On an ordinary Tuesday, Broadway in Tivoli is a four block stretch you can walk in under ten minutes. GioBatta Alimentari is closed. Tivoli General is doing its quiet mid-morning coffee business. Traghaven's bar sits empty until evening. Nothing about the street suggests that a few blocks away, on Kaatsbaan Cultural Park's 153 acres, rehearsals are underway for the biggest weekend of the year.
That contrast disappears every time the Annual Festival opens its gates. This year marks Kaatsbaan's tenth since 2020, and the festival landed on three specific Saturdays: August 29, September 5, and September 12. The first one already happened. What's worth understanding, if you live here, is not just that two more are coming. It's why Kaatsbaan built the festival to work the way it does, and why that design choice is what actually fills the tables at Santa Fe and empties the parking near Tivoli Artists Gallery on those particular days.
Why one Saturday feels like a whole day, not one show
Kaatsbaan could run its festival as a single evening concert and call it done. It doesn't. Every performance is capped at an hour, spread across a full day of programming on the Mountain Stage, the Meadow Stage, and the Studio Complex, with free artmaking sessions starting at 11am. That structure means no single act holds an audience captive for an entire afternoon. People filter in and out, and when they're out, Tivoli's downtown is the only place within walking distance to be.
Kaatsbaan's artistic director put it plainly this year: "Each Saturday of the festival is a mini festival of its own flavor." That's a deliberate redesign, not an accident of scheduling. The festival isn't asking people to drive up, sit through a show, and drive home. It's asking them to spend a day in Tivoli, which means Broadway absorbs foot traffic it wouldn't otherwise see on a random late-summer Saturday.
This year's lineup carries some added weight. Woven into the tenth annual festival are works by playwright Rachel Jendrzejewski and choreographer Toni Pierce-Sands, both of whom died in 2025. Kaatsbaan's artistic director has described including their work as a way of honoring a legacy of collective organizing and creative expression. It's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're actually following the festival's own program notes rather than a generic events calendar.
Here's how the three Saturdays break down:
| Date | Focus | Who's performing |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 29 (completed) | Opening day, dance and ritual | Calpulli Danza Mexicana, Ballez, Anna Sperber, evening concert by Valerie June |
| Sep 5 | Storytelling | Lucy Sexton of DANCENOISE, Adrienne Truscott of the Wau Wau Sisters presenting Blonde AF |
| Sep 12 | Closing day, large-scale dance | Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, Courtney "Balenciaga" Washington/MasterZ at Work, free Intercultural Fire Lighting at 7:15pm |
The closing event on September 12 is free and open to everyone, timed to coincide with the start of the Jewish New Year. It's held at the fire pits in front of the Studio Complex, and it's the one piece of festival programming that requires no ticket at all, which makes it the easiest entry point if you've never been to Kaatsbaan and want to see what the fuss is about.
The gallery timed its own turnover to land the same week
Tivoli Artists Gallery, a few doors down at 60 Broadway, runs on its own separate calendar. Nobody at Kaatsbaan and nobody at the gallery coordinated this, but the two institutions' biggest transitions this year land on top of each other. The gallery's summer show, "Small, Small, Small: Small Worlds, Tiny Wonders," closes September 6, the day after Kaatsbaan's second Saturday. Its fall show, "Fall Colors: Seasonal Influences," opens September 11 with a reception the following evening, September 12, from 5 to 7pm.
That means the gallery's opening reception and Kaatsbaan's closing Saturday, complete with the free fire lighting, both happen on the same day. If you're already downtown for one, the other is a two minute walk. Gallery hours run Friday 5 to 8:30pm, Saturday noon to 8pm, and Sunday 11am to 7pm, so the timing works whether you catch the reception first or wander in after the festival wraps.
What's actually on Broadway to eat and drink between shows
The festival's day-long design only works if there's somewhere to go during the gaps, and Broadway's small commercial stretch has changed enough in the past year and a half to actually support it. Club Sandwich opened at 76 Broadway in the spring of 2025, the work of hospitality veteran Anna Morris and Fortunes Ice Cream owner Lisa Farjam, who met in 2020 when Farjam rolled her ice cream cart up to Kitty's in Hudson, where Morris was general manager at the time. Their new spot works as a café by day and a casual gathering place into the evening, with seating inside, on the patio, or sandwiches built for a picnic on the Kaatsbaan grounds.
Club Sandwich joins a short list of anchors that were already doing steady business before it opened. GioBatta Alimentari serves Italian counter fare a few doors down. Tivoli General, the village's bakery and general store, makes its focaccia fresh daily and is now open seven days a week. Santa Fe and Broadway Pizza cover the more familiar dinner and late-night rotation. Traghaven Whiskey Pub, beyond its bar program, hosts play readings from Tangent Theater, giving the street a small but real live-performance thread that runs independent of Kaatsbaan entirely. The Corner, inside Hotel Tivoli, rounds out the sit-down option with a Mediterranean-leaning menu.
None of these are new discoveries if you've lived here more than a season. What's changed is the density. A year ago, a festival Saturday meant a handful of options clustered at one end of Broadway. Now the stretch can genuinely absorb a full afternoon of people moving between the gallery, the grounds, and a meal, without everyone converging on the same two doors.
What to do with the two Saturdays still ahead
If you're planning around September 5, the day leans toward storytelling, a quieter register than opening weekend, worth arriving for the early artmaking sessions if you want to see Kaatsbaan's grounds before the crowds build. September 12 is the bigger one to plan around: large-scale dance in the afternoon, the gallery's fall opening in the early evening, and the free fire lighting closing out both the day and the tenth annual festival itself. It's the one Saturday this year where three separate institutions on the same short stretch of road are all doing their biggest thing at once, and none of them had to ask each other's permission to make that happen.
If any of this makes you curious about what else changes on Broadway from one season to the next, or what it actually looks like to put down roots in a village small enough that one gallery's opening reception can reroute your Saturday, Melissa Dubin knows this stretch of the Hudson Valley from the inside. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what living here, in Tivoli or anywhere nearby, could look like for you.
