Vallejo Ganter

With 10 premieres, returning festivals, and artists from around the world, PS21’s 2026 season turns its Chatham campus into a living laboratory for contemporary performance.These artists are interrogating the role of American culture and history reflected around the world; engaging PS21’s landscape in ever bolder ways; and seeking out community members to help co-author place-based work. Groundtone and Commonground return for the second year—two festivals on each end of the summer, each featuring unexpected performances across the grounds.

The Dark is a new annual festival from PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance that celebrates and elevates the depths of winter. Taking place February 16–22, 2026, the festival will unfold at PS21 and in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces across Columbia County.

For ps21 in Chatham - August is a month of programming that includes the return of the Paul Taylor Dance Company for their 4th consecutive year of performances, the US Premier of Samantha Shay's Chekhov-inspired dance-theatre piece, “Life in this House is Over,” which reflects on the social awkwardness of grief, followed by Adam Tendler's “Inheritances,” which weaves together a number of composers into one intimate program to tell a universal story of lineage, loss and place.Their summer concludes with the inaugural COMMONGROUND Festival, which brings together two renowned international performance companies - Basinga (France) and Kaleider (UK) over a weekend of experiments in physics and materiality.