David Lang & Bill Morrison / Contemporaneous
Film with live music
Pulitzer-price winning composer David Lang and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Bill Morrison have collaborated for nearly 25 years—and darker is their tenth collaboration.
The score, conducted by David Bloom, is performed by the twelve-piece string ensemble, Contemporaneous.
Morrison took inspiration from David’s minimal score to create a film that, like the music, can exist both before and under the viewer’s eyelids: a slowly, lilting depiction of the sublime, where actors, dancers and acrobats reappear and then disappear back into a bubbling morass of time.
After the performance, stay for a Q&A with Lang, Morrison, and Bloom. And after that, head over to Bimi’s Canteen for drinks and music after dark, featuring a special set from three members of Contemporaneous—spanning traditional ballads to overlooked underground classics,
In many ways darker is more like an object than a piece of music. An extreme exploration of emotional restraint, darker is both highly detailed and relentlessly restrained, requiring an almost superhuman focus in order to keep it moving, inexorably, towards its end. – David Lang
“With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” – The New Yorker
Photo by Stephanie Berger
The Dark: PS21’s fearless winter festival of live performance radiating across Columbia County
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 across Columbia County—in theatres, restaurants, libraries, saunas, and outdoor public spaces. Featuring more than 60 international artists and over 80 performances, The Dark offers a packed week of world-class contemporary performance, installation, music, dance, and theatre—all exploring winter as a time of community and solitude, fire and ice, darkness and light. A major new attraction for the region, the festival positions Columbia County as a year-round cultural destination—not just a summer one.
It is a light in the dark—and The Dark is the light.
Secure your Festival Pass to The Dark now which includes tickets to every performance along with a complimentary sauna and ice skating session!
Passionate, prolific, and complicated, composer David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.
Lang is one of America’s most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalogue is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.
the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, was recently listed by The Guardian as “one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st Century.” It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and the recording received a Grammy Award in 2010. Lang’s simple song #3, written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed film YOUTH, received many awards nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe.
Bill Morrison is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker who has been called “the poet laureate of lost films” (New York Times). He has premiered feature-length documentary films at the New York, Sundance, Telluride and Venice film festivals. Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) has been listed as one of the best films of the decade (2010s) by the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair, among others. His most recent film, Incident (2023) won the Best Short Film Award from International Documentary Association in 2023, the Cinema Eye Honors for Outstanding Nonfiction Short, and was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Short in 2025.
“Morrison’s world is one of the most breathtaking and haltingly disturbing cinematic realms of our time”. –Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com, October 20, 2014
Contemporaneous is an ensemble of 25 musicians whose mission is to bring to life the most transformative music by living composers through performances, commissions, recordings, and educational programs. Described as “exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing” (The New York Times) and “leading new music towards its better self” (I Care If You Listen), Contemporaneous particularly champions the creation of large-scale works and “dream projects,” which composers might not otherwise have opportunities to realize due to scale.
Based in New York City and active throughout the United States, Contemporaneous has premiered over 200 new works, and has been presented by such institutions as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, PROTOTYPE Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, MATA Festival, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Bang on a Can and has worked with such artists as David Byrne, Donnacha Dennehy, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Dawn Upshaw, and Julia Wolfe. Contemporaneous’ programming has also received acclaim from community members, artists, and press of all kinds, with the ensemble’s recent performance of Stranger Love being listed as one of 2023’s “best classical music performances” by The New York Times.
While this performance does not have reserved seating, we are happy to accommodate any specific accessibility needs.
Please reach out to Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org, and she will coordinate with our front-of-house team to ensure your experience is comfortable and enjoyable.
The Crandell Theatre offers complimentary devices to assist hearing-impaired patrons, including:
Assisted Listening: Hear amplified audio from the house speakers via headset.
Our staff are happy to help you select and set up a device to ensure a more enjoyable movie-going experience.
