Somerville is hosting the 40th ArtBeat cultural festival in Davis Square on Saturday, highlighting the city’s diverse arts scene.
ArtBeat is Somerville’s “biggest cultural festival” as it “showcases music, dance, culinary arts, and visual arts,” said Rachel Strutt, the interim director of the Somerville Arts Council, which organizes the event. Overall, “it’s a celebration of community,” she said.
From 12 to 9 p.m., food and craft vendors will line the streets of Davis Square while musical acts, dancers, and theater troops perform in Seven Hill Park on Elm Street.
The festival will also feature the opportunity to make paper flowers, attend micro-cooking lessons taught by Nibble Kitchen, hear upcoming activities announced by a town crier and soapbox speeches from historical figures, including Abigail Adams and Henry David Thoreau, and a parade.
For the first time ever, this year’s theme — “REVolutionary” — was voted on by the community, aligning with the council’s mission to be more interactive with the community. The theme — where REV is capitalized to rev people up for the festival — celebrates America’s 250th birthday and challenges to the status quo, artistic or otherwise. In the past, the themes, including “Freeze” in 2025 and “Chance” in 2020, were chosen by the arts council.
“We try and put out a theme that is broad and encourage artists and community members to use it as an artist’s prompt and interpret it as they will,” said Strutt.
In 1986, “the Arts Council established ArtBeat specifically to share Somerville’s amazing local arts community with a local audience,” said Cecily Miller, the first ever director of the Arts Council. “This was a time when Somerville was not known as an arts community, and was part of a general campaign by the Arts Council to raise awareness and enjoyment of this hidden character.”
Over the years, the festival grew through business sponsorship, city funding, and natural growth. Approximately 1,000 people attended the first festival. This year, 8,000 people are expected to attend throughout the day.
ArtBeat also avoids having repeat performers from year to year to “give as many artists as possible a chance to be [a] part” of the festival and keep the lineup “fresh for the public,” said Strutt.
Dance performance
Part of the lineup this year is a 17-minute ballet titled “This is Power.” The piece is a portion of choreographer Julianne Cerreta’s MFA thesis “This is Ballet.” The piece involves nine dancers and one actor, who plays a ballet director. Together, their routine challenges the ballet world’s structure through altering the choreography of George Balanchine’s renowned “Serenade” ballet by chasing the “male artistic director figure off stage enabling the women to reclaim their power,” according to Cerreta’s website.
“‘This is Power’ is really addressing the power imbalances” in the art form, Cerreta said, and it aims to show “how [to] get power back” from ballet administrators.
Cerreta, who discovered ArtBeat through a call for performance pieces soon after she moved to Boston, had performed the piece four times last year at festivals in New York and Pennsylvania and had planned to retire it, but chose to showcase it one more time given the festival’s theme.
“This is Power” will be performed for the first time in the Boston area at the Crystal Ballroom at 1 and 3 p.m. on Saturday.
Musical performances
Another on-theme participant will be Ruby Grove, a Boston-based indie rock band who will play the opening performance on the Seven Hill Stage at 12:30 p.m.
The band’s set will include part of their summer tour set as well as songs that align with the theme, including “Cut the Cord,” a song about shedding old identities and connections, and “District Street,” which is about the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility on the street of the same name in Burlington, said Melissa Nilles, the band’s lead singer and keyboardist.
The festival theme also aligns with the band’s next album, tentatively named “Burn the Old Way,” which is set to be released in early 2027.
Both are “a combination of things — old thought patterns, the old world that we’re all dealing with … in terms of our society,” said Nilles, who founded the social justice and music festival Dream a Better World Fest in Somerville in August 2025.
The Somerville-based indie band Intac will close the festival with a performance at the Seven Hill Stage at 8 p.m.
Formed in 2023, Intac operates as a faux-music industry corporation, often referred to as Intac International, as a way to satirize corporate culture, which is why the Arts Council jury selected the band was chosen for the festival, Strutt said.
A typical Intac performance includes “everything from poetry readings … to lecturing to a business proposal … to questions and answer” sections in between, or sometimes in the middle, of their songs, said Carlo Crestivo, the band’s accordion player.
Intac plans to perform a mix of songs, old and new, at ArtBeat, ahead of the release of their next album, “Champions Are Never Satisfied,” on July 22. The 10-song album was entirely recorded on a Nintendo DS — “a revolutionary method for production,” the band said — and is a rock opera about the alleged affair between Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and reporter Diana Russini.
ArtBeat Festival. 12 to 9 p.m. on Saturday in Davis Square, Somerville. Free. Full festival details can be found at https://somervilleartscouncil.org/events/artbeat-2026-revolution/
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