PS21 Launches Commonground Festival of Contemporary Circus and Street Theater
A new kind of festival unfolds in the orchards and open spaces of PS21 in Chatham.
This weekend, a new kind of festival unfolds in the orchards and open spaces of PS21 in Chatham. Commonground, a free two-day event running August 30–31, features international street theater and conceptual performance. The focus is on two groups of performers walking on tightropes and building ephemeral arches of ice over fire.
Commonground intends to blur the line between audience and performer, performance and environment. It builds on a week of lead-up programming that’s already brought people into PS21 for free community tightrope walking workshops led by French aerialist Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga and members of Compagnie Basinga. The workshops, open to anyone eight and older, aren't just for fun, organizers say, they serve as a quiet metaphor for what the festival hopes to achieve: a shared sense of balance, vulnerability, and public engagement through art.
At the center of the weekend’s programming is the US premiere of “Soka Tira Osoa,” a gravity-defying tightrope piece by Compagnie Basinga. Performed daily at 1:30 and 5pm, the work features Bongonga walking a high wire suspended across PS21’s bucolic landscape, accompanied by live music. As the performance unfolds, the physicality and focus of the tightrope artist is intended to become a kind of public meditation, less about spectacle than about presence. The piece’s title, drawn from Catalan, translates to “the whole rope pulled together,” nodding to the communal nature of the act. In Bongonga’s work, there are no safety nets—trust is placed in the rope, the team, and the moment.
Melting Together
After dark, the tone shifts with the arrival of “Arch,” a performance-installation by UK-based company Kaleider. Somewhere between an opera and a construction project, the piece unfolds as performers attempt to build a free-standing arch from concrete blocks and ice. It’s an intentionally impermanent structure, melting and crumbling as it’s assembled, and a striking visual metaphor for shared labor, ambition, and futility. Kaleider has described the work as an “opera of inevitability,” where music and movement meet engineering and entropy.
The performances take place in the round, across PS21’s campus, among meadows, trees, and pathways, with no formal proscenium to separate performers from viewers. There are no tickets to purchase and no seats to reserve. Visitors are free to move about the space at their leisure. Food and drink will be available throughout the weekend, and attendees are encouraged to treat the event like a public meeting space.
The festival is free, though advance registration is required.
