Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival

Friday, Aug 15, 2025 at 2:00pm

Various Venue in Becket
413-243-9919

Schedule of Events:

2:00pm: Ballet BC at Ted Shawn Theatre

First Appearance Since 2019 U.S. Premiere:
Formed in 1986 and based in British Columbia, Ballet BC is well-known in Canada and around the world for pushing the physical and emotional boundaries of contemporary dance with performances that are "visually stunning and emotionally profound" (PBS). The company returns to the Ted Shawn Theatre stage for the first time since 2019 with a program that includes the U.S. premiere of BOLERO X by Shahar Binyamini, SWAY by the company's artistic director Medhi Walerski, and the U.S. premiere of Obsidian by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber.

Ballet BC presents a diverse repertoire in its international tours, as well as its regular runs at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. Collaborating choreographers include William Forsythe, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, Medhi Walerski, Ohad Naharin, Crystal Pite, Johan Inger, Imre and Marne van Opstal, Adi Salant, Jiří Pokorný, Micaela Taylor, Marco Goecke, Fernando Hernando Magadan, Dorotea Saykaly, and Aszure Barton. "We are a company," says Ballet BC, "that aims to create dance at its most essential: visceral, powerful, thought-provoking, and transformative."

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2:30pm: Faye Driscoll at Doris Duke Theatre

First Appearance Since 2018:
Faye Driscoll is a Jacob's Pillow Dance Award and Doris Duke Award-winning performance maker who has been hailed as a "startlingly original talent" by The New York Times and "a post-millenium postmodern wild woman" by The Village Voice. She returns to the Pillow 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 at Tanz im August, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires.

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2:30pm - 5:30pm Community Day Featuring Artists of the Berkshires

2:30-5:30pm Community Day at Pillow Grounds

Everyone is invited to this free, kid-friendly, all-ages Friday afternoon, featuring movement classes as well as dance-themed children's activities and tours. Check back soon as events are confirmed.

5:30pm Artists of the Berkshires at Henry J. Leir Stage

The outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage hosts selected Berkshire-region artists for a special one-day-only performance. Tickets to this performance and all Community Day programs are free.

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