Yale Schwarzman Center Unveils Spring 2026 Season

Yale Schwarzman Center today announced its Spring 2026 Season, a bold lineup of performances spanning dance, music, opera, and multimedia art. Featuring groundbreaking world premieres and intimate appearances by internationally-acclaimed artists, the season underscores the Center’s desire to bring together diverse voices and creative disciplines at the heart of Yale University.

Throughout the spring, audiences will experience multifaceted residencies, cross-disciplinary projects, and premieres that explore the intersections of movement, sound, technology, and storytelling. All events are free and open to the public, continuing the Center’s commitment to accessibility, dialogue, and collaboration between artists and audiences, as well as campus and community.

Highlights include visionary artist Toni Dove, world-renowned choreographer Andrea Miller and her company GALLIM, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang with Theo Bleckmann and the Attacca Quartet, Gabriel Kahane, Lorelei Ensemble and Cantus, and MacArthur “genius” Yuval Sharon directing The Comet / Poppea, a forward-thinking operatic hybrid by George Lewis ’74 and Claudio Monteverdi, which was nominated as a 2025 Pulitzer Prize Music finalist.

“The 2026 Spring Season is a testament to the power of creative exchange and live arts, and their ability to create shared spaces for reflection and joy.” said Rachel Fine, executive director of Yale Schwarzman Center. “Each work invites both artists and audiences to experience performance not as something distant or inaccessible, but as something deeply alive and entwined with its community.

“This spring, the Schwarzman Center continues to build on its role as a cultural engine for Yale and New Haven,” said Jennifer Harrison Newman, associate artistic director of Yale Schwarzman Center. “With Toni Dove’s boundary-blurring multi-media installation, Andrea Miller’s visceral choreography, and Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born’s genre-defying performances, the Season celebrates artists who challenge conventions and expand the possibilities of what performance can be.”

For full season details, dates, and updates, visit https://schwarzman.yale.edu

Highlights of the Spring 2026 Season:

Toni Dove: Sunjammer 6 – A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze 

Visionary media artist Toni Dove will inaugurate the spring season with the interactive installation Sunjammer 6: A Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze, a dreamlike fusion of sculpture, cinema, gesture-responsive AI, and performance. The piece stages a dialogue between Hypatia, the Hellenistic mathematician-philosopher from 415AD, and a future NASA engineer — a love story across time exploring the tension between knowledge and fear as each character pushes back against an encroaching dark age. The core of Hypatia is a hybrid AI that responds to the movement and gestures of multiple viewer-operators and reacts to them with what appears to be a complex personality. Using this technology-driven interactivity, projection, and sound, Dove creates an immersive environment where viewers become part of the story itself. (January 13-14 | The Dome)

GALLIM: BLUSH

Choreographer Andrea Miller and her acclaimed company GALLIM perform BLUSH, an electrifying dance work that transforms one of the most elusive human expressions –blushing – into a visceral, hour-long journey that chases emotion through stress and rapture as it melts into the edges of the skin. Set to music by Chopin, Arvo Pärt, and Wolf Parade, BLUSH is dense with emotional rawness and physical intensity — receiving critical acclaim in contemporary dance since its 2009 premiere. Miller herself is a Guggenheim, Sadler's Wells, New York City Center, and Princess Grace Fellow, and was featured in Forbes as a visionary entrepreneur and leader in the dance world. (January 17 | Commons)

Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective: Second Annual Jazz Jam

Yale’s own next generation of jazz innovators take center stage as the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective (YUJC) presents its second annual Jazz Jam in The Underground. The evening spotlights short sets from student combos before opening the floor to an all- student jam session — inviting spontaneous collaboration, musical risk-taking, and the joy of improvisation that defines jazz itself. As both celebration and kickoff to the 2026 YUJC Jazz Festival, the event sets the tone for a weekend headlined by saxophonist Patrick Bartley on January 31 and anchored by bassist Jeff Fuller on February 1. Founded in 2012 to expand opportunities for jazz performance and education at Yale and in New Haven, YUJC continues to champion a thriving campus jazz scene with energy and fearless creativity. (January 30 | The Underground)

Gabriel Kahane: Book of Travelers & Magnificent Bird

Across four intimate performances, musician and storyteller Gabriel Kahane shares songs from Book of Travelers, which chronicles the composer’s 8,980-mile railway journey in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, and Magnificent Bird, which chronicles a year he spent entirely off-line and the unexpected turbulence of living quietly. These pieces will be presented alongside a new set of works that premiered in 2025. Known for tackling politically thorny subject matters in his work with subtlety and grace, Kahane’s music has been hailed for its emotional intelligence and social resonance. (February 4–5 | The Dome) Book of Travelers  Magnificent Bird

Attacca Quartet & Theo Bleckmann: note to a friend

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Yale faculty member David Lang, in response to Japan Society’s commission for a new chamber opera, combined and reimagined three texts by iconic Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa into a performative piece. The result was note to a friend, a stunning and haunting monodrama that addresses our eternal human fascinations with death, love, family and suicide. Performed by vocalist Theo Bleckmann with the Attacca Quartet, the work bridges musical minimalism and theatrical depth. (February 11–12 | The Dome)

Lorelei Ensemble & Cantus: Rothko Chapel & Land That I Love

Two acclaimed vocal ensembles, Lorelei and Cantus, will unite for a weekend of performances in a partnership between Yale Schwarzman Center and the Yale Glee Club exploring belonging, identity, and place through contemporary choral innovation. The first will be an hour-long program by Lorelei Ensemble including Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel which will feature guest artists, Cantus; Julius Eastman’s Colors with guest student artists from Peabody Conservatory; and Yale faculty member Katherine Balch’s songs and interludes. The second will be an hour-long version of Cantus’ touring show Land That I Love with Lorelei Ensemble joining Cantus on combined selections interspersed throughout the program. (February 28–March 1 | Commons)

Alexi Kenney: Shifting Ground

Violinist Alexi Kenney, celebrated for his adventurous programming, continues to perform and develop Shifting Ground, a multimedia program in collaboration with the video artist Xuan, which weaves together pieces for violin and electronics by J.S. Bach, Rafiq Bhatia, Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Salina Fisher, Nicola Matteis, Angélica Negrón, and Paul Wiancko. Alexi has performed Shifting Ground at the Celebrity Series of Boston, Ojai Festival, and Baryshnikov Arts Center, among other renowned venues and festivals. (March 3 | The Dome)

Owls: Rare Birds

Alexi Kenney joins his ensemble Owls, a “dream group” (The New York Times) — founded by Kenney, Ayane Kozasa, Paul Wiancko, and Gabriel Cabezas — for a performance of music from their 2025 album Rare Birds. With its “inverted quartet” configuration (two cellos, violin, viola), the lack of prewritten music turned out to be liberating. Guided by the simple maxim that “all four of us must completely love everything we play,” these friends and highly in-demand collaborators present a program of minimalism, folk music, contemporary and baroque music, plus compositions by ensemble member (and Kronos Quartet cellist) Wiancko, borne from an unspoken ease of communication, trust, and a joyful, raucous abandon in their music-making. (March 4 | The Dome)

The Comet / Poppea

The Comet / Poppea is an experimental opera that brings together seemingly disparate worlds connected by stories of cultural transformation, juxtaposing Claudio Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, an Italian opera from 1643 unfolding among the social divisions of ancient Rome; and The Comet, based on the 1924 science-fiction short story by sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Set in 1920s New York City, the piece depicts a Black man and white woman as the only survivors after a comet hits Earth. Presented on a turntable divided in two halves, these worlds unfold simultaneously, with the stage’s rotation creating a visual and sonic spiral for audiences —inviting associations, dissociations, collisions, and confluences. The musical score, The Comet, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, composed by George Lewis ’74. The work is directed by Yuval Sharon, and co-produced by Anthony Roth Costanzo, Cath Brittan, The Industry, AMOC*, Curtis Institute of Music, Michigan Central Art, and Yale Schwarzman Center. (March 23–24 | Commons)

Maiani da Silva: Brouhaha: Shaped by Fire (Album Release Party)

Join Yale faculty member Maiani da Silva, violinist, chamber musician, member of the four- time Grammy-winning sextet Eighth Blackbird, and founder of solo project Brouhaha, for a celebration to launch her debut solo album, Brouhaha: Shaped by Fire. Blending music and anthropology, the project explores what it means to be human—from ancient fireside gatherings to the digital present—through six new works for solo violin inspired by our evolving relationship with our origins and environment. Composers featured on the album—produced by six-time GRAMMY winner Elaine Martone—include Fjóla Evans (Yale School of Music, Class of ’18), Zachary Good, and Ian Gottlieb (Yale School of Music, Class of ’15). The party will feature performance, reflection, and conversation with a collaborating composer and a surprise Yale anthropologist whose creativity and insights are woven into the project. (April 14 | The Well)

Emily Coates: Tell Me Where It Comes From

Yale faculty member and renowned dancer and choreographer Emily Coates presents her new work Tell Me Where It Comes From, tracing the echoes of George Balanchine’s 1933 visit to Hartford through dance, archives, and live music. The performance project was commissioned by Works & Process for premiere at Guggenheim New York. Coates and her collaborators Ain Gordon, Derek Lucci, Charles Burnham, Melvin Chen, Krista Smith, Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme, and Henry Seth collage forgotten aspects of Balanchine’s legacy, reanimating unanswered letters, old photographs and music exercises, lost ballets, early muses, and more. (April 24 | The Dome)

Sweat Variant - Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born: adaku, part 2 (work in process)

Yale Schwarzman Center will host a work-in-process presentation sharing elements of adaku, part 2, a new work by Sweat Variant, the collaborative practice of artists Okwui Okpokwasili (Yale College, Class of ’96) and Peter Born (Yale College, Class of ’95). Set in a near-future United States, this project is the second part of a trilogy that explores the impact of the transatlantic slave trade, examines the devastating consequences of this historical rupture, and investigates the embodied impact on individuals and communities. (April 30 | The Dome)

Beyond Performances

Yale Schwarzman Center continues its widely popular lunch series, Schwarzman Sessions, the Center’s foundational series sparking conversation, connection, and community over lunch. EveryBody Dances @ Yale Schwarzman Center is back for another season of weekly public dance classes with an ever-changing roster of local and visiting artists. The hidden gem of Yale's campus and Yale Schwarzman Center’s on-site pub, The Well,  offers a culinary adventure with its ongoing Tasting Series led by expert sommeliers and mixologists — a unique opportunity to explore a variety of beverages, from fine wines and craft beers to innovative cocktails and spirits. Presented by Yale School of Public Health and Yale Schwarzman Center Hospitality, Oleoteca Olive Oil Exploration sets the stage for olive oil tastings and exploration of Mediterranean flavors led by Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health Tassos Kyriakides. Watch the website for dates and registration details.

READ the recap in Broadway World