When the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow, the bucolic dance festival in Becket, Mass., was destroyed by a fire four years ago, the festival’s director, Pamela Tatge, promised that it would be rebuilt.
“The theater,” she said at the time, “is an essential component of the ecology of Jacob’s Pillow.”
On Wednesday, Jacob’s Pillow announced that its new Doris Duke Theater would reopen on July 9, as part of its coming season. And the initial wave of programming there has been conceived specifically with the space in mind.
“We all struggled when we lost the Doris Duke,” Tatge said in an interview. “But we had this moment to think of what we will build and why, and what sort of building we need in the future.”
The campus of Jacob’s Pillow has other performances spaces: the large Ted Shawn Theater, and the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage. The old Doris Duke opened in 1990, with 230 seats and the look of a sleek barn.
A $10 million gift from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, insurance claims and other gifts paid for the costs of the new theater. Jacob’s Pillow, Tatge said, wanted its new building to be a flexible space with “the ability to support the future of where this field is going.” The organization hired the Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo, and brought on the Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson as a consultant, to design a theater, Tatge added, “that was in dialogue with nature.”
The result is a building nearly twice the size of the original theater, with a range of 220-400 seats and the ability to also house residencies and other events, perhaps at the same time. It will be equipped with a spatial audio system and specialized cameras for livestreaming and interactive video performances.
Tatge said that next summer’s lineup of artists at the Doris Duke Theater was based on “works that could magnify and amplify the flexibility of the space, as well as works that demonstrate the intersection of dance and technology.”
The programming includes the world premiere of Andrew Schneider’s “Here,” Shamel Pitts’s “Touch of Red” and Eun-Me Ahn’s “Dragons.” The Taiwanese choreographer and roboticist Huang Yi will make her Pillow debut, as will the Indigenous Sámi choreographer Elle Sofe. Faye Driscoll will return to the festival with her work “Weathering,” from last year, and Schneider and Pitts will create digital-first pieces.
In the future, Tatge said, Jacob’s Pillow hopes to commission works that incorporate augmented reality, technology similar to video conferencing and other forms of mixed reality. And they can be developed year-round in the new building.
“It will be a maker space,” Tatge said of the Doris Duke Theater. “At a time where there is a crisis of ambition in our country because a lack of resources, the fact that we’re going to be able to support artists — that is something.”
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