PS21 has built a reputation on culturally adventurous summer nights in Chatham at its open-air pavilion. With The Dark, it’s making a clear argument that winter deserves equal billing.
Running February 16-22, The Dark is a new annual festival that unfolds across Columbia County, spilling into theaters, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. The premise is less about cheerfully “embracing” winter than taking it seriously—as a season that sharpens attention and alters how people gather. The weeklong program brings together contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theater, framed around winter’s basic tensions: solitude and community, darkness and light, fire and ice.
For PS21, the festival also marks a strategic shift. The Dark formalizes a longer-term investment in year-round programming and deeper partnerships with neighboring venues and institutions, while activating creative infrastructure that typically sits dormant once temperatures drop. It’s a move that reframes Columbia County not as a seasonal destination, but as a place where cultural life continues to evolve 12 months a year.
“This festival and this program is a snow-fed fever dream,” says Vallejo Ganter, PS21’s artistic and executive director. “It’s a vision created by the incredible PS21 team, the artists whose work we serve and the collaborating venues across the county, all adding up to create a thrilling contradiction with the common expectation that winter comprises fallow months.” Ganter frames the project as both practical and philosophical. “This is what organizations like us should and need to be doing—creating moments for the community around them that simply can’t happen otherwise.”
While the full lineup will be announced in January 2026, PS21 has released a substantial preview that signals the festival’s scope. Among the highlights is “my tongue is a blade” (US premiere), a three-hour durational work by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, collaborators since the mid-1990s. The piece explores attention, memory, and endurance through a sustained physical and relational practice performed by Okpokwasili alongside Bria Bacon and Alessandra Azeviche.
Also on offer is “L’Addition” (US premiere), by Tim Etchells and the performance duo Bert and Nasi, a tightly wound theatrical loop that turns a simple cafe transaction into an escalating study of power, repetition, and inevitability—funny, unnerving, and precise.
Music and visual performance intersect in “ContreJour,” a long-running collaboration between Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer, while Trisha Brown Dance Company brings “In Plain Site” to Chatham’s restored Masonic Hall, adapting Brown’s choreography to an architectural and temporal context at dusk. Andrew Schneider’s immersive installation NOW IS WHEN WE ARE (the stars) will also be part of the festival, inviting participants into an individualized encounter with time, choice, and presence through light and sound.
Ganter puts it plainly: “This is why the arts exist: to bring us together in dialogue, debate and communion, in ways that we didn’t know were possible.” With The Dark, PS21 is betting that winter isn’t a cultural pause—it’s a different set of conditions, and a compelling one.
