The Fisher Center’s signature summer festival brings world premieres, rare operas, landmark dance, and a Bard Music Festival devoted to Mozart to the Hudson Valley.
The Fisher Center at Bard College. Credit: Peter Aaron
The Fisher Center at Bard has announced SummerScape 2026, running June 25 through August 16, reaffirming the festival’s role as one of the Hudson Valley’s central summer cultural anchors. Since its founding in 2003, SummerScape has built a national reputation for pairing rarely staged works with new commissions across dance, opera, music, and performance—an approach The New York Times once described as “a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary hits.”
Dance remains a defining throughline. This summer brings the return of Lucinda Childs, whose “Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise” (June 26–28) marks one of the Lucinda Childs Dance Company’s few North American appearances in 2026. The Fisher Center LAB commission spans new work and revivals, with collaborations involving Philip Glass, John Adams, and visual artist Anri Sala. The program also serves as a tribute to two figures who died in 2025—Robert Wilson and Frank Gehry—whose collaborations with Childs shaped some of the most influential interdisciplinary works of the late 20th century. At 86, Childs will also perform a solo, offering what the Fisher Center describes as “a uniquely intimate encounter with one of the great living pioneers of contemporary dance.”
Opera arrives in two markedly different forms. The Fisher Center LAB opens the season with the world premiere of “Suddenly Last Summer” (June 25–July 19), a hybrid music-theater adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Southern Gothic play by composer Courtney Bryan, with a libretto by Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester and direction by Daniel Fish. Bryan has described her long-standing interest in opera as a contemporary storytelling form, noting, “The first 20th-century opera I saw, while still in high school, was Andre Previn and Philip Littell’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and it left a lasting impression, seeing how opera with contemporary language could complement the storytelling of such a powerful play.” Set between New Orleans and the Mediterranean, the work explores family power dynamics and the suppression of truth, and is the first premiere in the Fisher Center LAB’s new Civis Hope Commission series.
Later in the summer, SummerScape returns to its tradition of mounting rarely staged repertoire with Richard Strauss’s “The Egyptian Helen” (July 24–August 2), performed by the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein and directed by Christian Rath. Botstein has described Strauss as the true modern heir to Mozart—a fitting frame in a season that also includes the 36th Bard Music Festival, devoted to Mozart and His World.
Running August 7–16, the Bard Music Festival examines Mozart’s life, myths, and cultural context across eleven concerts. Deemed by the Los Angeles Times “the most imaginative summer music festival in the country,” the festival pairs Mozart’s works with those of his contemporaries and culminates in a semi-staged performance of “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”
As always, SummerScape extends beyond the main theaters. The Spiegeltent returns for nightly music, comedy, cabaret, and dancing, while the season unfolds alongside the near completion of a new Fisher Center studio building designed by Maya Lin—a reminder that at Bard, creation and presentation continue to evolve side by side. Tickets go on sale February 17.
