New York Times

Leir Stage performances will be held Wednesdays through Saturdays for all nine weeks of Festival 2025, offering one-night and two-night engagements by companies dancing Afro-Caribbean, contemporary, swing, tap, ballet, jazz, Indigenous, modern, West African, and more. Performances by artists of the Berkshires on Community Day, and by the Contemporary Ballet, Contemporary, and Tap Dance ensembles of The School at Jacob's Pillow, round out the schedule.

. The season features expanded offerings in the spring, summer, and fall. With two mainstage productions, three Fresh Takes play readings, and a dynamic community program—including documentary films, thought-provoking panels, and creative exchanges with women-led theatre companies.

Now, decades later, The Art History Paintings are back—louder, sharper, and just as biting. The forces Kass set out to dismantle —patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and the elitism of cultural institutions— haven’t gone anywhere, making her work feel as subversive and necessary in 2025 as when she first picked up a brush.   

Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival 2025 will feature indoor performances in the landmark Ted Shawn Theatre and the newly-opened Doris Duke Theatre, as well as outdoor performances on the Henry J. Leir Stage. The return of the Doris Duke Theatre restores Jacob’s Pillow to its full presenting capacity for the first time since 2020, reuniting the Festival’s three core performance spaces and offering audiences an unparalleled range of dance experiences across the Pillow’s grounds.

In 1986 I organized an exhibition of four African American artists who lived and worked in Provincetown. That fall Kind of Blue traveled to the gallery of Northeastern University. In Boston there was a panel discussion chaired by Edmund Barry Gaither, then the director of the National Center for African American Artists and an adjunct curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to myself, there were two other panelists. Patricia Hills was then a professor of art history at Boston University. She has long championed issues of social justice and wrote a monograph and curated an exhibition of the work of Jacob Lawrence. Dana Chandler is an artist and activist.

Benny Andrews was one of ten children of Georgia sharecroppers. After serving in the Air Force he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill. He showed regularly in Provincetown where we met. He formed a group to protest the racist Harlem on My Mind at the Met. The group helped initiate but subsequently boycotted an exhibition of black artists at the Whitney Museum. Collage was an element in his figurative expressionist works.

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.

We viewed the stunning 2017 retrospective “Salvatore Del Deo: A Storied History” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis. In 2023, then 95, he was the subject of national news when there was an attempt to evict the renowned artist and chef from his historic summer Provincetown dune shack.

Robert Downey Jr.. is everything you could hope for and more in this New York stage debut as the title character in Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal.  Downey started his career playing a dog in Pound directed by his father.  Familiar to filmgoers, his physical presence on stage at the Lincoln Center Theater combines his casual warmth with an edge demanded by a role in which his character may well have precipitated a suicide.

The British born Tony Vevers served as a Staff Sargent for two years during WWII. After which he studied fine arts at Yale on the GI Bill. He and his wife, artist Elspeth Halvorsen, settled in Provincetown. He did carpentry to pay the bills. He showed at the legendary Sun Gallery and was later a founding member of the prestigious Long Point Gallery. Their daughter Tabitha is an artist married to artist/ photographer, Daniel Ranalli.

Jacob’s Pillow announces the artists selected to participate in 10 onsite residencies this fall through next summer, as part of the Pillow Lab residency program. Artists participating in this series, in chronological order, are: Hélène Simoneau Danse; Emily Coates, Ain Gordon, and Derek Lucci;  Music from the Sole; Andy Blankenbuehler and Kate Quinn; Brinae Ali; dani tirell; Peter Rockford Espiritu and Roberta Uno; Joanna Kotze; The Choreodaemonic Collective; and Rosy Simas. Programming and dates are subject to change.

Dr. Nathaniel Halper was the first Provincetown arts activist that I interviewed starting in 1982. He died just a year later leaving a distinguished legacy. For a time he was director of HCE then the most prominent of many galleries. In later years he formed a partnership with Mervin Jules to buy and resell from the estate of Karl Knaths. He offered many insights to the prominent arts community.

In their first appearance at Jacob’s Pillow since 2019, Dance Theatre of Harlem is celebrating their 55th Anniversary, as well as the 90th birthday of their legendary founder Arthur Mitchell (1934-2018).

Week 8 of this summer’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival will feature beloved New York-based flamenco artists Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca, who will perform at the Festival for the first time since 2002. Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca will appear for five days in the historic Ted Shawn Theatre, from Wednesday, August 14 through Sunday, August 18. The program is a showcase for the work of Martín Santangelo and Bessie-award winning dancer and choreographer Soledad Barrio, and will feature their newest work, Searching for Goya (2023).

Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival welcomes the internationally- touring modern dance company Parsons Dance back to the Ted Shawn Theatre, 25 years after their last engagement with the festival in 1999.

Our friends at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute in Lenox are coming out of the holiday weekend with continued fireworks: Ted Rosenthal Trio returns to the Berkshires to perform on July 9, at 7pm.

“It is a thrill to welcome Camille A. Brown back to the Pillow, this time for the world premiere of I AM,” said Jacob’s Pillow Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge. “Since she received the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2016, she has seen a meteoric rise as a choreographer and director of opera and Broadway productions, from her stunning work on Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, to her Tony nominated work this year on the Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen. 

The A. R.T. season will begin in September with a production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director Diane Paulus and choreographed by two-time Olivier Award winner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Jagged Little Pill; Beyoncé at the 2017 Grammy Awards and APESHIT; Madonna’s Celebration tour). This powerhouse duo reunites for the first time since their Tony Award-winning collaboration Jagged Little Pill, staging a bold new production of Shakespeare’s iconic love story.

Seventy five years ago the artists Weldon Kees and Fritz Bultman organized the summer long event Forum '49. In weekly lectures and panels the issues of the day were debated from the fine arts and architectures to jazz, literature, psychoanalysis the face off of Paris vs New York and the threat of Stalinism. The exhibits were staged in a popup space in protest over the conservative programming of the Provincetown Art Association. The dissent moved to New York and a petition against the Met signed by the Irascibles including P'town artists.

A Complicated Woman has elements that need rethinking. For one, almost the entire first act takes place in 1928; when act two begins, we are in the late 1950s-60s. The jump seems too extreme and not clearly defined.

As part of its 30th Anniversary Celebration, Barrington Stage Company announces Tony Award-winner Bernadette Peters in Concert on Tuesday, August 27 at 8:00 p.m. on the Boyd-Quinson Stage (30 Union Street). 

With a book by Harvey Fierstein (Broadway: Kinky Boots, Torch Song Trilogy) and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman (Broadway: Hello, Dolly!, Mame), La Cage aux Folles is based on the play by Jean Poirot that also inspired the 1978 French film of the same name and its American remake, The Birdcage, starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.

On June 1, 2024 the Berkshire Music School, in partnership with Ventfort Hall, welcomes Brandon Patrick George, flute, for Berkshire Music School's Annual Gala to raise funds for BMS’ Community Engagement programs, including pay-what-you-wish group classes, need-based private lesson scholarships, and outreach assemblies and workshops in public schools.

A large show featuring “The Anchors of the Berta Walker Gallery” will celebrate the artists who keep the gallery thriving: Director Grace Hopkins, Gallery Assistant Laura Shabott and Gallery Assistant/Installer Bert Yarborough. Accompanying this show will be a group show of art by former staff, including Sky Power and Erna Partoll (both of whom worked at the gallery for ten years), as well as photos of individuals, friends, and family who have made the Gallery’s existence possible (a visual “introduction of gratitude,” if you will, in our book of visuals.)

Jacob’s Pillow announces that tickets are now on sale to the general public for the full schedule of programming at this summer’s Dance Festival, which will offer nine weeks of performances by world-class artists, live music, and free and paid family-friendly events, on indoor and outdoor stages. In addition to featuring local and regional artists, the festival will include dance companies traveling from across the United States, Canada, England, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Spain, and beyond.