For three Saturdays in a row, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park presents the 2026 Annual Festival in Tivoli, NY, on August 29, September 5, and September 12, 2026. It is Kaatsbaan’s tenth festival since 2020.

 

Each Saturday will feature a distinct lineup and focus:

- August 29: The festival opener is an all-day celebration filled with live music and geared towards all ages. Dance performances by Calpulli Danza Mexicana, Ballez, and Anna Sperber, and an evening concert by Valerie June;

- September 5: Labor Day weekend programming centers on storytelling by individual playwrights Rachel Jendrzejewski (through collaborators Terry Hempfling and Lauren Lewis), Jeanette Harrison, Ty Defoe, Vickie Ramirez, Rose Jarboe, Sylvan Oswald, Jim Fletcher, Lucy Sexton, and Adrienne Truscott. A musical double-bill closes out the day with The Bearded Ladies Cabaret sing-along and concert/dance party by CRICKETS (JD Samson, Roddy Bottum, and Michael O’Neill); and

- September 12: The festival closes with a high-energy summer send-off. Large- ensemble dance performances by EVIDENCE and MasterZ at Work open the day and Sadonna and the Slutinos give a farewell evening concert.

 

The 2026 Annual Festival also marks the return of Kaatsbaan’s outdoor Mountain Stage with its expansive views of the Catskill Mountains and immersion in the natural beauty of the Hudson Valley. Most performances are an hour or less, are all ages, and the festival schedule permits an easeful and day-long schedule of art and nature alongside Tivoli’s walkable downtown amenities. Tickets will be offered on an incentive-based, affordable structure. Individual tickets and all-day passes available June 23 at https://kaatsbaan.org/performances-festivals.  

 

“Inspired guest curator Michèle Steinwald” (The Dance Enthusiast) returns after her first festival in 2025, noted for her “programming that leans into reflection, intimacy, and resonance” (Rural Intelligence), which is recognized as “a thoughtful, challenging, and innovative [festival] that has something—and likely many more that one thing—for everyone” (The Berkshire Edge). This year, Steinwald’s curatorial selection brings together multidisciplinary expressions of storytelling and community.

 

In Steinwald’s words, “The 2026 festival program reflects what I learned during my time in Tivoli last year. Kaatsbaan audiences and local artists influenced the direction of the festival in how we are centering communities and first-person narratives. Each Saturday of the festival is a mini festival of its own flavor with multiple shows that build into an all-day celebration. Our goal is to create an inviting and uniquely Kaatsbaan experience for everyone to enjoy.

 

I am particularly moved that we are able to pay homage to the legacy and power of collective organizing and creative expression rooted in Minnesota by including works by choreographer Pramila Vasudevan, playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski (1982-2025), and a work originally choreographed for TU Dance directed by the iconic and influential Toni Pierce-Sands (1962-2025). With the recent passing of Rachel and Toni, this moment to be with their life’s work is even more meaningful.”

 

Kaatsbaan’s Managing Director, Naomi Miller, offers that “Kaatsbaan’s signature festival, which first gathered artists and audiences during the pandemic for collective healing, continues to grow and offer new ways to come together in creativity and celebration. Working with Michèle has expanded the scope of artists we present, to everyone’s benefit. Come for distinct moments of joy and transformation, stay for the power of community.”  

 

The more events you attend, the deeper the discounts.

- One performance ticket is $25. ($15. for students)

- All-day passes:

-   A two-performance ticket bundle is $40. ($25. for students)

-   A three-performance ticket bundle is $50. ($30. for students) *only available 8/29*

-   Add a concert ticket to your bundle and receive a $10. discount

- Concerts are individually priced. Buy concert tickets early and receive a $10. discount per ticket. Offer ends July 31.

 

2026 Annual Festival Lineup

 

Saturday, August 29

11am Kaatsbaan Campus (free): Various art-making activities and workshops lead by festival artists-in-residence: Jeanette Harrison, Ty Defoe, Vickie Ramirez, and Laura Curry.

 

1pm Mountain Stage (outdoors): Calpulli Danza Mexicana, Native Mexico: Dances of the First Peoples. Filled with inspired stories and present-day resonance, audiences are invited to honor earth, spirit, and community through rhythms and rituals in this lively celebration of prehispanic peoples, namely the Mexika, Purepecha, Zapotec, Totonaca, Maya, Olmec, and Tolteca, and their dances.

 

3pm Black Box Theater (indoors): Ballez, Travesty Doll Play (after Coppélia). Based on the story ballet from 1870, Ballez’s choreographic reimagining exposes us to the interdependent relationship between the Doll-maker and the Doll creations, bringing to light the tenderness and perseverance of new life, the joy and support found in desire and connection, and the love and humanity that transforms and thrives in our relations with one another. Live original score by Lavinia Eloise Bruce and Scott Killian.

 

5pm Mountain Field (outdoors): Anna Sperber, Bow Echo. This Bessie award-winning dance, originally created for a 15,000-square-foot rooftop in Brooklyn, will be transposed on and for the land at Kaatsbaan. By placing the performers and their sculptural instruments in concert within the sense-filling, ever-present elements of the natural environment, the movement accumulates in a visual and sonic collaboration with the grasses, the trees, the sky, and the expanse. Choreographer and performer Anna Sperber is a 2026–2027 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.

 

7pm Mountain Stage (outdoors): Valerie June, Concert. A rare jewel-box performance with the irresistible and multidimensional singer-songwriter, Valerie June, in celebration of her new album, Owls, Omens, and Oracles. Described as “a necessary reminder… that happiness is just as potent a tool for beating back the darkness as anger” (Paste Magazine).

 

Saturday, September 5

Playwrights’ Platform is a newly created live anthology, responsive to the needs of boundary-bending playwrights and focused on the stories central to their writing. Audiences are invited into the hearts and minds of these award-winning theater artists to explore each turn of phrase and unique worldview.

 

12pm Meadow Field (outdoors): Fire-lighting Ceremony

 

12:30pm Meadow Stage (outdoors): Playwrights’ Platform – Program 1

Vickie Ramirez, Ty Defoe, and Jeanette Harrison—Democracy Cycle commission awardees (PAC NYC)—embody Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Great Law of Peace through a journey that offers insight and lessons into unity, justice, and consensus-based decision-making with Six Nations: One Fire. In partnership with Bard Center for Indigenous Studies.

 

Rachel Jendrzejewski once described her writing process as pushing words around on the page just as her artist parents had pushed paint on their canvases, and a way “to pay attention to the world” around her. Rachel died of breast cancer in July 2025. Rachel’s longtime friends and collaborators, choreographer Terry Hempfling and actor Lauren Lewis, read as the two moon characters from encyclopedia, her play published ten years ago by Spout Press. Directed by Marcela Michelle. 

 

Rose Jarboe as Mx. Rogers channels the beloved, critically acclaimed, PBS-hosted, forever wholesome Fred Rogers, all the while visiting iconic neighborhood moments anew and asking some earnest questions about irony through some gentle audience participation.

 

3pm Black Box Theater (indoors): Playwrights’ Platform – Program 2

Sylvan Oswald creates caringly and considerately, using nonviolent storytelling, rabbit-hole fascination, deep-dive scholarship, and embodied accountability, and turns his persistent obsession for Jean Cocteau into I Leave Saint Cloud, an uninhibited and prismatic expression of the 20th-century avant-garde artist.

Actor and poet Jim Fletcher, composer and cellist Lori Goldston, and composer and sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson collage the sonic and visual worlds of 20th- and 21st-century film filtered through the densely emotional and psychically charged resonance of early Yiddish Theatre. Pulling from the texts of Ben Hecht, Sholem Asch, Bertolt Brecht, and Isaac Babel, among others, they pose questions about freedom, connection, resistance, violence, dizzying shifts in the understanding of humanness, and cultural inheritance.

 

Theater/dance/performance artists & makers Lucy Sexton (one half of DANCENOISE) and Adrienne Truscott(one half of Wau Wau Sisters) tell a gritty, glamourous, 1970s-East Village-punk rock-feminist fairytale set to the music of Blondie, in Blonde AF: a girl's journey to hell and back.

 

7pm Meadow stage (outdoors): Musical double bill

The Bearded Ladies Cabaret, Sing-along. For all their favorite people—misfits, rabble-rousers, chanteuses, and the people who love and need them—the Beards have invited special guest musicians and selected songs for an evening of singing, of stories, of community, and the power of coming together for a future filled with hope.  

 

CRICKETS, Concert and DJ Dance Party. Musicians Roddy Bottum (Faith No More), Michael O’Neill (MEN), and JD Samson (Le Tigre, MEN), supercharge the night with their messy minimalist punk-funk-electro-rant-queer-guitar-synthesizer-drum-machine stories. “A thumping new reprisal of toxic masculinity... delightful and delirious.” (Rolling Stone)

 

Friday, September 11

7pm Black Box Theater (indoors): A generous and candid conversation between festival choreographers Courtney “Balenciaga” Washington (MasterZ at Work), and Ronald K. Brown and Arcell Cabuag (EVIDENCE), facilitated by choreographer Souleymane Badolo (Assistant Professor of Dance, Bard College) around their artistic lineages, dance influences, and daily inspirations. Free and open for everyone to enjoy.

 

Saturday, September 12

1pm Mountain Stage (outdoors): Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, Where the Light Shines Through and Torch. These choreographic works are full of heart, both brilliant and triumphant expressions of freedom for our times performed by Brown’s highly accomplished dancers. Their exacting movements exude grace, and equal parts intensity and generosity. With dancing so infectious and soul-stirring, you will be swept up out of your seat throughout the entire show.

 

2:30pm Mountain Stage (outdoors): Courtney “Balenciaga” Washington/MasterZ at Work, The 24/7 Diner. Precise, high-energy dancing mirrors the bustle of a big city, all-night diner and the internal landscape of those who work and gather inside. Moreover, Washington’s choreography is past-present-future synthesized across space and time, pulling from dance forms—house, hip hop, vogue, and street—seamlessly. Tight, continuously evolving formations serve to amplify each dancer’s individual style, personality, and charm. 

 

6pm Mountain Stage (outdoors): Sadonna and the Slutinos, Concert. Sadonna (Miguel Gutierrez) and the Slutinos (John Maria Gutierrez, Alvaro Gonzalez, and Santiago Venegas) provide the bow at the end of the festival, the cherry on top of a full season. Fans of Madonna’s sensational pop hits will recognize the messages of strength and resilience in Sadonna’s slower, bluer renditions. Though comfortingly familiar, the now sad songs rightly reveal the raw vulnerability and beating heart behind these classic hits as we sing farewell to summer.

 

Ongoing

Open Mondays to Fridays, 9am–5pm, Free

Access included with tickets on festival days

Lobby Gallery + Grounds (indoors and outdoors)

 

Performance Lending Library

A curated selection of audio-guided physical experiences adapted for Kaatsbaan’s environment, each under 30 minutes. Bring your smart phone/tablet (data streaming required), earbuds/headphones, and be led into a range of embodied performance practices with your imagination as the site of the artwork. Available onsite for free and at your own pace throughout the festival (August 29–September 12). 

 

Bridget Fiske, Joseph Lau, Stelios Manousakis, and Stephanie Pan, A Concept Album of Architectural Choreographies: A guerrilla audio tour in semi-public spaces. A mixtape-style selection of propositions to perform almost-imperceptible daily dances in overlooked transitory and in-between places around Kaatsbaan. An international co-production by Modulus (NL) and Project Auske (UK).

 

Terry Hempfling and Rachel Jendrzejewski, Backwards Walk. An invitation to walk backwards slowly, in a sustained tempo, while listening to fragments of text and focusing your sensory orientation along a single path. Developed as a collaboration from 2016 to 2025 and adapted in 2026 for Kaatsbaan, Backwards Walk is a site-responsive movement practice designed to interrupt your habitual patterns of perception, attention, and locomotion.

Plant Lines | Pramila Vasudevan, Moss | Marrow Vitality Scores. A movement ritual for all bodies as constellations of energy fields. A visualization and overlay of human marma points (ie. anatomical junctions where muscles, veins, ligaments, bones, and joints meet) with those of our plant kin (ie. roots to shoots), honoring every point as vulnerable and an opportunity for healing.

 

Laura Curry, Cita en Bici / Bike Date. From an earnest conversation while biking, choreographer and social practice artist Laura Curry has turned a seemingly simple research process, started in 2013 in South and North American cities, into a sisterhood of mothers, daughters, aunties, grandmas, and fem/trans individuals who are also cyclists. Share stories while on a bike ride with Laura on the Empire State Trail or your local neighborhood route. Book directly with the artist onsite during the festival or at BikeDateProject@gmail.com, August 29–September 12.

 

2026 Visual Arts Exhibition, Earthly Delights

For the 6th edition of the Visual Arts Exhibition, Earthly Delights presents artworks evoking planets, plants, insects, and other biological forms erupting out of the mystical Kaatsbaan landscape. Artists include Laura Battle, Thea Berman, Sharon Broit, Ian McMahon, Virginia L. Montgomery, Kris Perry, Aurora Robson, and Nadia Yaron. Two of Gaston Lachaise’s world-famous bronzes continue to be on display as a long-term loan by the Lachaise Foundation. Curated by Hilary Greene.

 

Sunday, September 6 at 1pm (indoors and outdoors): Visuals Art Walk with Curator + Artists. Join Curator Hilary Greene and exhibition artists on a guided tour of the indoor and outdoor exhibition. Nine contemporary artists working predominantly in the Hudson Valley offer an inspiring alchemy of structure, form, beauty, and soul.

 

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The 2026 Annual Festival is made possible, in part, through funding of individual programs by

the following entities and partners: New England Foundation for the Arts, Bank of Greene County Charitable Foundation, Thendara Foundation, Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley, and generous individual underwriters. Valerie June’s performance is made possible, in part, through funding from the County of Dutchess and Destination Dutchess (formerly Dutchess Tourism, Inc.) and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson. Kaatsbaan’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

 

For more information, contact Michelle Tabnick michelle@michelletabnickpr.com or

info@kaatsbaan.org. 

 

About Kaatsbaan Cultural Park

The mission of Kaatsbaan Cultural Park is to provide an extraordinary environment for cultural

innovation and excellence by providing artists at any stage of their careers with creative

residencies at state-of-the-art facilities, and presenting audiences and communities with annual

festivals, educational programs, and events. As both an incubator for creativity and

presenter for world-class artists in dance, theater, music, film, spoken and written word, and

culinary and visual arts, Kaatsbaan provides artists with dance studios, accommodations, an

indoor theater, and outdoor stages. Sited on 153 Hudson River-adjacent acres, Kaatsbaan is free of urban facilities’ space and time constraints, allowing for exciting levels of artistic exploration, creative action, and achievement—just two hours north of New York City.

 

Kaatsbaan Cultural Park is committed to the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion in

the arts as we aim to present, promote, and embrace programming that accurately reflects our

society. We encourage a broadly diverse group of individuals to participate in our programs and

join our Board and Staff, and insist on being inclusive of all peoples regardless of their race,

ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socio-economic background, or physical or mental ability.

 

With humility, we acknowledge that the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park rests on the unceded homelands of the Lenape, The Original People; the Muh he con ne ok, The Peoples of the Water that are Never Still; and the Schaghticoke, The Gathered Waters. Due to forced land cessions and removals, their seats of government are now located in various parts of New England, Canada, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. We honor and pay our respects to their ancestors, present and future, and we recognize their continuing presence on this land. For additional information, please visit https://kaatsbaan.org/about