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With $10 million grant, Jacob’s Pillow plans to rebuild Doris Duke Theatre after catastrophic fire in 2020

Fire fighters and a fire truck are in front of a burning wooden building
Monterey Fire Department
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Monterey Fire Department

In November 2020, a fire razed the Doris Duke Theatre on the campus of Becket, Massachusetts dance center Jacob’s Pillow. Originally built in 1990, the structure’s sprinkler system was inoperable at the time of the fire, but the Massachusetts State Police could not determine the cause of the fire. Now, a $10 million grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation will allow the Pillow to rebuild the theatre with an opening slated for 2025. Executive and Artistic Director Pamela Tatge tells WAMC that the gift is the largest in the center’s history, and will cover a third of the cost.

TATGE: It's been a really intentional process that began two years ago today when we lost the Doris Duke Theatre. And I tell you, I feel it in my bones today being at the Pillow what a loss that was. But out of that came some really remarkable conversations with artists with audiences for whom that that space was so special. And with our board, and thinking forwardly about approaching our 100 years – we just celebrated 90 this year – and sort of, what is the theater that we need for the future. And after many conversations, an international search for the right design team, I am so excited to say and to finally be able to announce that we will be rebuilding. But we’re building a theater for the future. It will have all of the warmth and intimacy that the Doris Duke that everyone loved and knew had, but it will also be equipped for art being made into the future. And that means art that incorporates technology, art that actually blurs the boundaries between the outdoors and the indoors, it will be a very open, it'll have be a flexible space that will have the ability to be open to the outside. So, there are many features. And it's a $30 million structure, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation was extraordinary when they said, no, we want to invest in the future of Jacob's Pillow and we will be a one third investor in this in this building. So, it's an extraordinary day, it's the beginning of a new chapter in the life of Jacob's Pillow.

WAMC: Now, when we think about this reimagining and bringing new technologies to the fore in creating this new theater, give us some of those details. What are the kinds of things that are going to need to be part of the infrastructure to prepare this for the next 100 years of Jacob's Pillow?

For example, you might have an artist who wants to be in a space where they have a 360-surround sound for the audience to experience, and maybe the audience is not going to be in fixed seating, maybe it'll be an immersive experience where there is sound and projection all around them. Maybe this is an experience that will actually, in the building of the work, bring artists into the space through live streaming or audiences into the space through live streaming and shift where an audience member is, an artist is. Maybe it will use motion capture technology. It will have the basic fiber infrastructure so that we can put in the appropriate equipment to serve what the artist wants to create. Not only that, but we will use the time in between festivals as to use the space as a makerspace in addition to an extraordinary space for people to have events in terms of rentals, conferences. We will now have two adjacent spaces in the Perles Family Studio and the new theater, plus the housing we have on campus to really host gatherings. So, it will have have multiple purposes. But I think what's exciting to me is the fact that it will be the same but different.

Now, the press release details the ways in which Jacob’s Pillow was trying to bring in Indigenous lens to this process. Can you speak a little bit to that and how the center is trying to incorporate voices of Native Americans into this conversation?

In the interview process, we required that every design team has an Indigenous artist to be a part of the team alongside their engineer, their theater consultant. We really wanted to make sure that an Indigenous artist would be at the table from the very beginning. In this case, we have Jeffrey Gibson, who's a MacArthur Award winning artist who's actually based just an hour from here in Germantown, New York. And he brought in Heather Bruegl, who is Oneida Stockbridge Munsee. And Heather was able to canvass indigenous representatives from different tribal peoples in Western Massachusetts to gather input. And ultimately, we want to think deeply about our relationship to this land. We're thinking about the relationship of the four directions to the structure, to the presence of the connectivity to sky, any number of values that we're thinking about, including environmental sustainability and being responsible to the environment in the decisions that we make.

Josh Landes has been WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief since February 2018, following stints at WBGO Newark and WFMU East Orange. A passionate advocate for Western Massachusetts, Landes was raised in Pittsfield and attended Hampshire College in Amherst, receiving his bachelor's in Ethnomusicology and Radio Production. His free time is spent with his cat Harry, experimental electronic music, and exploring the woods.
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