around you was made just for you? What if it already was?
Schneider has designed off-Broadway and is a member of the arts incubator ONX in New York City, a 2020 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award, a Sundance “Art of the Practice” fellow, and has received a fellowship in 2022 from the Junge Akademie/Akademie Der Künste in Berlin. He was a 2019 Professor of the Practice and Visiting Fellow in Theater Arts and Performance Studies through the Brown Arts Initiative at Brown University.
Elle Sofe Company (Norway) make their U.S. debut to present Vástádus eana – the answer is land, a critically-acclaimed performance that combines dance with yoik, a traditional singing style of the Sámi people who are Indigenous to the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Supported by polyphonic music and costumes inspired by traditional clothing, the piece is inspired by political demonstrations, Sámi spiritual practices, and formation dance, and explores community and kinship between people, nature, and the earth. The yoik, composed specifically for the performance, serves as a musical pillar throughout a performance that reflects on the power of standing together and the awareness of the earth we all stand on and share. Company founder Elle Sofe Sara is a featured artist at the Arctic Arts Festival in Harstad and a winner of the 2019 Moon Jury Award at the Imagine Native Film Festival. Vástádus eana – the answer is land has toured internationally, and received the 2021/2022 Norwegian Critics Award for Dance.
Eun-Me Ahn (Korea) is a leading artist of the Korean performing arts scene, known for her avant garde choreographic worlds and technicolor productions. In her return to Jacob’s Pillow for the first time since 2000, Ahn will present the official U.S. premiere of Dragons, a work with tumbling and 3D holographic choreography that juggles speed, scale, and illusion. The work was conceived before the pandemic and transformed by the reality of her initial cast of pan-Asian dancers being split and isolated through it. Dragons incorporates the 3D holographic presence of the initially isolated cast with live choreography for eight on-stage dancers, many of whom were born in 2000—the year of the dragon on the Asian Zodiac calendar. A graduate of contemporary dance in Seoul and from NYU Tisch, Ahn is internationally renowned, with over 150 pieces in her repertoire. Her work has toured widely in Asia and Europe through invitations from the Pina Bausch Foundation in Wuppertal, Germany, and an association with Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.
Shamel Pitts (United States) is a performance artist, choreographer, conceptual artist, dancer, spoken word artist, and teacher whose company TRIBE will perform Touch of RED as part of the Doris Duke Theatre’s 2025 season. Touch of RED is inspired by the rapid-fire footwork of boxing, the African-American jazz dance style Lindy Hop, Gaga movement language, and nightlife culture. Set in a stylized ring, this dance duet examines the way Black men are perceived and perceive themselves in contemporary society. This is a notable homecoming for Pitts and his company, whose Pillow Lab residency work on this piece in November 2020 was disrupted when the original Doris Duke Theatre was lost to a structure fire. Since then, TRIBE premiered Touch of Red in a sold-out weekend in October 2022 at MASS MoCA, co-presented by Jacob’s Pillow. This will be the first time this remarkable duet is performed at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
To complement his week-long performance run in the Doris Duke Theatre, Shamel Pitts has also been commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow to create and release a digital-first work in summer 2025 and will create a series of cinematic 3D experiences, in collaboration with TRIBE’s Transmedia Artist Lucca Del Carlo, that accompany his in-person performance of Touch of RED. These experiences will explore the intense intimacy that virtual performances make possible, with Pitts’s focus on “how can the audience feel the sweat?” Beyond witnessing the movement, viewers will also feel like they're moving through the pieces themselves.
Pitts is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and recently received a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship. He is the recipient of a 2018 Princess Grace Award in Choreography and a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Award winner in Choreography. Pitts’s “BLACK series” has toured extensively worldwide since 2016.
Faye Driscoll (United States) is a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and Doris Duke Award-winning performance maker who has been hailed as a “startlingly original talent” by The New York Times and “a post-millenium postmodern wild woman” by The Village Voice. She returns to the Pillow to present her piece Weathering, first developed in a Pillow Lab residency in 2022. Weathering is a multi-sensory flesh sculpture made of bodies, sounds, scents, liquids, and objects, in which ten people enact a glacially morphing tableau vivant on a mobile raft-like stage surging through the Anthropocene, with the audience embanking the performers. This symphonically active, luminously living work is a breathing, leaking, choreography of micro-events within a momentum thrusting from just beyond the perceivable. Driscoll received the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2018 and has been presented across the U.S. and internationally at Tanz im August, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.
Huang Yi (Taiwan) is a dancer, choreographer, and inventor creating partnership between humans and robots. Huang will appear for his first-ever engagement at Jacob’s Pillow to present Ink, in which Huang and audio-visual pioneer Ryoichi Kurokawa dismantle and reconstruct the lines from a hundred artworks in renowned calligrapher Tong Yang-Tze’s Silent Music series. Exploring textures of movement, sound, visual art, and space, Huang and his dancers perform alongside stunning holographic projection and two industrial robots he programmed. Mixing movement with mechanical and multimedia elements to create dance that corresponds with the flow of data, Ink makes each performer, whether human or machine, a dancing instrument. Named by Dance Magazine as one of the “25 to Watch,” Huang is one of Asia’s most prolific choreographers. Ink was co-commissioned by the National Taichung Theater and National Theater, Taipei in Taiwan and had its world premiere in June 2023.