2020 Season
Elena Siyanko, Artistic Executive Director, Curator & Producer
2020 SEASON presented live for a limited audience (July 17 – October 2020)
Modern Music Fest:
July 17, 2020. Sandbox Percussion. Leading proponents of contemporary percussion chamber music, with works by Andy Akiho, Amy Beth Kirsten, Nick DiBerardino, Julia Wolfe, Julius Eastman, and Steve Reich. 2020 Season-opening, live for a limited audience and livestreamed.
August 21, 2020 Timo Andres – a daring program of three musical responses to violence and exploitation: Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata; Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, and his own Old Ground. Live and live-streamed.
August 22, 2020 Adam Tendler, the exuberant champion of new music displayed the range of his musical enthusiasms in a program of works by John Cage, Christopher Cerrone, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly, John Glover, Darian Donovan Thomas, Frederic Rzewski, and Philip Glass.
August 28, 2020 Miranda Cuckson. J. S. Bach: Sonata No. 2 in A minor, Elliott Carter: Statement – Remembering Aaron, Mario Davidovsky: Synchronisms No. 9 for violin and electronic sounds, and Pierre Boulez: Anthèmes. Live and live-streamed
August 29, 2020 Conor Hanick. Galina Ustvolskaya’s Six Piano Sonatas.
August 30, 2020. A conversation with artists of the Modern Music Fest, violinist Miranda Cuckson, and pianist Conor Hanick, moderated by composer, musician and visual artist Jeffrey Lependorf, Director, Art Omi: Music, and Director, The Flow Chart Foundation
September 4, 2020 Conrad Tao. Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a thirty-six variations on the Chilean workers’ anthem ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!, written by Sergio Ortega during the presidency of Salvador Allende.
Essential Cinema: Two Film Series: Firefighters Select and Artists’ Choice:
July 16–August 27, 2020 Firefighters Select In recognition of the contributions and sacrifices of first responders, PS21 invited members of local fire companies and other first responders to select films. The films included Catnip Nation (2019), selected by Chatham Rescue, Ladder 49 (2004), selected by TriVillage Fire Company, World Trade Center (2006), selected by Philmont Fire Company; Wages of Fear (1953), selected by Chatham Fire Department; The Wizard of Oz, selected by East Chatham Fire Company; Deepwater Horizon (2016), selected by West Lebanon Fire Department; and The Firemen’s Ball (1967), selected by PS21.
August 17–September 28, 2020 Artists’ Choice films are works that illustrate how films have inspired the arts. They included I Knew Her Well (1965), selected by Joan Juliet Buck; Diabolique (1955), selected by Francine Prose; Tokyo Story (1953), selected by Ian Buruma; A Hard Day’s Night (1964), selected by Winsome Brown; The Philadelphia Story (1940), selected by Brian Cox; and Do The Right Thing (1989), selected by Nicole Ansari.
2020 Season Highlights
July 24, 2020 Calidore String Quartet The winners of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition celebrated their 10th anniversary and the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth with concerts of the Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 130; Grosse Fugue, Op. 133; String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135; & Quartet in A Major, Op. 18, No.5.
August 7, 2020 New York State Premiere of Ten Thousand Birds. Alarm Will Sound’s 22 musicians performed John Luther Adams’s exploration of the interconnections of nature and music, inspired by the varieties of birdsong over the course of a day. Live for a limited audience and live streamed.
August 6, 2020 Follow Me Into the Field. Environmental adaptation of Ten Thousand Birds for kids and families, directed by Ashley Tata, a free, socially distanced musical tour of the PS21/Crellin Park landscape. Part of PATHWAYS.
Public Art Commission
Alison McNulty’s Hudson Valley Ghost Column 7. The site-specific art installation, a cylindrical tower of vintage bricks and unprocessed wool, is PS21’s first public art commission. PATHWAYS.
2020 – 2019 Residencies and Premieres
1-8 Aug, 2020. 22 artists of Alarm Will Sound spent over a week at PS21 workshopping compositions of the Franco-Haitian singer and percussionist Anaïs Maviel, and Tyshawn Sorey’s “For George Lewis,” culminating in their performance of Ten Thousand Birds.
The double album For George Lewis/Autoschediasms was released in 2021.
September 6–12, 2020 D-CELL, developed in residency at PS21: David Michalek’s hybrid of exhibition and performance, an encounter with deceleration in dance and visual art. Premiering at PS21, D-CELL utilized PS21’s architecture, grounds, and trails as a media canvas, with dancers from BodySonnet, Peridance, Gallim, and the Martha Graham Dance Company performing decelerated sequences on sand-covered raised platforms throughout the landscape. The Neave Trio accompanied the performances with works by Morton Feldman.
David Michalek’s Portraits in Dramatic Time, screening in the Pavilion Theater
September 10, 2020 The Neave Trio in a special concert, performing Rebecca Clark’s Piano Trio from their album Her Voice (2019) and Astor Piazzolla’s The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires
September 18 – 20, 2020 Field Notes: Outdoor Dances for This 21st Century premiere developed in residency at PS21. Choreographer and director Catherine Galasso created the site specific work for four dancers. Performed in PS21’s apple orchards, Field Notes is Galasso’s fourth chapter in her Of Iron and Diamonds series, inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron
August 2020. Edisa Weeks and her company, DELIRIOUS Dances, who developed 3 Rites, an interactive theatrical exploration of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America and how these rights are manifested in the body
21 Sept – 28 Oct, 2020. American Ballet Theater bubble residency
Nov 1 – Nov 10, 2020. Six musicians of Sandbox Percussion, composer Andy Akiho, and engineer Sean Dixon in residency at PS21 to record Andy Akiho’s Seven Pillars, an ambitious 75-minute-long composition that was released in 2021 and nominated for two Grammys: Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Sandbox Percussion also gave a concert, live and livestreamed on July 17, 2020, as the Opening Night of the 2020 season.
October 4-6, 2019. Pollock by French playwright Fabrice Melquiot and directed by Paul Desveaux. The life, mythology, and volatile relationship of the towering 20th-century painter Jackson Pollock and his likewise talented and enigmatic wife Lee Krasner, the play stars Jim Fletcher as Pollock and Michelle Stern as Krasner. North American Premiere.
July-September 2019. Movement Without Borders, developed in partnership with dancer, teacher, and choreographer Richard Colton. PS 21’s Summertime Cure for that Fenced-in Feeling. Open-level classes with leading choreographers, dancers, and artists coexisting in shared spaces /finding time/tuning in to thought and practice. Movement without Borders included David Neumann, Michelle Boule, Kimberly Barrosik, Amy Spencer, Wendy Whelan, Randall James, Grace Osborne, Miguel Guitterez, and Edisa Weeks, whose workshop, “Exploring the Personal and Political,” mined personal memories and political events as source material for dance. More recently, choreographers, composers, musicians, playwright-directors and actors have developed new pieces for performance at PS21 and elsewhere.
PRESS:
Nov 23, 2020 – Summer Retrospective: Timo Andres and Conor Hanick at PS 21: Andres, Copland, Rzewski, and Ustvolskaya – “I am unaware of any other organization to have offered professionally presented, socially-distanced live music in the Hudson Valley or Berkshires during the summer season, and that in itself was most welcome. But, beyond that, the Modern Music Fest, organized by PS 21’s Artistic Director, Elena Siyanko, only weeks before it opened, to replace an ambitious program of visitors from abroad which was planned last year, long before anyone thought of Covid-19. Most impressive were the coherence and focus of the programming, as well as the level of musicianship among the performing artists, all of whom hailed from New York City… “…gratitude to Ms. Siyanko for giving these important younger musical voices an opportunity to play before an audience in programs which allowed them to share their admirable musicianship, temperament, and values in repertory which truly needs to be heard more often, especially in our musically conservative region. It was wonderful that the concerts took place at all in the middle of the pandemic, but it was more than wonderful that the programming, quality of the playing, and significance of what they meant, placed PS21’s 2020 season in the rare category of artistic enterprises which go beyond the immediate pleasures (Brecht described them as “culinary”) they provide.”
Nov. 23, 2020 — Contemporary Music. Summer Retrospective: Miranda Cuckson and Conrad Tao at PS21, Larry Wallach. Grand Statements, Intimate Forces: the return of live concerts, a Review of two concerts at PS 21, Chatham NY: Miranda Cuckson, solo violin, August 28, 2020; Conrad Tao, solo piano, September 4, 2020.
Aug. 28, 2019 — Tresca Weinstein, PS21 offers sessions for neophyte dancers. Series gives everyone chance -— with no one watching — “It’s rare that people have an opportunity to get behind the scenes of someone’s creative process and method firsthand, while moving,” said PS21’s executive director, Elena Siyanko, who conceived the series, which continues through Sept. 21. “It’s something you can’t get through the Q&As that dance festivals normally organize to demystify the process of creating and choreography.” Open to all and offered by donation twice weekly, Movement Without Borders has brought leading choreographers and dancers, most based in New York City and upstate New York, to Chatham this summer to teach, including David Neumann, Miguel Gutierrez, Michelle Boulé, Amy Spencer and former New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan. The series has run the gamut of styles and approaches, from meditative Feldenkrais practices taught by Gutierrez, to playful improvisation, to a more traditional class…” “The community aspect was also important to us—how we move physically and connect as human beings, how the energy changes when you move or improvise together,” Siyanko said. “The sense of connection and mental and physical awareness translates outside of class.”
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SEASON 2020 canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic
December 10, 2019 – PS21 proudly announces our lineup for the 2020 Spring Season, a diverse, distinctive array of performances by acclaimed and emerging international dancers, musicians, and actors that has electrified audiences around the world. The first full season to be planned by Elena Siyanko, PS21’s inaugural executive and artistic director, it will kick off on March 15 with a mini-festival of Contemporary Flamenco featuring three of the evolving genre’s most exciting young innovators: Patricia Guerrero, born in Granada in 1990, Eduardo Guerrero, a thirty-six-year-old native of Cadiz, and Manuel Liñán are in the forefront of a new generation of younger flamenco artists who are redefining this traditional music and dance art form for the twenty-first century.
Residencies by Rioult Dance NYC and Compania Manuel Liñán, who will lead movement workshops in the local schools, will run concurrently with the festival until early June. Besides the performances each visiting company will offer a Free Community Program during the summer. Together, these events solidify PS21’s status as a Hudson Valley cultural destination and underscore our mission to enrich the lives of the community.
Continuing its commitment to fostering innovative performance, PS21 has invited the Bessie award-winning dancers Mina Nishimura, Molly Lieber, and Hilary Clark as artists in residence in April. On April 24-26, they will inaugurate the second season of our successful Movement Without Borders open workshops series and present new work in the Contemporary Dancemakers/Piano Pioneers program on April 25, sharing the stage in a double bill with Adam Tendler, Kathleen Supove and Vicky Chow, who perform in Encounters With the Piano.
May ushers in a potpourri of performances across the artistic spectrum, starting with Power to the People!, a collaboration with the literary magazine N+1 and featuring pianist Conrad Tao on May 2; and continuing with a reading of international theater works, in partnership with Columbia University (May 7/8); a performance and workshop by Les Impuxibles, a fusion of music and movement by sisters Clara and Ariadna Peya of Barcelona on May 23; MACE, the Mannes American Composers Ensemble, in recital on May 24; and a special appearance by the Mark Morris Dance Group at the PS21 Gala on May 30.
Capping the Spring phase of 2020 at PS21 is the US Premiere of Requiem pour L., an epic reworking of Mozart’s Requiem by Les Ballets C de la B that enlivens the timeless masterpiece with infusions of jazz, opera, and African music by artists from three continents, with lyrics in Latin and five African languages, including Lingala and Swahili. While preserving the formal structure and theme of the iconic original, Requiem pour L. expands the work’s emotional range and redefines the “journey towards the hereafter.” There will be two performances, on June 5 and 6, and a music workshop with composer Fabrizio Cassol, on Sunday, June 7.
Highlights of the summer and fall include “Envá,” an original work of circus theater by the Catalan-based company that combines acrobatics, history, and humor to explore the mysteries of human relationships on a stage strewn with 500 pounds of straw (July18-19), a lunch prepared by a former chef from El Bulli will accompany one of the presentations, to celebrate the consummation and celebration of locally grown and produced food; Compagnie Les Hommes Penchés (A Leaning Man), France, with a solo performance of one acrobat and a Chinese pole, that talks about the way we live and the longing in everything that makes us angry and happy (June 27); and a work of political cabaret by radical South African theater maker Robyn Orlin.
Throughout the season, PS21 will host several residencies and Free Family Fridays, including Delirious Dances, with Three Rites, a theatrical work-in-process about American Ideas of liberty, rights, and happiness—just in time for election season; celebrated French director Pascal Rambert and Jim Fletcher, the Obie Award-winning American actor who are developing a new theater piece, whose protagonist is a dog; the David Parsons Dance Company, with workshops and performances; and Lucy Dhegrae, founder and director of the Resonant Bodies Festival.
Community participation, central to PS21’s mission, will take several new directions this summer. Among them PATHWAYS, a weekend-long exploration of trails in Crellin Park and on PS21’s lush landscape; immersive installations and participatory theater; swing dancing and a master class in the art led by David Parsons dancers. and “Firefighters Select,” a community film festival curated by members of local fire companies and climaxing with a screening of Milos Forman’s classic Firemen’s Ball.