Jacob’s Pillow today announces the opening date of, and artists to perform in, 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 beautiful destination campus in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts.
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.
Francine Houben, Mecanoo’s Creative Director and Founding Partner, said: “At the heart of the new Doris Duke Theatre lies a celebration of movement, space, and connection. Inspired by Mecanoo’s core values of ‘people, place, purpose, and poetry,’ the new theater captures the essence of dance, not only as an art form but as a deeply human experience intertwined with the landscape and community. Rooted in the rolling hills of the Berkshires, the theater honors the rich heritage of Jacob’s Pillow while pushing the frontiers of the performing arts. The design draws on the rhythms of nature, mirroring the fluidity and grace of dancers.”
The reimagined Doris Duke Theatre will be approximately 20,000 sq. ft., compared with the former Duke’s roughly 8,500 sq. ft. footprint. The design allows for multi-use flexibility, so that the building can support performances, events, residencies, and more, sometimes simultaneously. The theater will seat up to 220-400 patrons in the main performance space, with an array of seating and stage configurations.
The theater's mass timber structure is clad in thermally treated pine, designed to weather gracefully over time. The building transforms with the seasons, its natural materials telling a story of light and shadow, time, and change—an organic register of the dance of nature. Rainwater is collected for future reuse, and the generous veranda provides natural shading, a quiet gesture of harmony between sustainability and design. Through its form, function, and connection to the land, the new Doris Duke Theatre embodies the poetry of place—an enduring testament to the power of dance, nature, and human creativity intertwined.
Netherlands-based architecture firm Mecanoo, led by Creative Director and Founding Partner Francine Houben, is serving as the lead architect for the new building project, in partnership with New York-based architecture firm Marvel as the local architect and landscape architect. Charcoalblue are consulting on theater and acoustics design for the project. 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.
Read the full press release, here.