PS21 has always made a case for performance as something that doesn’t just happen on a stage but in relation to a place—to weather, to landscape, to the people who show up. This summer in Chatham, that idea feels less like a curatorial throughline than a full-throated commitment. The 2026 season unfolds over four months with an ambitious mix of premieres, festivals, and international touring work, pushing further toward what Vallejo Gantner, PS21’s artistic and executive director describes as “a polyphony of voices” grappling with “identity, politics, economics, geopolitical disasters and a revision of our own history.”
That sense of multiplicity is matched by scale. The season includes 10 new productions and the return of signature festivals like Groundtone and Commonground, underscoring PS21’s evolution into a year-round hub for contemporary performance rather than a summer outpost. Increasingly, the organization’s residency program feeds directly into what audiences see, with artists developing work onsite—often in dialogue with the surrounding fields, barns, and wooded edges that have become as much a part of the experience as the stage itself.
The summer opens June 5 with the NEXT Festival of Emerging Artists, a world premiere program centered on immigrant women composers, anchored by cellist and composer Andrea Casarrubios. It’s a statement of intent: global in scope, but grounded in the present moment, with community workshops extending the work beyond the performance itself. That outward-looking sensibility continues the following night with Oki Dub Ainu Band, whose hybrid of Ainu folk traditions, reggae, and electronic music signals the kind of cross-cultural conversation PS21 increasingly foregrounds.
From there, the season moves fluidly across disciplines. Circa’s “Eternity” (June 11–13), a US premiere from the Australian contemporary circus company, transforms physical virtuosity into something approaching the spiritual, set to Arvo Part’s music. Later in June, choreographer Jeremy Nedd brings a pair of works interrogating ownership and authorship in dance, from viral hip-hop gestures to social dance traditions, asking who gets to claim—and profit from—movement itself.
Groundtone (June 18–21), PS21’s annual deep dive into adventurous music, again disperses audiences across the grounds for a weekend of performances, installations, and collaborations. This year’s lineup includes So Percussion, Becca Stevens, and a sunrise procession by composer Phil Kline, turning the campus into a kind of living instrument.
If Groundtone is about immersion, July’s premieres lean into metaphor and critique. Geoff Sobelle’s “Clown Show” (July 3–5), debuting over Fourth of July weekend, imagines a collapsing circus run by clowns as a darkly comic allegory for a nation coming apart. It’s followed by appearances from avant-rock ensemble Horse Lords and a major new work from composer Jessie Cox and the International Contemporary Ensemble, which constructs a live acoustic ecosystem where instruments, voices, and even trees interact as one system.
August brings a strong international slate, including Walid Raad’s “Two Drops per Heartbeat,” a dense, multimedia meditation on history and narrative, and Lenio Kaklea’s “The Birds,” which uses choreography to explore ecology, visibility, and collective behavior. The Berkshire Opera Festival’s staging of “Zemire et Azor” offers a more classical counterpoint, refracted through a Gilded Age American lens.
The season culminates in two large-scale, place-driven works. 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s “Five Years” (August 28–29), a PS21 commission, assembles a mosaic of rural life from footage gathered over half a decade, where the ordinary accrues meaning through juxtaposition. And Commonground (September 4–7), the organization’s free, family-friendly festival, returns with participatory spectacles scattered across the site, including “SUPERDRUM X,” a performance for 100 self-playing drums.
Throughout, Gantner’s framing holds: artists “from every discipline imaginable” converging in Chatham, not just to present work but to test how it resonates in a specific place.
