Cal Performances at Home is much more than a series of great streamed performances. Fascinating behind-the-scenes artist interviews. Informative and entertaining public forums. The Cal Performances Reading Room, featuring books with interesting connections to our Fall 2020 programs. For all this and much more, keep checking this page for frequent updates and to journey far, far Beyond the Stage!
Major support for Beyond the Stage is provided by Bank of America.
Beyond the Stage
“Innocence & Experience”: Crucibles of Experience
“Innocence & Experience”: Crucibles of Experience
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
European and the US armies conscripted hundreds of thousands of Africans and African Americans into World War I, then deliberately left them out of the record. What is the impact of that erasure, and what counter-histories endured in spite of it? During Cal Performances 2026–27 season, we’re exploring the theme of “Innocence & Experience” as part of our Illuminations programming, which connects extraordinary artistry with groundbreaking scholarship to unpack pressing topics of today. In this video, we engage performing artists and scholars to discuss how concepts of “Innocence & Experience” can inform our understanding of these histories—especially in the context of upcoming performances of William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load and Jason Moran and the Harlem Hellfighters in James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin.
This video features William Kentridge, concept & director for The Head & the Load; Donna V. Jones, associate professor of English at UC Berkeley; Bruce S. Hall, associate professor of History at UC Berkeley; Jason Moran, jazz pianist and composer performing in James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin; and Leigh Raiford, professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley.
Find additional videos and upcoming performances and events at calperformances.org/illuminations.
Transcript
William Kentridge:
I realized in myself the ignorance about Africa and the First World War, a designed ignorance in the sense that the armies and the institutions in Europe deliberately hid information about the Africans who had been part of the First World War. In 1884 at the Congress of Berlin, there was the final cutting up of Africa between European powers.
Donna V. Jones:
All of these ideas that you had about the 19th century of technological progress, that empire, the civilizing mission of empire, all of this stuff is moving forward apace, right? And then comes this war, right? And this war is an inter-imperial rivalry. All of the guys who were peaceably carving up Africa are now at each other’s throats. And so this is a crisis. For Europeans, they’re fighting among each other, but they also are looking at the colonized, bringing them into this war, conscripting them.
Bruce S. Hall:
To build roads, to do almost anything, labor was recruited from African authorities. The vast majority of people who found themselves forcibly recruited into colonial armies were people from the bottom of African societies: slaves or former slaves, or descended from slaves, or people who belonged to low ranking castes in some of these societies. Enslaved people in West Africa, at least some of them, were literate, were involved in all kinds of activities, and used those tools and opportunities to build more autonomous lives, to accumulate wealth, to create families, to move out of slavery in some sort of way.
William Kentridge:
A lot of the people, Africans who went to war, did it on the basis that they would show that they were the equal of the Europeans and as dedicated to that country, so should be given civil rights. So they expected civil rights, but at the end of the war, what did the soldiers get? A great coat and a bicycle. There were no monuments to them. There was no record of them. There were no lists of names. They were literally erased from history in the most direct physical way.
Bruce S. Hall:
But the fact that you had sent so many people from the bottom of society and that when those people came back, they came back with a sense that they were not going to bow down anymore to their social betters … It created a new dynamic in these societies, which would play itself out over the decades that followed. Because it’s so clear and so easy to understand: if you’re going to die on behalf of a regime which doesn’t think you’re good, doesn’t value you, you need something in return. You’re demonstrating to them that you are, in fact, worthy and they need to demonstrate to you, they need to recognize that [sacrifice] by making changes in the dispensation that’s available to you and to people like you.
William Kentridge:
And it was a statement made by one of the colonial officers. He wrote in a memorandum with regards to the African soldier, he said, “Lest their actions merit recognition, their deeds should not be recorded.” And in that you have kind of the whole question of what it is to hide a history and to try to record and note those actions.
Jason Moran:
How does war get racialized? How do people who have sacrificed everything sacrifice their families, their love, their futures, put it all on the line?
Leigh Raiford:
I think it’s really profound and quite generative to compare the histories of African American soldiers and African soldiers in World War I as a node of thinking about the Black diaspora.
Donna V. Jones:
You have in the African diaspora the kind of beginnings of a real political sense of understanding oneself internationally. The sovereignty of Ethiopia is huge in places like Harlem and among African intellectuals. Forget about nation states; we align ourselves internationally.
Leigh Raiford:
When we think about all of the modes of representation that have been withheld from Black people, and yet Black people represent themselves. Black people make art, Black people have political desire and they make those desires known. Music in particular has been one key form.
Jason Moran:
Any soldier that walks into war and hears whizzing bullets, falling bombs, or this loud rattle that says, “Put on your gas mask” … the sounds become part of how you understand where you are. And James Reese Europe even also took out a small portable organ to the front lines to start writing songs. I haven’t met musicians like that. It’s quite brave.
Leigh Raiford:
Even as we may not have the voluminous number of images that we might want of the Harlem Hellfighters, I think there are so many other forms of presence that are key to their story, not least of which is the music.
Jason Moran:
It’s frustrating as a musician when someone who’s made such a large impact on the music gets wiped away. And James Reese Europe is more than a jazz musician. He’s an organizer, and that rarely kind of happened in jazz history after him—a person who had equal impact on the stage as he did off the stage.
Leigh Raiford:
Marginalized people, the so-called “defeated,” have always narrated in alternative stories, the counter histories—they’ve always been passed on. They are in the archives, and part of our work as artists, as educators, is to give our students the tools to imagine different kinds of stories, to think about dominant narratives as just one version. And I think with different tools, with different eyes, with different ears, with different ethical compasses, those stories that we can find, those archival bits and scraps and random photographs actually open up something else for us and imagine us to think and dream otherwise.
Upcoming Related Events
Beyond the Stage Related Posts
“Innocence & Experience”: Love & the Politics of Innocence
“Innocence & Experience”: Love & the Politics of Innocence
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
Whose love gets to be labeled as “innocent“—and who assigns that label? During Cal Performances 2026–27 season, we’re exploring the theme of “Innocence & Experience” as part of our Illuminations programming, which connects extraordinary artistry with groundbreaking scholarship to unpack pressing topics of today.
In this video, we engage performing artists and scholars to discuss the intersection of “Innocence & Experience” with themes of love and politics—especially in the context of two upcoming performances on the UC Berkeley campus: The Australian Ballet performing Christopher Wheeldon’s Oscar inspired by the life and works of Oscar Wilde, and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas performed by Joyce DiDonato, Il Pomo d’Oro Orchestra and Choir, and soloists.
This video features Ellen T. Harris, professor emerita of Music & Theater Arts at MIT; Russell K. Robinson, Walter Perry Johnson Professor of Law at UC Berkeley; Callum Linnane, principal artist with The Australian Ballet; and Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor Emeritus of Talmudic Culture at UC Berkeley.
Find additional videos and upcoming performances and events at calperformances.org/illuminations.
Transcript
Ellen T. Harris:
Wouldn’t it be lovely if love were always entirely private? I’m afraid it isn’t always. So we know what happens to Dido, and we certainly know what happened to Oscar Wilde. He lost everything. Dido lost everything.
Who is granted innocence in matters of love?
Russell K. Robinson:
We think about innocence in matters of love. We have to understand that it’s not a universal condition. Perceptions of innocence are inflected through systems of power, systems around race, gender, sexuality that prevent us from seeing the purity and the innocence of desire, attraction, and love.
Ellen T. Harris:
The story of Dido and Aeneas is a story of a woman who is chaste and gives up her chastity for her love of Aeneas, and when she loses her chastity, she loses a great deal, and in the end, she loses her life. There are certain loves that have been deemed by the societies in which these people lived that are inappropriate, wrong. If you have a sexual love outside of marriage, maybe even simply a love outside of marriage, that you will be punished one way or another.
Callum Linnane:
Our ballet, Oscar, begins with his [Oscar Wilde’s] trial and then imprisonment, and then it weaves back and forth between memory, and also elements of his works.
April 1895: Oscar Wilde was tried on charges of gross indecency following accusations of homosexuality from his lover’s father, two months after the theatrical premiere of his most successful work, The Importance of Being Earnest.
Daniel Boyarin:
The trials of Wilde were part of the process of solidifying the homosexual as a “type” of human. Homoerotic homosexual acts, these were understood within a spectrum of different qualities and desires that human beings had. Now, there were certainly societies that condemned those acts, but they didn’t define a whole person. There was no such thing as a homosexual.
Legal decisions granting innocence
Daniel Boyarin:
Foucault argued that the idea of homosexuality and heterosexuality as human “types” wasn’t the universal, but that it was a product of a particular moment within the development of European culture that it became distilled into an identity.
Callum Linnane:
When I think of portraying Oscar Wilde’s love, it feels like it blooms as innocently. I’m thinking specifically of this moment in act two, the centerpiece of his love with Bosie. For me, that is when his love is in full bloom, and it feels as innocent and as overflowing as ever.
The sound of resistance
Ellen T. Harris:
The character of Dido is one that has many facets. She’s obviously an admirable woman. She ran her country. She built Carthage. She could play a man’s game and win. Her dalliance with Aeneas is, on the other hand, something of a warning. It shows you that even those who reach the highest stature will potentially stumble.
“Dido’s Lament,” which is obviously the most important piece of music from the opera [Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas], is an absolutely stunning creation built on a ground bass, which means it has a bass pattern that repeats over and over and over again. What Purcell does is take the vocal line, the “”when I am laid in earth,” out of sync with the bass, so their cadences come in the middle of the bassline, they never end when the pattern ends, and it’s as if Dido is resisting the bassline because she will not cadence with it. It only aligns with the bass at the very, very end. I do believe that the bassline represents her fate, and that even now, she is resisting it, saying, “Remember me, remember me.”
Timeless Love, Timely Struggle: The continued fight for innocence
Callum Linnane:
Wilde’s story is both timeless and timely, universal stories of love that will always be timeless. But I think timely because queer people are still facing those same battles and those same struggles.
Russell K. Robinson:
We recognize that legal victories matter. In 2003, the Supreme Court held that states cannot criminalize gay sex. Then in 2015, the court held that there’s a fundamental right to marry, that it applies to same sex couples. These victories matter and create the possibility of changing the culture. They create the possibility that people will see the innocence and the core humanity of LGBTQ people. Nine judges on the US Supreme Court cannot automatically change people’s attitudes and stereotypes. This stereotype remains in the culture and in politics, and coexists with legal decisions that celebrate the humanity and dignity of LGBTQ people, and our desire for loving relationships.
Ellen T. Harris:
You would think that maybe if someone follows the rules of society, that they might be allowed to love a person they love. You know that doesn’t work always. I wish we could just love one another.
Upcoming Related Events
Beyond the Stage Related Posts
“Innocence & Experience”: Embodied Experience
“Innocence & Experience”: Embodied Experience
Produced and directed by Mina Girgis, Cal Performances’ Director of Education, Campus and Community Engagement; directed and edited by Lindsay Gauthier. Full credits below.
What does the body know that the mind doesn’t—and what do we lose when everything is built to go faster? During Cal Performances 2026–27 season, we’re exploring the theme of “Innocence & Experience” as part of our Illuminations programming, which connects extraordinary artistry with groundbreaking scholarship to unpack pressing topics of today.
In this video, we engage performing artists and scholars to discuss the intersection of “Innocence & Experience” and concepts of embodied experiences, time, and technology—especially in the context of upcoming performances of Ambrose Akinmusire & Aszure Barton’s dance and jazz creation A a | a B : B E N D on the UC Berkeley campus.
This video features Aszure Barton, choreographer and director of A a | a B : B E N D; Greg Niemeyer, Professor of Media Innovation at UC Berkeley; and Shannon Jackson, Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of the Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley.
Find additional videos and upcoming performances and events at calperformances.org/illuminations.
Transcript
Aszure Barton:
I’m really interested in the body choreographing itself. A lot of the work comes from prompts of simple questions that I ask dancers. It’s about multitasking the body and maxing out the mind so that the body can override or take over and create its own language. I ask, okay, let’s create a phrase with the head and let’s create a phrase with the left arm, and then with the right fingers; and then layering the body to be able to discover something new. It’s like learning a new language. The humanity that lives in the body then is exposed through simple tasks of putting things together.
Embodied being & knowing
Greg Niemeyer:
Is there a meaningful difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it through the body?
Shannon Jackson:
Yes. Our brains are attached to our bodies. The body is not a place of unknowing. It is a repository of codes, of histories, of memories, of habits.
Greg Niemeyer:
We direct our perception and our perception comes through physical processes. When we think, we use energy and that energy is material. So, even the most abstract thought that we think is really a bodily movement, if you will. Being in the body for what the body brings—grief, joy, restoration, relaxation, exhaustion—all these things are physical feelings and they lead to thoughts, so the thoughts actually come from the body.
Shannon Jackson:
The body might know something more deeply and more intimately, and actually with more complexity than the brain will sometimes give it credit for.
Greg Niemeyer:
When the word “innocence” comes up, I imagine myself as a child playing, or, if I’m lucky, even as an adult playing. There’s a lot of innocence in play. We’re most innocent when we don’t calculate at all how long it will take to get something done, when we don’t try to extract things from time.
Aszure Barton:
It’s so easy over the years to forget that space or to lose touch with that emptiness or that not-knowing space.
Shannon Jackson:
It’s from the place of experience where we’re burdened and shackled by responsibility, and obligation, or the feeling of alienation, or something—that makes us, if I may, “invent” a concept of innocence, that we find ourselves longing for something unmediated precisely because we feel so fettered by mediation. I don’t know that the quest can be about finding that purity, finding what I think people think of when they think of “innocence,” that it’s authentic, it’s truth, it’s natural, it’s pure—I’m not sure we can get there, get back there, or I’m not sure we were ever there.
Technology & innocence
Greg Niemeyer:
AI is the industrialization of losing innocence because AI is really about pursuing a particular goal in as little time as possible. It’s very efficient and it’s very good at that, but it really is quite extractive in that sense. It’s really designed to make things go faster. Whenever we make things go faster, we are definitely not innocent. We’re definitely thinking about a particular end goal that we’re really adamant about achieving, and oftentimes that’s a little bit out of sync with the world. I think the world actually would benefit from us slowing down a great deal.
Shannon Jackson:
Again, it’s not that the technology is here for us to fear its encroachment, but for us to get smart about how it works on us and to make interventions into how we want it to work on us.
Aszure Barton:
You reach a point [when] the knowledge you have and the experience that you have is enough, and that if you can trust yourself, then you’ll make things that are far beyond what you have ever imagined. If you know what you’re going to do before you do it, you’re going to do something you’ve done from the past, is what I’ve learned. So, you’ve got to take risk and jump into the deep end sometimes.
Learning & unlearning
Shannon Jackson:
I consider unlearning to utterly be a process of new learning. I think of it as an extended and expansive learning. It means opening up to new forms, healthy forms, of mediation.
Greg Niemeyer:
I think it’s very important that we always seek to learn as fast as possible. That means to revise our beliefs, to revise our stereotypes, to pay attention to the world around us, and to take in information and make change possible. But also, we could learn a lot from just going a lot slower. If the world offers us an opportunity to do something a little bit slower, we should take it.
Shannon Jackson:
We believe that the opportunity to work together, to collaborate together, to fail together, to learn from others, to compose and recompose sentences in real-time interaction with each other is how we build conditions for flourishing citizens of the world.
Aszure Barton:
There’s no hierarchy in the process when we’re working [on B E N D], so everyone really participates equally in the process, and that is the magic for me. I mean, it’s creating a space where everyone is absolutely involved.
Upcoming Related Events
Beyond the Stage Related Posts
Familiar Favorites: The World-Renowned Artists Who’ve Made Berkeley a Second Home
Familiar Favorites: The World-Renowned Artists Who’ve Made Berkeley a Second Home
By El Zager, Cal Performances’ Social Media, Digital Content and Engagement Specialist
Every season, Cal Performances curates a lineup of approximately 80 performances spanning an incredible range of genres, styles, and cultural traditions. And while no season looks identical to another, there are some world-renowned artists who have chosen to make Berkeley a second home. These iconic performers and creators serve as pillars of our programming, returning to us every year or few years—sometimes, over the course of decades!—and deepening their connection to Berkeley audiences with each new season. Though familiar favorites, their performances offer us fresh perspective each time, whether it’s via a different piece, a new collaborator, or simply a beloved classic that somehow hits differently the second time around.
If you’ve ever looked at our season calendar and felt that flicker of ‘“Where do I even begin?”—start here. These tried and true artists are favorites among Cal Performances audiences for a multitude of reasons—all of which are immediately clear upon your first encounter.
The below list represents a sampling of these artists, all of whom are featured this year on our 2026–27 season. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience these in-demand creators in a place so embedded in their own history—and consider this your very own Cal Performances rite of passage!
MAR 2–4, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
Some ensembles don’t need an introduction so much as a moment of reverence. The Vienna Philharmonic is 185 years old, which means its history isn’t adjacent to that of Western classical music—it is that history, celebrating and preserving foundational traditions throughout the decades.Since the orchestra’s debut at Cal Performances in 2011 (which was its first performance in the region since 1987), the storied orchestra has performed more often in Berkeley than anywhere else in Northern California. During that time, Bay Area audiences have experienced the true range of the Vienna Philharmonic’s artistic powers under a number of legendary conductors, including the illustrious Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who most recently visited with the orchestra during their 2025 residency. This season, they return for three distinct programs across three nights, each of which centers on a different symphony by Gustav Mahler. For this very special visit, they bring with them a selection of internationally acclaimed guest artists, including pianist Yuja Wang, soprano Christiane Karg, mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča, and the Bay Area’s very own San Francisco Symphony Chorus led by director Jenny Wong. If you only let yourself have one bucket-list night this season, the case for spending it here is not a hard one to make.
APR 6–11, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
Alvin Ailey didn’t just found a dance company in 1958—in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, he built something closer to an archive with a pulse, a “library of dance” designed to keep the work of dozens of choreographers alive long after they might otherwise have been lost. That instinct still defines the company today, more than 300 works and 100 choreographers deep. The Ailey company has visited Cal Performances annually for over 50 years, and in that time has performed more often in Berkeley than anywhere outside their home base in New York. They return each season for “Ailey Week,” bringing with them beloved favorites as well as a regular slate of new work by a range of influential choreographers that explore the Black American experience. Whether it’s a canonical piece like Revelations or a brand-new commission, an Ailey performance has always been, and remains, an event rather than an evening.
JAN 29, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
Among the most venerated pianists and musical thinkers of our time, Mitsuko Uchida is acclaimed as a peerless interpreter of composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. Though her debut at Cal Performances dates back to 2014, Uchida has been a regular fixture of Cal Performances seasons since 2022, even serving as the organization’s artist in residence for the full 2023–24 season. Whether directing a concert or performing as soloist, Uchida offers Cal Performances audiences unmatched sensitivity and deep musical insight. This season, she returns to Berkeley in a solo recital of masterworks by composers with whom she has been closely associated throughout her career. There’s perhaps no purer representation of her powers than this stripped down recital— just Uchida, her piano, and the classical music canon brought to life on the Zellerbach Hall stage.
MAY 7–9, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
Moses Pendleton, a Pilobolus co-founder, started Momix more than 40 years ago with a simple, strange ambition: erase the line between the human body and the natural world. Watch long enough and you’ll stop being able to tell where the dancer ends and the illusion begins—a body becomes a flower, a wasp, a gust of wind, utilizing nothing but light, costume, and astonishing physical control. A frequent Cal Performances collaborator, last season’s Alice (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) sent audiences out of Zellerbach both dazed and delighted. This spring, the company returns with Botanica, a passage through all four seasons set to a score that drifts from birdsong to Vivaldi.
OCT 11, 2026, ZELLERBACH HALL
There’s a particular kind of trust that builds between an audience and a quartet over decades, and Berkeley has that with the Takács—a Grammy-winning ensemble whose performances still carry the electricity of a group discovering the music fresh, every single time, no matter how many times they’ve played it. This season they’re joined by pianist and MacArthur “Genius” Jeremy Denk, already a favorite in his own right, for César Franck’s searing Piano Quintet, paired with Mendelssohn and a work by Berkeley’s own Gabriela Lena Frank, fresh off a Pulitzer. Past collaborations between the Takács and Denk have been some of Cal Performances’ earliest sellouts of the season, so don’t miss your opportunity to see the magic live!
MAR 14, 2027, HERTZ HALL
Talk about one of our favorite power couples: cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han have been playing together since 1982, and their history with our stages runs even deeper than that: Finckel’s first encounter with cello legend Mstislav Rostropovich happened in a masterclass at Hertz Hall in the mid-1970s, and if you know where to look backstage, there’s still a small montage of photos from that class on the wall. As founders of Music@Menlo and co-directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, they carry real authority into every phrase, and their annual returns to Berkeley have become one of the season’s quieter, more devoted pleasures. The all-Russian program they bring to Hertz this spring features Rachmaninoff’s rhapsodic Cello Sonata along with Prokofiev’s mercurial Cello Sonata and Myaskovsky’s Second Cello Sonata.
APR 23, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
Part of what makes viol master, conductor, and venerated scholar Jordi Savall so magnetic is that you genuinely never know what corner of history he’s about to excavate—his programs have a way of resurrecting anonymous and under-recognized composers, and revealing the threads that connect cultures across centuries. So it’s a small shock, and a delight, that this time he’s turning to something far more familiar: Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5, performed on period instruments with his ensemble Le Concert des Nations. This concert is part of a lifelong project—and a lifelong dream—to record and perform Beethoven’s complete symphonic cycle, and, after decades of annual visits, it marks the first time Berkeley will hear his interpretation of these works with a full symphony orchestra.
APR 16, 2027, FIRST CHURCH, BERKELEY
More than 50 years ago, a group of Oxford undergraduates got together to sing Renaissance polyphony for the pure pleasure of it. That group, led by Peter Phillips, became The Tallis Scholars, and, in the decades since, they’ve become a defining voice of the early-music revival—a sound so pure and so precisely blended that it can feel like listening to architecture. This season’s annual visit features a program entitled Slings and Arrows…, which centers on Josquin des Prez’s Missa Fortuna desperata, one of the true monuments of Renaissance sacred music, alongside works by Jean Mouton and Walter Lambe. Sit in First Church and let five centuries come alive in one evening.
FEB 10, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
The New Yorker once called her perhaps the most potent female singer of her generation, and anyone who has heard Joyce DiDonato live tends not to argue. Throughout the years, the mezzo-soprano has visited with a wide variety of passion projects, from a semi-staged concert dedicated to the environment featuring a local children’s choir, to last season’s breathtaking performance that set the poetry of Emily Dickinson to music alongside collaborators Time for Three. This season, she returns with the period-music ensemble and choir Il Pomo d’Oro and an impressive cohort of vocalists for an evening built on tragedy: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas paired with Carissimi’s Jephte. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear her take on Dido’s famous lament, “When I Am Laid on Earth.”
APR 25, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
There’s a reason we keep bringing Harry Bicket and The English Concert back for Handel: nobody does it with quite the same clarity, wit, and dramatic instinct. Considered some of the foremost Handel interpreters in the world, this incredible pairing of conductor, period-instrument ensemble, and soloists has enriched Berkeley audiences with performances of Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Hercules over the past decades. This season, they turn to Alessandro, and if you’ve caught any of their previous visits, you already know to clear your evening.
NOV 12–15, 2026, HENRY J. KAISER CENTER FOR THE ARTS, OAKLAND
Since William Kentridge’s first visit to Cal Performances for the US premiere of his SIBYL in 2023, the South African artist has displayed the vast range of his artistry, with productions that evoke dance, projection, speech, song, shadow play, costume, and music to interrogate history. During the 2022–23 season, Kentridge served as artist in residence for the entire UC Berkeley campus, which celebrated his art across theater/opera, film, and drawing/animation. He returned in 2025 for the Bay Area premiere of incredibly memorable performances of The Great Yes, The Great No, and this year, Cal Performances audiences have the distinct pleasure of experiencing his magnum opus: The Head & the Load. An epic multidisciplinary work of theater, the production resurrects the largely untold story of more than two million Africans who labored, fought, and died during the First World War. Built for a massive stage, the performance will be hosted at Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Center Arena, and will serve as the first project in a new Cal Performances initiative that will see a Kentridge multidisciplinary work on each of the organization’s next five seasons. This work is of particular importance to Kentridge, and no doubt will be to our Bay Area audiences, too!
JAN 22–24, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
For 45 years, the drummers of Kodo have turned taiko into something that feels less like a concert and more like a force of nature—across more than 7,500 performances in 50 countries. Performing in Zellerbach Hall roughly every two years, the athletic performers offer an expansive, all-consuming combination of sound and movement, rooted in a philosophy as simple as it is demanding: “play the drums with the simple heart of a child.” This season’s production, Luminance, marks the ensemble’s 45th anniversary and pays tribute to composer Maki Ishii’s groundbreaking Monochrome, alongside new works born from everywhere Kodo’s travels have taken them.
FEB 27–28, 2027, ZELLERBACH HALL
The Trocks were founded in New York City in 1974, in the years just after the Stonewall Uprising, and their first shows happened on the makeshift stage of a downtown loft belonging to the West Side Discussion Group, an early gay and lesbian political organization. More than 50 years later, the original premise hasn’t budged: a company of professional male dancers performing the classical and modern repertoire en travesti and en pointe, each under an elaborately invented ballerina persona. The joke lands only because the dancing is seriously, technically excellent—the comedy comes from exaggerating the foibles, near-misses, and incongruities that serious ballet works very hard to hide. Treasured by Cal Performances audiences for decades, the Trocks last visited Berkeley in January 2024 to celebrate their 50th anniversary season, and this February they return with a repertory program of lovingly satirical takes on the works ballets aficionados know by heart. As the company itself puts it, “Comedy is serious business and ballet even more so.”
This list barely scratches the surface—there’s so much more across our 2026–27 season, including plenty of artists making their very first visit to Berkeley. But if you’re looking for a place to start, there is perhaps no greater endorsement of an artist than a community eager to have them back, again and again. Whether this is your first time at Cal Performances (or a live performance in general!) or you, too, are a frequent visitor to our halls, we hope to see you for any performances that spark your interest during the exciting season that lies ahead!
Related Events
Beyond the Stage: 2026–27 Season Guides
Explore the six guides to the season below to find the performances that were made for you.
Honoring Robert Cole
Honoring Robert Cole
The performing arts world has lost one of its great champions. Robert Cole, who served as Director of Cal Performances from 1986 to 2009, was a singular force in American arts presenting—a conductor and musician by training who brought a performer’s instinct and an institution-builder’s vision to everything he touched. For decades, he shaped not only what happened on Cal Performances’ stages, but how an entire region came to understand and experience the transformative power of live performance. His passing leaves a profound absence, and an equally profound legacy.
Cole arrived at Cal Performances in 1986, inheriting a respected regional organization that presented roughly 45 events each year on a relatively modest budget. What he built over the next 23 years was something altogether different: an internationally acclaimed presenting and commissioning organization that came to stand alongside the greatest performing arts centers and festivals in the world and directly helped to shape the performing arts ecosystem. By the time he stepped down at the close of the 2008–09 season, Cal Performances was presenting some 130 performances annually, with a budget that had more than tripled and ticket sales that had grown more than ten-fold since he took the helm.
Numbers, of course, tell only part of a story. What Cole understood—and what made him so effective—was that true transformation in the arts happens through relationships, through artistic risk, and through an unwavering belief that audiences deserve the very best. “I had the idea to make [Berkeley] more like a London, New York, or Paris where the greatest artists come from all over the world,” he said in a 2005 KQED interview. “That was my goal when I came here and that’s what we’ve been working on ever since.” He achieved it.
Building Something New
From the earliest years of his tenure, Cole began forging the long-term artist partnerships that would define Cal Performances’ identity for generations. One of the most celebrated was with choreographer Mark Morris, whom Cole first invited to Berkeley in 1987, and who has been coming every year since. Over the following decades, Cole presented a remarkable series of Mark Morris Dance Group premieres and commissions, including the world premieres of World Power (1995), Falling Down Stairs (1997), and Rhymes With Silver (1997)—as well as the US premieres of Morris’s staging of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Platée (1998) and King Arthur (2006), and the West Coast premieres of L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1994), The Hard Nut (1996), and Mozart Dances (2007).
He commissioned or co-commissioned new works from an extraordinary range of artists, including theater and opera director Peter Sellars, choreographers Twyla Tharp, Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, and Pascal Rioult; the Kronos Quartet; actor and director Robert Lepage; and performance artist Laurie Anderson. Among the highlights of his tenure were the world premiere of John Adams’ songplay I Was Looking at the Ceiling, and Then I Saw the Sky (1995), with a libretto by UC Berkeley poet June Jordan and directed by Peter Sellars; the US premiere of Nur Du (Only You) by German expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal (1996); the first West Coast performances of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble in a 10-day festival held on the UC Berkeley campus; and the final performances of the acclaimed Berliner Ensemble before the company disbanded in 1999.
The international companies he brought to Berkeley—Lyon Opera Ballet and Orchestra, the Royal Court Theatre, the Grand Kabuki Theater of Japan, the Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre of Dublin, and the Bolshoi Ballet and Orchestra, to name a small selection—made Cal Performances a genuine destination for the world’s most celebrated artists and companies, and attracted new audiences within the Bay Area. Among the US debuts Cole presented were tenor Ian Bostridge, violinist Julia Fischer, and the early music ensemble Il Giardino Armonico.
Under his leadership, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater came to perform in Berkeley more than anywhere else in the world outside of New York. The roster of artists who made Cal Performances a regular home included Yo-Yo Ma, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Cecilia Bartoli, Ravi Shankar, Salif Keita, Philip Glass, Jordi Savall, Cesária Évora, Paco de Lucía, and Sweet Honey in the Rock. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma once observed that Cole was an artist himself, and that he “understands what artists need to do their best work”—an insight that explains much about why so many of the world’s great performers trusted him and returned to Berkeley again and again.
A Visionary for New and Early Music
Cole’s impact extended even beyond Cal Performances’ halls. In 1990, Cole founded the Berkeley Festival & Exhibition, a biennial international festival of early music, presented in association with the UC Berkeley Department of Music, the San Francisco Early Music Society, and Early Music America. The festival helped establish Berkeley as one of the world’s premier destinations for early music, and continues to draw audiences and artists from across the globe. In 2003, Cole established the Berkeley Edge Fest, a biennial showcase for new and contemporary performing arts that featured the work of John Adams, John Zorn, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Paul Dresher, and Frederic Rzewski, among others across its multiple years of production. Both festivals reflected a belief that the full breadth of musical tradition—from the ancient to the newly made—deserved a place on Berkeley’s stages.
After his time at Cal Performances, Cole continued to lend his expertise and vision to the broader arts community, including through his contributions to the Berkeley Festival and the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University. He remained, throughout these years, a devoted supporter of Cal Performances, and his continued engagement with the organization he had built was a source of immense meaning to those who carry its work forward today.
An Educator and Institution-Builder
Cole understood that a great performing arts organization must also be a great civic institution. As arts funding declined nationally, he expanded Cal Performances’ education offerings dramatically. By the time he stepped down, more than 100 programs were presented annually, including the highly regarded SchoolTime and teaching artist in-school residency initiatives, which have been nationally recognized as model arts education programs.
Cole also shaped the extracurricular music life of UC Berkeley through formal management of Student Musical Activities: the Cal Band, the UC Jazz Ensemble, and the UC Choral Ensembles. He deepened the organization’s ties to the University by working closely with faculty to support their work, and by programming lectures, demonstrations, and symposia for students and community members throughout the year.
Among the programs Cole counted as his proudest achievements was Berkeley/Oakland AileyCamp, which takes place on the UC Berkeley campus and will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2027. The camp opened locally in 2002 as a free summer program through which young people can experience first-hand the transformative power of dance while learning essential life skills. Now well into its third decade, Berkeley/Oakland AileyCamp has touched more than 1,300 young people—a legacy that reflects Cole’s conviction that the arts belong to everyone, and that the work of a performing arts organization extends far beyond the concert hall.
Honors and a Lasting Mark
The recognition Cole received from the wider world was a fitting reflection of his accomplishments. In 1997, UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien awarded him the Berkeley Citation, the campus’s highest administrative honor, given to individuals who have “rendered distinguished or extraordinary service to the University.” In 1995, France’s Minister of Culture and Francophonia named him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. In 1998, he received the William Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters.
Cole came to Cal Performances with distinguished experience: he had studied conducting with Richard Lert and Ingolf Dahl in California, with Leonard Bernstein and Leon Barzin at the Tanglewood Music Center, and with Hans Swarowsky in Europe. He was a graduate of the University of Southern California School of Music; and had previously served as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Center for Performing Arts at Brooklyn College and of the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York, as Associate Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and as Music Director and Executive Director of the Ballet Society of Los Angeles.
When he announced his departure in 2007, Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau offered words that still ring true today: “Robert has not only heightened Cal Performances’ profile in the arts world, but also the organization’s service to the educational mission of the University. The arts and sciences stand together in the important work of advancing civilization, and in this complex world nothing bridges cultural differences more effectively than the performing arts; they demonstrate the immeasurable range of human expression and our shared humanity. The University community has been the recipient of Robert’s impeccable artistic judgment, and because of it, we have all grown in our understanding and appreciation of the world.”
Cole himself, ever looking forward, reflected on what remained possible: “There is uncommon opportunity for growth at Cal Performances; what I have been able to accomplish with this talented staff and devoted Board of Trustees”—a board that he helped to initiate—”is only the beginning.”
He was right. The organization he built continues to grow and to bring the world’s greatest artists to Berkeley—a living testament to the vision, dedication, and artistry of a remarkable leader. Cal Performances will always consider Robert Cole part of our family, and we are profoundly grateful for everything he gave us and to the community we share.
——
Robert Cole is survived by his sons, Alex Julian Cole and Thomas Montgomery Cole; his grandsons, Charles Cole and Daniel Cole; and his wife, Susan Muscarella. Cal Performances extends its deepest condolences to them, as well as all other members of his family, his friends, and the many people whose lives were touched by his extraordinary work.
Beyond the Stage Related Posts
Sustaining Excellence: A Conversation with Board Co-Chair Jeff MacKie-Mason and Janet Netz
Sustaining Excellence: A Conversation with Board Co-Chair Jeff MacKie-Mason and Janet Netz
“We want our children and grandchildren, and theirs, to continue to have the opportunity to hear world-class and exciting performances close to home.”
By Cal Performances Development staff
As Cal Performances looks to the future, leadership from within its own community is setting a visionary example. Board Co-Chair Jeff MacKie-Mason (former University Librarian, University of California, Berkeley, and a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Department of Economics) and longtime supporter Janet Netz (bachelor’s degree cum laude in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986) recently committed a transformative $1 million gift to establish sustained excellence in classical music via a newly established endowment.
Both have deep roots at UC Berkeley, and we sat down with them to discuss the vital role of philanthropy, their personal connection to the arts, and why investing in the future of classical music at a public university matters now more than ever.
Jeff, in your role as Co-Chair of the Cal Performances Board, and Janet, as an alumna, longtime major donor, and champion of our mission, you have unique insights into not only the performing arts, but Cal Performances presentations specifically. From your perspective, why is an endowment the right way to ensure the enduring excellence of our classical programming? And why now?
Jeff & Janet: Classical music has been an important part of our lives for many years, and Cal Performances makes extraordinary artists and performances available to students, faculty, and the broader public. Some of our most memorable experiences have happened in Zellerbach Hall or Hertz Hall—moments of beauty, surprise, and awe that stayed with us long after the performance ended.
We believe an endowment is the right vehicle because it provides long-term stability. It helps ensure that Cal Performances can continue presenting ambitious classical programming not just today, but decades from now—even through economic uncertainty or changing cultural priorities. We want our children and grandchildren, and theirs, to continue to have the opportunity to hear world-class and exciting performances close to home.
We also believe this is an important moment to invest in the arts. Organizations everywhere are facing rising costs and increased competition for philanthropic support. Endowment funding allows institutions to plan boldly and sustain excellence over time.
And what does it mean to lead by example in this way?
Jeff & Janet: UC Berkeley has been enormously important in both of our lives, and Cal Performances contributes so much to the cultural life of the Bay Area. We are fortunate to be able to help this continue, and hope that we might inspire others to give generously as well.
When you think about the future of classical music, what is the impact you hope this gift has on the next generation of students and concert-goers?
Jeff & Janet: We hope this gift helps ensure that future students and audiences continue to have access to truly world-class classical music in Berkeley. One of the remarkable things about Cal Performances is that students can encounter extraordinary artists and performances as part of everyday university life.
As a Berkeley student in the 1980s, Janet was able to attend performances through student rush tickets that made concerts affordable on a student budget. Those opportunities created exposure to artists and performances she would not have otherwise had. Great performances challenge audiences, introduce them to new ideas and interpretations, and create shared experiences that bring people together across generations and backgrounds.
Was there a specific moment or performance that made you realize this was the legacy you wanted to leave?
Jeff & Janet: There was not one single concert or moment that led us to make this gift. Rather, it came from many years of attending performances and seeing firsthand the important role Cal Performances plays in the intellectual and cultural life of both the university and the broader Bay Area community.
Over time, we realized we wanted to help ensure that future generations would continue to have those same opportunities—to discover artists they might never otherwise encounter, to experience the excitement of live performance, and to have access to a vibrant classical music program close to home.
Why did you choose to earmark this $1 million gift specifically for a classical music endowment?
Jeff & Janet: We enjoy many different kinds of performances at Cal Performances—dance, theater, jazz, folk, and world music among them—but classical music has always held a special place for us. That is especially true for Jeff, who has studied classical piano since childhood and now, in retirement, has more time to devote to that lifelong passion.
We chose to direct this gift toward a classical music endowment because sustaining great classical programming requires long-term investment. World-class artists, ambitious programming, and opportunities for audiences and students to experience exceptional live performance do not happen automatically. We wanted to help ensure that Cal Performances can continue presenting classical music at the highest level for generations to come.
How do you see the presence of world-class piano performances and classical music as vital to the cultural fabric of a public university like Berkeley?
Jeff & Janet: We’ve both been university professors, and we share the belief that higher education should do more than prepare students for careers. Universities should help students build meaningful, intellectually rich lives by exposing them to new ideas, different forms of expression, and experiences that inspire curiosity and reflection.
The performing arts—and classical music in particular—play an important role in that mission. Experiencing great music, whether as a listener or performer, develops attention, discipline, emotional understanding, and a deeper appreciation for human creativity. Having access to world-class performances on a public university campus like Berkeley enriches not only students, but the broader community as well.
One of the extraordinary things about Cal Performances is that it makes those experiences part of the everyday cultural life of Berkeley and the East Bay. We hope this gift helps ensure that continues far into the future.
Cal Performances offers its sincerest appreciation to Jeff MacKie-Mason and Janet Netz for their endowment gift, as well as for a long history of guidance and financial support. For more information about how you can join our passionate community of donors, visit calperformances.org/support.