The Things Around Us.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. – Charles Mingus I read that quote when I was a teenager, not yet jaded, and it stuck with me. So much of the labor that makes The Things Around Us possible is unseen. Every time I set up, before I can play a note, I spend hours plugging in wires and cables. It took hundreds of late nights, in complete isolation, replaying each small section of music over and over and over, trying
“The Annex” is a new Festival venue in the North Adams Gateway Center, located at 245 State Road in North Adams, MA. We are converting a former Rent-A-Center into a flexible performance space for an intimate, non-traditional theatre experience. For W71, it will be home to four core productions. Above is a behind-the-scenes shot that Production Director Adrian White took a week ago as the Williamstown Production team and our friends at Moresi & Associates and Hill Engineers start to renovate the
Many Happy Returns
Monica Bill Barnes is a choreographer and performer. She’s been dancing for about forty years but hardly ever calls herself a dancer. I (Robbie Saenz de Viteri) write and insist I’m not performing even when I’m talking on stage. We’ve been collaborating for something like the last ten years. I say “something like” because the borders of working together have a pretty soft edge. When did we start? Whose idea was this? I’m going to make this change because of something you said which prompts you t
W71
Hello, I’m Jeremy O. Harris. And it is my pleasure to welcome you to Williamstown for my inaugural year as Creative Director. A “theatre festival” in 2025 is a curious proposition for a litany of reasons. First of all, what is theatre? And who is it for? A theatre festival in the Berkshires is an entirely different proposition altogether because it brings to mind a history of summer stock and communities that are quite foreign to those that I was raised within. These thoughts and queries, to m
