PS21's Late Summer Lineup Celebrates Art in Place and Place as Art

PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance has spent its spring and early summer proving it’s as emotionally vital an artistic destination as any city stage. The season so far has brought an Australian circus troupe's US premiere, a Brooklyn choreographer reworking the Milly Rock dance trend, and Berkshire Opera Festival's first-ever Resident Artist Program, which wrapped its run of Andre Gretry's “Zemire et Azor” on August 2. What's left of the 2026 season, running from this week through late September, leans even harder into performances built from the specific, close-up texture of a place, made in close contact with the Chatham landscape itself.

This week Walid Raad brings “Two Drops per Heartbeat” to the bucolic art center (August 7–8). It’s the US premiere of a piece the Lebanese-American artist first developed for Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum. Raad, whose two-decade project The Atlas Group reimagined the contemporary history of Lebanon through invented archives, built the original version of this piece after being invited to make an exhibition about a private art collector's holdings—and found the project spiraling outward from a single Persian carpet he'd spent years trying to track down for his own daughter. 

Onstage at PS21, Raad narrates his way through a tangle of objects (that carpet, photographs of clouds, medieval gold and silver cups, images of American swamps) juxtaposed against pieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, pulling out threads that reach from transatlantic slavery to Cold War weather-forecasting technology. The New York Times has called his delivery "incisive.”

Two weeks later, Annea Lockwood and Claire Chase present “Elwha!” (August 21–22) inviting audiences to do a very different kind of listening. Lockwood, an 85-year-old New Zealand-born composer with a career built on recording rivers, teamed up with MacArthur Fellow flutist Claire Chase to build a 40-minute piece entirely around field recordings of the Elwha River in Washington State—the site of the largest dam removal project in US history. After a century of blocked salmon runs, the Elwha's dams came down in 2014, and the river has since become a model for ecological recovery. 

Chase plays seven flutes live, from piccolo to contrabass, answering and being submerged by a seven-channel surround mix of the river itself. It's the twelfth installment of Chase's 24-year Density 2036 project, and it arrives at PS21 fresh off its premiere at The Kitchen.

The season rolls on with “600 HIGHWAYMEN: FIVE YEARS” (August 28–29), a PS21 commission from Guggenheim Fellows Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, whom Le Monde has called "the standard-bearers of contemporary theater-making." Starting in 2019, the pair spent five years gathering footage of rural New York life (sunlight on a table, a taxidermy auction, a neighbor's bonfire, a parade) and let bigger history bleed in around the edges: the pandemic, protests, an election. Assembled into a multichannel installation rather than a conventional performance, the piece lets meaning build through accumulation, placing the ordinary next to the historic without editorializing.

Commonground (September 4–7), PS21's free, family-friendly closing-of-summer festival, is built around participatory spectacle scattered across the property. Its centerpiece this year is the world premiere of “SUPERDRUM X,” from Amsterdam collective Touki Delphine: more than 100 second-hand drums, donated by the local community and pulled from thrift stores and attics, wired into a single self-playing percussive organism struck by twigs collected from PS21's own woods. The festival also premieres “FIELD,” a new work from director Andrew Schneider, alongside Sayer Mansfield's “Dive Barn” and a slate of artists still to be announced.

The season closes with Lenio Kaklea’s “The Birds” (September 18–19), in which the Athens-born, Paris-based choreographer sends eight dancers shifting between individual movement and flock-like unison, drawing on bird courtship and territorial display.

Along the way, PS21 is also hosting a free Crellin Park Day community event on August 15, part of its ongoing push to be a year-round civic presence in Chatham rather than a summer-only destination. "The artists you will engage and meet this summer are coming to Chatham from every discipline imaginable, and they reflect wildly different aspects of how American culture transmits itself and is received around the world," artistic and executive director Vallejo Gantner says. "Out of the theater and into the meadows, woods, barns and ponds that define our landscape."