Jacob's Pillow Will Open Landmark New Dance Theatre By Mecanoo

Jacob's Pillow has announced 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 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.

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.

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.