November 18, 2025 (BECKET, Mass.) — Jacob’s Pillow is pleased to announce that its beloved summer dance festival in the Berkshires, returning to a ten-week schedule next summer, will include week-long engagements in the Ted Shawn Theatre by Martha Graham Dance Company in the company’s 100th anniversary year (presented in partnership with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and featuring a performance at Tanglewood), Germany-based Gauthier Dance in the company’s fourth Pillow engagement since their 2015 debut, and A.I.M by Kyle Abraham presenting the U.S. premiere of a new Pillow-commissioned work featuring music composed by Jason Moran and Nico Muhly. In the Doris Duke Theatre, next summer’s programming will include week-long performances of the virtuosic duet Touch of Red by Shamel Pitts | TRIBE, the multisensory ensemble piece Weathering by Faye Driscoll, and the strikingly futuristic Ink by Huang Yi.
Additional programming will be announced in February, with Member Pre-Sale starting in March and tickets open to the public in April.
The Festival is curated by Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge, Associate Artistic Director Kim Chan, and Associate Curator Melanie George, supported by International Advisor Cathy Levy, Producing Director Holly Jones, and Director of Technical Production Jason Wells.
“This is an inspiring time of year, as we look ahead to all the human creativity coming to Jacob’s Pillow, and the power of connection that we feel on our campus,” said Tatge. “Our return to a ten-week Festival marks a joyful milestone, and we are honored to celebrate it with artists who embody the stylistic breadth and innovation of today’s dance world. Presenting the Martha Graham Dance Company will be a special anchor in our honoring of groundbreaking women of American dance during the nation’s 250th birthday year. The crowd-pleasing Gauthier Dance and A.I.M by Kyle Abraham bring audiences the new and international work that our festival is known for. And we are deeply grateful to welcome back Shamel Pitts, Faye Driscoll, and Huang Yi, three remarkable artists whose engagements were postponed when we made the difficult decision to suspend the final three weeks of the Festival last summer. Their return embodies the resilience, artistry, and renewal that define this moment for Jacob’s Pillow.”
Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, said: “The legacies of Jacob’s Pillow, Tanglewood, and the Martha Graham Dance Company have intersected at crucial junctures for decades. From Ted Shawn‘s long relationship with his student Martha Graham to the launch of the Copland/Graham collaboration in Stockbridge that resulted in Appalachian Spring, our histories—each an indelible American touchstone—are deeply connected. It is particularly meaningful to highlight these extraordinary relationships next August, as part of the Graham Company’s historic Centennial celebration.”
Chad Smith, President and CEO of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, said: “We are delighted to be partnering with Jacob’s Pillow this summer as an important part of how we engage and collaborate with our Berkshire community. For more than eighty years, Tanglewood has been a place of artistic exploration, where music and dance have thrived side by side since the days of Serge Koussevitzky and Ted Shawn. Together, we present a joint commission for the Martha Graham Dance Company. In their first appearance at Tanglewood, the company will premiere a newly created work inspired by an idea first envisioned by Leonard Bernstein, one of the BSO’s guiding voices. This collaboration reflects the spirit of the BSO’s multi-season humanities initiative, E Pluribus Unum: From Many, One, exploring American music and identity.”
The Enduring Spirit of Martha Graham
Jacob’s Pillow will present the Martha Graham Dance Company, the oldest dance company in the nation, in its centennial year, anchoring the Pillow’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States by honoring groundbreaking women who have shaped, and are shaping, dance in our nation. Graham’s connection with Jacob’s Pillow dates to her early apprenticeship with Ted Shawn as a member of Denishawn, and her legacy continues to shape generations of choreographers and performers. The program will feature some of Graham’s most defining works, including Night Journey (1947), part of her Greek cycle with sets by Isamu Noguchi and music by William Schuman; Frontier (1935), a solo portraying the independence of pioneer woman; and Immediate Tragedy (1937), a politically charged response to the Spanish Civil War. These works highlight Graham’s revolutionary voice as an artist who used dance to speak out for democracy, women’s rights, and freedom of expression.
The Graham centennial will also be marked by a new work, En Masse, jointly commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow and the Boston Symphony Orchestra among others, which the Company will present in the Koussevitzky Music Shed at Tanglewood during their week at Jacob’s Pillow. This collaboration will include a performance of “For Martha” from En Masse, choreographed by former Alvin Ailey dancer Hope Boykin to a score by composer Christopher Rountree, which incorporates a recently recovered 49-second composition by Leonard Bernstein. The Graham Company will also perform Graham’s iconic Appalachian Spring alongside the Rountree work.
In tandem with this engagement, Jacob’s Pillow will host a summer-long exhibition in Blake’s Barn exploring Martha Graham’s artistic and political voice during the 1930s, curated by former Graham dancer and scholar Oliver Tobin. A portion of this exhibition, which will open at The Church Sag Harbor on Long Island this spring, will focus on Graham’s first decade as a choreographer—when she created dances exclusively for women and positioned her work within the era’s broader currents of political theater and social activism. Together, the performances and exhibition offer a sweeping portrait of a revolutionary artist whose vision helped define modern dance and continues to illuminate the intersections of art, politics, and the human spirit.
International Artists and U.S. Premieres
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham will return to the Ted Shawn Theatre with the U.S. premiere of White Space, a new full-length work co-commissioned by Jacob’s Pillow and the Lugano Dance Project in Switzerland. Created by Kyle Abraham, one of the most original voices in contemporary dance, White Space will unite an extraordinary team of collaborators: composers Jason Moran and Nico Muhly, visual artist Glenn Ligon, costume designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, and lighting designer Dan Scully. Performed by 12 dancers, the work unfolds within an all-white environment, where the live two-piano score and pulses of pre-recorded hip-hop music create a charged atmosphere of collision and dialogue between classical and contemporary forms. Developed in residence at the Pillow Lab in December 2025 and premiering at Lugano in June, White Space will examine the tension between confrontation and connection, movement and stillness, through Abraham’s signature blend of grounded, soulful lyricism and kinetic intensity.
Returning to Jacob’s Pillow by popular demand, Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart will bring its extraordinary blend of precision, power, and play to the Ted Shawn Theatre stage. Led by artistic director Eric Gauthier, the company of 16 dynamic dancers has earned international acclaim for its bold repertoire and magnetic performances. Their 2026 program at Jacob’s Pillow will include The Fireworks Project, a program showcasing six works by leading choreographers—including Benjamin Millepied, Barak Marshall, Johan Inger, and Sofia Nappi—performed against a striking red marley floor. In the second half of the program, audiences will experience a new piece by Sharon Eyal—whose distinctive movement language has captivated Pillow audiences in past seasons—alongside Greek choreographer Andonis Foniadakis with a breathtaking work performed on trampolines. Together, these works form a joyful, high-octane tour de force that captures the company’s trademark wit, musicality, and fearless physicality.
In the New Duke, Innovative Performances Connect Dance and Technology
Among other works, summer 2026 engagements in the new Doris Duke Theatre will include three visionary artists whose works were originally scheduled to appear at Jacob’s Pillow in August 2025.
Dancer, artist, and choreographer Shamel Pitts and his company TRIBE will perform Touch of RED, inspired by the rapid-fire footwork of boxing, Lindy Hop, Gaga movement language, and nightlife culture. Set in a stylized boxing ring, this dance duet examines the way Black men are perceived and perceive themselves in contemporary society. Following a Pillow Lab residency, 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 the Festival. Pitts is a 2025 Black Genius Foundation Strokes of Genius Fellow, 2024 MacArthur Fellow, a 2024 Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, a 2024 Knight Choreography Prize recipient, and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Doris Duke Award-winning performance maker Faye Driscoll will return to the Pillow for the first time since 2018 to present Weathering, first developed in a Pillow Lab residency in 2022. Weathering is a multi-sensory performance 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.
Taiwanese dancer, choreographer, and inventor Huang Yi will appear for his first-ever engagement at Jacob’s Pillow to present Ink, in which he 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. 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. Ink was co-commissioned by the National Taichung Theater and National Theater, Taipei in Taiwan and had its world premiere in June 2023.
About Jacob’s Pillow
Jacob’s Pillow is a National Historic Landmark, recipient of the National Medal of Arts, and home to America’s longest-running international dance festival, which will celebrate its 94th season in Summer 2026. Jacob’s Pillow acknowledges that it rests on the ancestral homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok or Mohican people. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors and elders past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all. In addition, we acknowledge the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag and other tribal nations who also made their homes in what is now known as Massachusetts.
Founded by Ted Shawn in 1933, each Festival includes national and international dance companies and free and ticketed performances, talks, tours, classes, exhibits, events, and community programs. The School at Jacob’s Pillow, a prestigious professional dance training center, advances the careers of the upcoming generation of performers and choreographers; during the Festival, 100 international dancers evolve as artists in ballet, choreography, contemporary, musical theatre, tap, and other genres; and year round, artist faculty and accomplished alumni nurture younger dancers in a series of Jacob’s Pillow 360 workshops and intensives offered in partnership with leading dance institutions worldwide. The Pillow also provides professional advancement opportunities across the disciplines of arts administration, design, video, and production through seasonal internships and a year-round Administrative Fellows program. Through its community engagement programs, the Pillow serves as a partner and active citizen in its local community. The Pillow’s extensive Archives, open year-round to the public and highlighted online at danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org, chronicle more than a century of dance in photographs, programs, books, costumes, audiotapes, and videos.
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, Shelby Cullom Davis Charitable Fund, and The Shubert Foundation.