In the Archives:
Artists of the Reimagined Doris Duke Theatre’s Inaugural Season

World premieres, exclusive digital commissions, connections between dance and technology, and genre-defying dance theater works – the inaugural season of the Reimagined Doris Duke Theatre will stun audiences in Summer 2025. Following the devastating loss of the Doris Duke Theatre due to a fire in 2020, the Pillow is eagerly awaiting the opening of the renewed theater in July 2025, marking the launch of an innovative space which welcomes interdisciplinary and imaginative dance works. 

An exciting bill of artists, announced on November 20, will perform in the reimagined theater’s first Festival season. Artists include Pillow debuts, such as Elle Sofe Company, and Huang Yi, and the return of artists Faye Driscoll, Eun-Me Ahn, Andrew Schneider, and Shamel Pitts. In anticipation of the new Doris Duke Duke Theatre’s opening, we took a dive into the Pillow’s Archives to explore the relationship of Andrew Schneider and Shamel Pitts with the Pillow through the years. 

Andrew Schneider

OBIE award-winning, Drama Desk nominated performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider returns to the Pillow for Festival 2025 to present the world premiere of HERE, a digital commission. 

“The things I make tend to border on the edge of human perception and use of scientific concepts… as a blueprint for staging,” Schneider said in a 2023 PillowTalk. 

Schneider first came to the Pillow in Festival 2023 for the Dancerly Intelligences residency, where technology-forward dance artists gave visitors a glimpse into the intersection of dance and technology. In this residency, Schneider and artists Grisha Coleman and Catie Cuan explored technological tools that can enrich the choreographic process, a crucial step in the development of the Reimagined Doris Duke Theatre. 

“We use the tools that are available to us, and if they’re not available to us, then we dream about them, but we don’t use them,” Schneider said in a PillowTalk about the Dancerly Intelligences residency. “And in order to get fluent in them, we have to have them available to us, and that is an investment in infrastructure.”

Shamel Pitts

Based in New York, Shamel Pitts is a performance artist, choreographer, spoken word artist, and teacher. Artistic Director and Founder of TRIBE, a New York multidisciplinary arts collective, Pitts will present Touch of RED in the Doris Duke Theatre this upcoming summer. This work was developed in the Pillow Lab in November 2020, when Pitts’ time in the Duke was cut short by the destruction of the original Doris Duke Theatre. The homecoming of Touch of RED, then, is a symbolic extension of Pitts’ journey with the Pillow.

Pitts made his Pillow debut as a dancer with Sidra Bell Dance New York in Festival 2006, where he danced Light is Calling and Language & Possession on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage as a part of the Inside/Out Performance Series. 

Sidra Bell Dance New York in “Light is Calling;” Jacob’s Pillow Archives video, 2006

Pitts would return to the Pillow again in the fall of 2020 with his collective, TRIBE, for a Pillow Lab residency in the original Doris Duke Theatre, marking the collective’s first time at the Pillow and Pitts’ first engagement as a choreographer. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, these residencies offered artists a respite to generate new work. 

On November 17, Pitts’ residency in the Duke was cut short, as the unoccupied Doris Duke Theatre was destroyed by a fire. The artists, whose work was directly affected by the turn of events, mourned the loss of the theater. 

“I wanted to find a moment for each of us to connect,” Pitts said to his collaborators in the Inside the Pillow Lab documentary chronicling the unforeseen circumstances of TRIBE’s residency. “And also to just honor the loss of that beautiful dance space, dance church, the sanctuary.” 

Pitts and his collaborators were able to complete their residency in The Perles Family Studio, now home of the Pillow Lab and the School at Jacob’s Pillow, and Touch of RED went on to premiere at MASS MoCA in 2021 as a co-presentation with Jacob’s Pillow. 

“To gather again safely feels really magical and meaningful during this creative process,” Pitts said, once the artists continued their work in the Perles Family Studio. “It keeps the connection and the research of the work itself and the artistic journey of it constant.”

Now, four years later, Touch of RED will return to the Doris Duke Theatre, bringing the connection and artistry fostered in the Pillow Lab to fruition on the site of its original creation. 

This Pillow Pick was written by Lucy Kudlinski and published on November 20, 2024.