The Dark Festival 2026: Winter as a Site of Encounter
Chatham and Columbia County, New York
February 16–22, 2026

Founded in 2006 by Judy Grunberg, PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance has developed a national reputation for presenting contemporary performance in dialogue with landscape, architecture, and community. Based in Chatham, New York, PS21 presents work across indoor and outdoor sites, placing artists and audiences in direct relationship to architectural, environmental, and civic spaces throughout Columbia County. Over the past two decades, the organization has expanded from a seasonal presenter into a year-round platform supporting creation, research, and public engagement.

In late March 2025, PS21 appointed Vallejo Gantner as its Artistic and Executive Director. Gantner brings more than twenty-five years of international curatorial and leadership experience, including roles at Performance Space 122, now Performance Space New York, and the Onassis Foundation USA. At PS21, he is extending the organization’s commitment to contemporary performance through expanded seasonal programming and a focused consideration of how ambitious work can be situated within rural and civic contexts.

Running February 16–22, 2026, The Dark inaugurates PS21’s winter festival format. The program activates multiple indoor and civic sites across the region, bringing contemporary performance, dance, and interdisciplinary work into spaces that encourage proximity and sustained engagement. Rather than treating winter as a pause in cultural activity, the festival approaches seasonal conditions as a material context shaping how performance is encountered and shared.

With The Dark, PS21 formalizes a winter gathering point that reflects how artists and audiences already live and work in the upper Hudson Valley. The region has long functioned as a site of making, retreat, and informal exchange for artists connected to New York City and beyond. Positioned in February, the festival also creates a temporal bridge within the broader performance calendar, connecting the January festivals in New York City, including Under the Radar and Exponential, to the early spring season, as institutions such as BAM and The Skirball Center for the Performing Arts continue presenting significant international work. In this way, The Dark operates as a connective thread linking rural and urban performance contexts through shared artists, audiences, and forms of attention.

The Dark joins a growing set of international festivals documented through ContemporaryPerformance.com’s Festival Highlights series.

The Dark Festival Highlights

my tongue is a blade

Sweet Varient – Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born
Venue: Hudson Hall
Dates: February 21-22, 2026
Tickets: https://ps21chatham.org/event/sweat-variant-okwui-okpokwasili-peter-born/

my tongue is a blade is a three-hour durational movement performance structured as an ongoing practice of relation, memory, and mutual attention. Performed by Okwui Okpokwasili, Bria Bacon, Kris Lee, and AJ Wilmore, the work unfolds within a dense visual and sonic environment in which performers commit to remembering, holding, and bearing one another over extended time. Audience members are invited to enter and exit freely, encountering a shared space shaped by sustained presence, gestural vocabularies, and narrative frameworks that address memory, identity, and the instability of persona. The performance foregrounds a reciprocal relationship between performers and audience, activating a space of attention in which looking itself becomes a subject of inquiry. Artist Website
Photo: Luca Truffarelli

Nothing #62: a bluff

Autumn Knight
Venue: Pocketbook Hudson
Dates: February 18-19, 2026
Tickets: https://ps21chatham.org/event/autumn-knight/

Nothing #62: a bluff is the third work in Autumn Knight’s ongoing investigation of the Italian concept dolce far niente, often translated as the sweetness of doing nothing. Performed solo, the piece unfolds through spontaneous response to the specific conditions of the space and the audience present. Knight works without a fixed score, allowing timing, orientation, and action to emerge in relation to attention, fatigue, and encounter. The performance considers economies of time, attention, and survival, alongside the role of creative labor within those systems, while remaining open to the varied expectations and projections each audience member brings. Artist Website

In Plain Site

Trisha Brown Dance Company
Venue: The Masonic
Dates: February 18-19, 2026
Tickets: https://ps21chatham.org/event/trisha-brown-dance-company/

In Plain Site marks the first collaboration between the Trisha Brown Dance Company and PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance, bringing a bespoke selection from the company’s repertory into Chatham’s newly restored Masonic Hall. Presented at dusk, the work places Brown’s choreography in direct conversation with the architecture of the space, heightening her longstanding interest in how movement is absorbed into, and reshaped by, its physical surroundings. Company Website

Across decades of choreographic practice, Brown’s work has consistently engaged questions of site, orientation, and spatial relation. Rather than treating space as a neutral container, her dances adapt to their environments, responding to light, scale, and condition.

Drinking Brecht

Sister Sylvester
Venue: Spencertown Academy Arts Center
Dates: February 17, 19 & 20, 2026
Tickets:https://ps21chatham.org/event/sister-sylvester/

Drinking Brecht is a live illustrated essay performance by performance artist and filmmaker Sister Sylvester that explores genetics, synthetic biology, economics, and theatre history through layered narrative and multimedia approaches. The work uses DNA extracted from a hat worn by actors in Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble as a conceptual starting point, engaging with scientific and theatrical histories in a format that blends performance and essayistic inquiry. As part of the event, audience members attending Drinking Brecht will be offered an alcoholic beverage, and the work is presented in an intimate theatrical setting where complex scientific and cultural ideas are interwoven with performative gesture. Artist Website

The Dark joins a growing set of international festivals documented through ContemporaryPerformance.com’s Festival Highlights series.

ContemporaryPerformance.com maintains an expanding Festival and Venue Database documenting contemporary performance festivals, presenters, and performance sites worldwide. The database serves as a shared resource for artists, audiences, and presenters seeking to understand where work is being made, shown, and supported across regions and seasons.

Explore the databases:
Festivals: https://contemporaryperformance.com/festivals/
Venues: https://contemporaryperformance.com/venues/