Jacob's Pillow cancels the rest of the dance festival 2025

Jacob's Pillow has cancelled the rest of the Festival 2025 following a tragic death of the festival's stage manager on its campus.

The dance centre in Becket, Massachusetts, the United States, said in a press release on 5th August 2025;

"The Jacob’s Pillow Board of Trustees and institutional leadership has decided that Festival 2025 will not continue.

We have come to this difficult decision following the tragic accident on our campus on August 1. Ticket buyers affected by the cancellations will receive refunds.

For 93 years, Jacob’s Pillow has been a haven for dance and a community dedicated to its creation, presentation, education, and preservation.

We look forward to welcoming audiences back to our campus."

Earlier, Jacob's Pillow said in a separate press release that Stage Manager Kat Sirico passed away in an accident on 1st August.

The New York Times article on 6th August said, "Sirico was moving platforms for theater staging with an intern’s help on Friday afternoon. While they were rolling a dolly down a slope, Sirico tripped and the load toppled, according to the Berkshire District Attorney’s Office, which determined it to be a workplace accident."

At the start of the Festival 2025 in July, Jacob's Pillow repopend the new expanded Doris Duke Theatre in a jubilant spirit. The theatre, originally built in 1990, was destroyed by fire in November 2020. The cause of the fire was never determined.

The Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival had been cancelled only once in the past. The cancellation was in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Pointe magazine.