Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Wooster Group and music titans are part of Walker’s 2025-26 season

The famed New York-based experimental theater troupe Wooster Group heads to the Walker Art Center in February, highlighting its 2025-26 performing arts season. The roster also encompasses commissions and premieres, and the legendary Trisha Brown Dance Company performing works by Brown and Merce Cunningham.

“The biggest thing of the whole season, if it’s not the Trisha Brown-Cunningham tour, is the Wooster Group coming back to the Walker with a Richard Foreman piece,” said Philip Bither, senior performing arts curator at the Walker. The company, he contended, has informed three generations of theater makers and visual artists.

Wooster’s performance of “Symphony of Rats” on Feb. 28, 2026, makes for a rare engagement outside of New York City. The Walker last hosted the group in 2000 at the former Guthrie Lab space. The museum is building trusses to hold lighting, sound and projection equipment throughout the auditorium for the show.

“The sound design is so elaborate and sophisticated that literally every seat in the house has its own unique sonic experience,” Bither said.

The season crosses over to other departments beyond performing arts as well. “We’re uniquely set up to support these blurred lines between artistic disciplines,” Bither said.

The Walker and Northrop’s co-present “Dancing with Bob: Rauschenberg, Brown, and Cunningham Onstage” on Nov. 11, featuring Brown’s “Set and Reset” and Cunningham’s “Travelogue.” Set designs for both are by artist Robert Rauschenberg, and pair with an exhibition called “Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy” opening later this month.

Rosy Simas (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron clan) presents a new work, “A:gajë:gwah dësa’nigöëwë:nye:’ (i hope it will stir your mind),” in both gallery form beginning in February and as a performance in May, 2026.

Crossing over to the moving image department, composer/bassist Mali Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation) and her trio perform a live score accompanying the Oscar-nominated film “Sugarcane” at Walker Cinema on April 16, as part of a two-night engagement that also features Obomsawin performing with her free-jazz sextet at Minneapolis’ Icehouse on April 18.

Bither said more than half of the season’s works blend performance and other artistic disciplines, like Aszure Barton’s collaboration with jazz composer Ambrose Akinmusire, presented in partnership with Northrop on Sept. 18-19.

On Oct. 2, electronic music composer Jlin collaborates with percussive dancer Leonardo Sandoval and violinist/composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, plus St. Paul Chamber Orchestra musicians.

And audiences who saw Shamel Pitts and his collective, Tribe, the last two years will know the group brings not only spectacular dance but also a visual and aural experience. They’ll present the world premiere of “Marks of Red,” co-commissioned by Northrop and the Walker, on March 20-21.

Enticing dance works include the Brussels-based choreographer Meg Stuart (April 3-4) and hip-hop choreographer Jeremy Nedd (April 24-25), and the popular Choreographer’s Evening curated by Benny Olk on Nov. 22.

For Walker’s commission of Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s “Open Machine,” on May 29-30, the choreographers infuse science fiction as they examine human intelligence vs. machine intelligence. The former principal dancers of Merce Cunningham Dance Company draw influence from the late choreographer as well as Judson Dance Theater and vogue dancing.

“It’s different than what Merce did, but it has that Cunningham vocabulary in their bodies,” Bither said.

The music highlights for the 2025-26 season include a performance by Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers celebrating 60 years of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians on Sept. 13, and Shahzad Ismaily on Oct. 10. Ismaily performs with Low’s Alan Sparkhawk, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, and a mix of well-known local and international musicians.

Eco-composer Gabriella Smith performs a Twin Cities premiere, co-commissioned by the Walker, Liquid Music and the Schubert Club, with a contemporary classical sextet yMusic on Nov. 8.

And on May 2, experimental musician L’Rain mixes classical motifs with looping and a pop and rock sensibility.

The season also offers cutting-edge theater, like the play “By Heart” by Portuguese playwright Tiago Rodrigues about memory and resistance on Oct. 28-29.

The “Out There” festival, beginning in January 2026, features a collection of darkly humorous pieces. Bither said there’s a growing trend of artists tapping into clowning, physical comedy and “joyous anarchy.”

The festival opens with a work by Alex Tatarsky, who uses his classical clown training to create a “fantastic, wildly unpredictable show,” Bither said. The lineup features Nile Harris’ “weird and provocative critique of a crumbling democracy”; French/UK duo Bert and Nasi’s “L’Addition”; and the Wooster Group, whose work tells a story about a U.S. president who thinks he’s getting signals from outer space.

“I always look to artists to see how they’re absorbing and refracting and reframing some of the direct shifts and political machinations going on at any given moment,” Bither said. “Theater and performance and even music couldn’t be more urgent than right now in terms of the things that it can do for society at large and our communities that we serve.”