HANOVER — While smaller arts venues around the Upper Valley have announced their summer plans, the Hopkins Center for the Arts has held off until this week. It now plans to start offering outdoor events on June 24.
With reopening of public life expanding, and mask mandates dwindling, the announcement by the region’s largest performing arts venue of a slate of in-person performances seems timed to encourage people to look ahead to summer.
The Hopkins Center released a wide-ranging schedule of performances on Thursday, including an extended stay later this month from Pilobolus, the path-breaking dance company founded at Dartmouth in 1971.
Known for its physicality, Pilobolus will perform in Dartmouth’s BEMA amphitheater, and much of the rest of the schedule will follow suit, with either free or inexpensive performances held mainly outdoors.
The Hop plans to begin a series called “Big Move” that pairs dance artists with academics. Pairings this summer include dancer and choreographer Emily Coates and Dartmouth assistant professor of physics and astronomy Elizabeth Newton, and French-Cambodian dancer Manou Phuon with ecologist Tom Wessels, author of the undersung classic Reading the Forested Landscape.
The Hop also is expanding its reach beyond Hanover, holding a Pilobolus workshop in White River Junction’s Lyman Point Park, and performances by the Fujiwara/Havorson/Bynum Trio and the Pedro Giraudo Quartet at Union Episcopal Church in Claremont. The “Big Move” workshop with Wessels will take place at the Montshire Museum in Norwich.
For more information about the Hopkins Center’s summer schedule, go to hop.dartmouth.edu.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
