PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance is excited to announce its August & September 2026 programming. Featuring an ambitious slate of interdisciplinary performances, including the return of the Commonground festival, these summer months will see artists from across the world present works that expand the boundaries of performance. Further highlighting the capacity of art to illuminate the times in which we live, a common thread uniting the works this season is an interrogation of the past, present, and future of American culture. In their shared engagement with the conditions of contemporary life, many of the performances integrate a participatory element that engages local audiences in a form of community co-authorship.

"The artists that have been coming to Chatham this summer are from every discipline imaginable, and they reflect wildly different aspects of how American culture transmits itself and is received around the world," said Vallejo Gantner, Artistic & Executive Director of PS21. "A polyphony of voices, each wading gamely through our current morass of identity, politics, economics, geopolitical disasters and a revision of our own history, will bring us out of the theatre and into the meadows, woods, barns and ponds that define our landscape. My thanks as always to the incredible team of PS21, who have run faster and stronger than I ever could have imagined."

August Programming

• Walid Raad: Two Drops Per Heartbeat [US Premiere Presentation]
  • August 7 & 8 at 7:30 PM
  • In Two Drops per Heartbeat, dynamic, razor-sharp and "incisive" (The New York Times) Lebanese-American multimedia artist Walid Raad imagines and narrates several encounters with strange artifacts —among them a Persian carpet, images of clouds, gold and silver medieval cups and depictions of American swamps and marshes. In this US premiere presentation, Raad juxtaposes his own works with objects from Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, disentangling their histories and their strangeness —only to find ever more complex stories within.
  • For more information, please click HERE.
• Phil Kline: Force of Nature (Crellin Park) [U.S. Premiere]
  • August 15 at 3 PM
  • Force of Nature (Crellin Park) is a mobile, living sound sculpture in which YOU are the performer-roaming the contours of Crellin Park and playing the music on cassette players, portable speakers, and cell phones. The inspiration came from listening to people playing music around the neighborhood on a summer day, hearing all of the different songs and sounds at the same time, and thinking: wouldn't it be cool to orchestrate the whole thing?
  • For more information, please click HERE.
• Annea Lockwood & Claire Chase: Elwha!
  • August 21 & 22 at 7:30 PM
  • Annea Lockwood, ecofeminist composer of "insatiable curiosity" with "a singular ear for the music of the natural world" and flutist Claire Chase, "the North Star of her instrument's ever-expanding universe," (The New York Times), meet Washington's Elwha River as an equal and able creative collaborator in Elwha!
  • An astoundingly successful 2011-2014 dam removal project on the Lower Elwha led to reforestation and restored populations of nine species of native salmon and trout on the Lower Elwha Klallam people's land. The Elwha is a model for ecosystem restoration projects—and for resilience, renewal, and rewilding —throughout the world.
  • For more information, please click HERE.
• 600 HIGHWAYMEN: FIVE YEARS
  • August 28 & 29 | 7:30PM
  • In 2019, interdisciplinary theater company 600 HIGHWAYMEN-Guggenheim Fellows Michael Silverstone and Abigail Browde, described by Le Monde as "standard-bearers of contemporary theater-making"-began a visual record of life in rural New York.
  • Each of their works takes a different form; here, it unfolds as a sustained field of moving images.
  • A PS21 commission, FIVE YEARS is a multi-channel performance installation built from thousands of short clips, gathered over the course of five years, in close proximity to daily life.
  • For more information, please click HERE.

September Programming

• Commonground
  
  • September 4-7
  • Commonground is PS21's annual free festival of contemporary spectacle, where renowned international artists explore the boundaries of what's physically possible in surprising and participatory performances across PS21's grounds.
  • Commonground is a family-friendly celebration of the end of summer, welcoming the whole community to PS21 to be dazzled by the performing arts.
  • For more information, please click HERE.
• Andrew Schneider: Field - Commonground Days 1–3 [World Premiere]
  
  • September 4, 5 & 6 at 6 PM 
  • After his immersive, interactive installation— NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars) —wowed over 600 attendees during The Dark in February, OBIE Award-winning Andrew Schneider returns to PS21 with a world premiere that gently removes reality from its normal and turns it inside out. Schneider is a performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist whose work confounds. In FIELD, he disappears into a crowd. We cannot or will not say any more.
  • Please join PS21 for a singular experience of multitudes. Bring headphones. Bring everyone you can. For more information, please click HERE.
• Touki Delphine: Superdrum X - Commonground Days 1–4 [World Premiere]
  
  • September 4, 5, 6 & 7 at 7:30 PM
  • The drum is a primal instrument. For thousands of years, people have used rhythm to communicate: across long distances, with their surroundings and with spiritual worlds.
  • With SUPERDRUM X, boundary-pushing Dutch collective Touki Delphine taps into this primal force. Making its world premiere at PS21 as part of Commonground Festival, SUPERDRUM X repurposes more than one hundred drums, sourced from the local community via a myriad of second-hand ways, creating one giant interconnected self-playing machine.
  • For more information, please click HERE.
• Sayer Mansfield: Dive Barn - Common Ground Day 3
  
  • September 6 at 4 PM
  • Back by popular demand, Dive Barn returns to PS21's Dance Barn. An evening of live dance and music, it is produced and directed by Sayer Mansfield and features performances by Elori Saxi, Raena Jade, Ashley Hill, Sayer Mansfield & Company.
  • Come take in the end-of-summer splendor with an evening of contemporary dance and live music featuring fresh voices from the community and beyond. Set within PS21's peaceful pastoral lands, Dive Barn invites artists, audience, and nature to share the stage-to stop, witness, and celebrate what is here, present and alive.
  • For more information, please click HERE.
• Lenio Kaklea: The Birds
  • September 18 & 19 at 7:30 PM
  • Athens-born, Paris-based choreographer Lenio Kaklea deepens her inquiry into ecology and humanity's impact on our environment with The Birds. Drawing on the vivid plumage, songs, and movements of birds, this striking new work reflects on what it means to be seen and heard.
  • Seven dancers shift between dynamic individuality and the cohesion of a migratory flock, navigating the tensions of predator and prey. Referencing mating rituals and territorial defense, Kaklea's choreography probes a society where freedom and subjugation exist in an increasingly precarious balance.
  • For more information, please click HERE.

Pictured top left: Phil Kline, Force of Nature (June), courtesy of the artist and PS21; pictured top right: Walid Raad, courtesy of the artist; pictured bottom left: Lenio Kaklea, The Birds, image credit: Albert Vidal; pictured bottom right: Touki Delphine, SUPERDRUM X, image credit: Isabelle la Poutre.