BECKET, MASS.: Jacob’s Pillow has announced the opening date of the new Doris Duke Theatre, a landmark international venue for dance and America’s only purpose-built new dance theatre 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 campus in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts.
“We envisioned and built the new Doris Duke Theatre grounded in the Indigenous history of the land on which we dance,” said Pamela Tatge, Jacob Pillow’s executive and artistic director, in a statement. “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.”
The first group of dance and technology makers invited to present work at the Doris Duke Theatre are interactive-electronics dance and theatre 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 piece 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.
The reimagined Doris Duke Theatre occupies the site of the former studio theatre from 1990, destroyed by fire in November 2020. The new theatre 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.
Inspired by the region’s natural beauty, the new Doris Duke Theatre’s landscape 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 theatre, 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.
The reimagined Doris Duke Theatre will be approximately 20,000 square feet, compared with the former Duke’s roughly 8,500-square-foot footprint. The design allows for multi-use flexibility, so that the building can support performances, events, residencies, and more. The theatre will seat up to 220-400 patrons in the main performance space, with an array of seating and stage configurations.
The international design team is led by Francine Houben, founding architect of Mecanoo, in partnership with architecture and landscape architecture firm Marvel, and theatre and acoustics consultants Charcoalblue. 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 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 Aug. 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.
