Lewis Center For the Arts

About the Festival:

To celebrate the opening of Princeton’s new Lewis Center for the Arts complex, join us for an exciting multi-day Festival of the Arts highlighting the breadth and uniqueness of the arts at Princeton. The Festival will include concerts, plays, readings, dance performances, art exhibitions, multidisciplinary presentations, community workshops and site-specific events presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Department of Music with professional, faculty, student, and alumni artists. Events will be open to the public and most will be free.

Highlights of the Festival

  • World premiere of a new adaptation of The Bacchae by two-time Obie Award-winning playwright and Princeton alumnus Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ’06

  • A multi-genre concert showcasing the Princeton University Orchestra, Glee Club and other University music ensembles

  • Performances of A Love Supreme by internationally-renowned choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker set to music by John Coltrane

  • A kinetic light and music Fanfare designed to interact with the building’s architecture

  • The biennial Princeton Poetry Festival featuring poets from around the world

  • A concert by the Norwegian Baroque ensemble Barokksolistene and an “Alehouse Session” featuring songs and melodies from the pubs and taverns of 17th century England

  • 24 Hour Psycho, an art installation by Douglas Gordon that appropriates Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 film in a unique presentation

  • An opera for electric guitar composed by Grammy Award-winner and Department of Music Professor Steven Mackey based on the Orpheusmyth

    Other events will include a music/sculpture Art Walk, a carillon concert, a jazz jam session, a French theater performance, community music play-alongs and sing-alongs, community dance master classes, exhibitions, readings, and performances, along with events at the Princeton University Art Museum and McCarter Theatre

Our hope is that this Festival of the Arts demonstrates the excellence and deep, edge-to-edge artistic work that happens at Princeton, where we encourage risk-taking, mind-blowing, soul-shaking exploration, pushing boundaries, and re-examining and reinterpreting what has come before. And we invite all to witness both the processes and the outcomes of those endeavors. We hope you will return again and again as each new generation of students, faculty and guest artists bring new energy and ideas to our creative community!

—Michael Cadden, Chair, Lewis Center for the Arts, Wendy Heller, Chair, Department of Music, and Mara Isaacs, Executive Producer, Festival of the Arts