The Hop Announces 2024/25 Season

The Hopkins Center for the Arts unveiled its 2024/25 season with a diverse slate of events engaging the power of the arts to connect, inspire, and awaken us to vital issues of the day. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, July 23.

Remarking on the season, Mary Lou Aleskie, Howard Gilman '44 Executive Director of the Hop, says, "This season brims with innovation, discovery and exceptional artistry offering moments of reflection and joy. We are thrilled to welcome some of the world's preeminent artists, whose diverse perspectives remind us how the arts bring us together across time and space. We're especially excited to partner with our campus community to tackle the pressing issue of our relationship to the natural world."

The Dartmouth Climate Collaborative is a comprehensive, campus-wide initiative addressing climate change through research, curricular innovation, sustainable building practices and the environmental humanities. Hop artists bring vital and creative voices to the initiative, amplifying scientific studies through artistic expression and strengthening our understanding of natural systems and our human responsibility to the environment. A wondrous site-specific dance inspired by the life-cycle of mushrooms (You Look Like a Fun Guy) leads off the season, created by Director of the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble and Guggenheim Fellowship awardee John Heginbotham. In conjunction with the work, the Hop will offer a series of environment-related experiences, including a Big Move dance workshop, a mushroom-tasting event, film screenings and a tour of the exhibit From the Field: Tracing Foodways through Art at the Hood Museum. Then, continuing the theme of art and the environment into the winter, the Hop will present Selected Shorts, an afternoon of spellbinding fiction with curated stories exploring our complex relationship with our planet and inspiring ecological awareness and action. The star lineup of theater artists will be announced in January.

Resident artists will make the Hop their home as they probe new forms of expression and exchange. In the field of dance, Trebien Pollard will be evolving and presenting Vegan Chitlins and the Artist Formerly Known as the N-word, a groundbreaking embodiment of the Black experience featuring movement, text, and sound.

Wordsmiths Inua Ellams and Aaron Jafferis both leverage improvisation and call and response structures that hearken back to the birth of storytelling. Ellams, the Nigerian-born British playwright who wrote the critically acclaimed play Barber Shop Chronicles, will be in residence working with students and faculty; Jafferis collaborates with composers Dahlak Brathwaite and Daniel Bernard Roumain to create Smooth Criminal, an interactive music theater work that blends contemporary hip-hop with ancestral traditions.

Dance Heginbotham's site-specific dance You Look Like a Fun Guy was expanded and adapted for Dartmouth's BEMA amphitheater during a spring residency.  Resident artists will connect with the Dartmouth community and curriculum through class visits, discussions and more. 

The season also takes audiences on a musical journey across the centuries, starting with the timeless elegance of Bach on the strings of Grammy winner and Musical America's 2016 Instrumentalist of the Year, Jennifer Koh. Ruckus, "the world's only period-instrument rock band" (San Francisco Classical Voice) explores the charm of English country dance. The seamless London-based Academy of St Martin in the Fields, known for its fresh, brilliant interpretations of the world's greatest orchestral music, performs iconic compositions by Mendelssohn.

Hop pianist-in-residence Sally Pinkas is joined by Apple Hill String Quartet's first violinist Elise Kuder for a program featuring Bartók. In a symphonic spectacle, the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra and the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble join forces to celebrate Gershwin's iconic Rhapsody in Blue on its 100th anniversary and premiere new works by Mexican composers as part of the Mexican Repertoire Initiative. Jazz powerhouse Christian McBride, host of WNPR's Jazz Night in America, and a seven-time Grammy award winner, is joined by his band Ursa Major as they push the boundaries of jazz.

Throughout the season, artists demonstrate how the human voice can be used for unique and enchanting joyous expression. Somi, the recipient of the 2023 Doris Duke Artist Award, two NAACP Image Awards for Best Vocal Jazz Album and the inaugural Jazz Music Award for Best Vocal Performance, mixes African rhythms and jazz.

Chanticleer, "The world's reigning male chorus," (The New Yorker) seamlessly blends 12 distinctive voices in a program featuring Renaissance motets, classic arrangements of familiar folk songs, as well as contemporary arrangements. The New England-based quartet Tenores de Aterúe channels the rich and singular tradition of Sardinian folk songs and The Lone Bellow takes audiences on a soulful journey blending Americana, rock and roots music.

Other highlights this season include a night of comedy by Native American artists curated by Andre Bouchard of Indigenous Performance Productions in his fifth collaboration with the Hop since 2018. The show features comedians Marc Yaffee and Jim Ruel. There will also be a bilingual family-friendly concert celebrating Latina musicians by Sonia De Los Santos who was named "one of the Latin children's music artists you should know" by Billboard.

The season launches at a dynamic time for the Hop as the building undergoes a large-scale renovation and expansion, with a reopening planned for the fall of 2025. "The reimagined Hop promises to be a beacon of innovation, offering welcoming spaces that draw us together while pushing the boundaries of artistic expression like never before," says Aleskie. "Meanwhile, we continue to embed the arts across campus, deeper into the Dartmouth community, and out in the world through our creative partnerships, tours and commissioned artists."

All events can now be viewed on the website at hop.dartmouth.edu. In addition, the public is invited to hear more about the artists and inspiration behind the season's programming at a free Season Launch Party on Thursday, July 25 on Allen Street and Sawtooth Kitchen. The event starts at 4 pm before the free Pedro Giraudo Tango Quartet concert taking place at 5:30 pm on the Dartmouth Green.