Jacob's Pillow Unveils First Wave Of Programming For Festival 2026

Jacob's Pillow's 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.”

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.