The Brooklyn Rail

Around February, winter in the Hudson Valley can feel eternal—this year especially, when snow has been measured in feet, not inches, and spontaneously manifests from the sky at random moments. Cue the Dark Festival, newly minted at PS21 under the eye of new artistic director Vallejo Gantner. This ambitious slate, with a home base at PS21’s idyllic campus in Chatham, encompassed twenty venues, sixty artists, thirty productions, and delights particular to the north such as ice skating, a sauna, and cold plunges. The weather duly forged on in its extreme winter mode, on the festival’s final day threatening to drop another one or two feet of snow.

While the lineup comprised many genres, I focused on the dance, leading off with Trisha Brown Dance Company’s In Plain Site, a collection of Brown’s early task and conceptual short works. It took place at the Masonic in downtown Chatham, in an elegant, recently renovated ballroom-type space with a coffered ceiling. Most of the audience roamed about, standing or sitting cross-legged, being herded into various formations by the seven dancers, who utilized the evacuated space to perform. (No doubt there are titles for each section, but the minimal program handed out didn’t list them.) The slate began with four dancers holding long sticks and attempting to align them end to end to form one long horizontal pole, alternately lying under the segments or stepping over them. A related piece had two dancers arrange their longer sticks in a V, sliding their bodies to the floor while maintaining the shape.

Several of the sections involved not tasks, but Brown’s luscious movement, seeded with repetitions and quotidian gestures, sometimes standing, sometimes not. In one long work, four women laid on the floor side by side, separated by a yard or so. They began an accumulation of small moves, hand gestures, raising one hip, adding larger actions, repeating and repeating. Two men began to manipulate the women, standing one up, dragging her across the floor while she continued with the designated sequence robotically. This felt at odds with the otherwise egalitarian aura of the program—the women zombie-like, on autopilot, seemingly with little agency other than to finish out the code.

The performers lined up for Spanish Dance toward the end of the show, a piece familiar to many fans of Brown’s choreography. One dancer began to shuffle forward, hands doing fancy twirls above head, until she collided with the next dancer, who started the same, infectious chug/hand twirls, until the entire line caterpillared toward the wall. I recalled the basic move as more louche and less vigorous in previous renditions, but it remains one of Brown’s most accessible and pleasing early pieces.

Balancing this heavyweight postmodern program of gems: my tongue is a blade, by Sweat Variant (Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born), at Hudson Hall. The installation, designed by Born, in which the piece took place, is fabricated from vertical strips mirrored on both sides with gaps left between, rotated smoothly on a track surrounding a stationary circular platform. One or more performers (AJ Wilmore, Kris Lee, Bria Bacon, and Okpokwasili) pushed the carousel at various speeds, switching to performing within the cylinder or resting. The group wailed and ululated, then cooed and moaned, pleading, “Why?” repeatedly. Okpokwasili, centered on the platform, seemed possessed by some otherworldly spirit, writhing and sickling her feet as the carousel pusher increased speed. Another dancer joined her, and they snuggled briefly, flailed their arms, and pulled away while keeping ahold of each other. I can think of no other contemporary dancer than Okpokwasili who transports herself so convincingly out of her current consciousness into another astral plane, taking us with her.

The apparatus and performance in my tongue is a blade summoned questions: What dictates the central action? Is it the caged dancers, or the pushers, who never stop moving? Their actions, in a sense, were as skilled as the dancers’; barefoot, they maintained a specified speed, at a certain point breaking into a run, or ambulating backward. It required as much concentration as anything else happening. They might represent all the work that can go into a production such as this but that usually remains backstage and invisible. And in the mirrored panels we could glimpse ourselves watching, cutting in and out like an Eadweard Muybridge photograph, or Bill Brand’s artwork in the DeKalb subway station in Brooklyn, flashing by piecemeal but cohering in the mind’s eye.

Constellations took place at PS21’s skating rink with artificial ice, temporarily installed near the outdoor pavilion a short distance from the main theater complex in Chatham. LaJuné McMillian and three skaters performed at dusk, clad in black catsuits with LEDs encircling their skates and light bracelets around their wrists. They skated carefully around the small rink, stopping in a line to perform small, soft movements, arms curved, upper bodies arching forward and back. The idea of personifying a celestial body captivates, but in reality, the proximity to the performers prevented the magic of distance and illusion from landing. The costume mishaps (lights falling off of skates) didn’t help. But being in the frosty air, snow underfoot, fire pits ablaze, hot chocolate at the ready, it was reward enough to partake in a new celebration of winter revolving around culture—unequivocally a gift to warm upstaters’ hibernating souls. The festival’s return next year has already been announced; let’s hope the winter of 2026–27 is less fierce than this year’s.