Phil Kline
World premiere
Music / Community Participation
Force of Nature (February) is a mobile, living sound sculpture performed by the audience participants, which roams the contours of PS21 as darkness falls, playing the music on cassette players, portable speakers, and cell phones.
You are invited to be an active participant in this piece! All participants need to do is walk around while carrying a music player. Please download the FORCE OF NATURE app, on Apple or Android in advance. Charge and bring a portable bluetooth speaker linked to your phone if you have one
This night is February in full regalia, fierce and unflinching, beautiful in its icy indifference.
Commissioned by PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance.
Immediately before the performance, join us for a bonfire lighting ceremony as we inaugurate The Dark.
Free & Family-Friendly
All ages are welcome—bring your friends, family, and curiosity for sound and community. No musical experience required!
FORCE OF NATURE is a new outdoor soundwalk created by composer Phil Kline for the PS21 grounds in February. Participants walk together across a cleared path as they play interlocking tracks on their phones, speakers, or boomboxes. Together, we can turn the winter landscape of PS21 into something almost unimaginable – a vast musical hallucination of cosmic harmony. Bundle up for the outdoors and experience the PS21 grounds in a whole new way.
In FORCE OF NATURE the audience is the performer. Join us!
Monday, February 16
4:30 PM Gather at PS21
5:00 PM Begin walk
Duration 45 minutes
Step One:
Complete the RSVP form below or just show up.
Step Two:
Download the FORCE OF NATURE app, on Apple or Android
Step Three:
Charge and bring a bluetooth speaker linked to your phone. You can also bring a cassette player and be provided with a cassette, or borrow one of Phil’s (but they will go fast!)
Step Four:
Dress to impress the night (and to stay warm)
PS21 is proud to partner with Wave Farm Radio, WGXC 90.7 FM to bring artists and events from The Dark to their airwaves. The Hudson Valley-based international transmission arts organization joins us for this celebration of live performance throughout Columbia County, in the heart of winter, making the voices of visionary artists available to all.
Special Remote Broadcast: PS21 “The Dark” – Phil Kline
Feb 16, 2026: 4:30 pm – 6pm
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!
From vast boombox symphonies to chamber music and song cycles, Phil Kline‘s work has been hailed for its originality, beauty, and sly subversion. Raised in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, Phil came to New York City to study poetry with Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro at Columbia. Shortly after graduation he moved downtown, cofounding the No Wave band the Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch, Jamie Nares, and Lucy Sante, collaborating with Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and playing guitar in the notorious Glenn Branca Ensemble.
Many of his early compositions evolved from performance art and used large numbers of boombox tape players, such as Bachman’s Warbler and the outdoor Christmas cult classic Unsilent Night, a mobile sound sculpture performed by the public, which has become a beloved annual holiday tradition around the world (175 cities and five continents to date). Other notable works include Exquisite Corpses, written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars; The Blue Room and Other Stories, a string quartet for Ethel; the orchestral work In a Handbasket; and Dawn Chorus, a chamber septet based on the song of the Western Meadowlark, commissioned for the U.S. National Parks System centennial and premiered in Badlands National Park, South Dakota.
A master of song and found text, his most famed examples are the iconic Zippo Songs (based on poems Vietnam vets inscribed on their Zippo lighters) and Rumsfeld Songs (based on the Pentagon briefings of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), both written for his muse Theo Bleckmann and influencing a new generation of political protest music. A song cycle about a different kind of madness followed: the strange, authentically American Florida Man, brought to life again by Bleckmann.
Kline also often sets his own texts, such as in the Mass John the Revelator, written for early music specialists Lionheart, and the Sinatra-inspired monodrama Out Cold, another tour-de-force for Bleckmann, which premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival.
Phil is currently immersed in music theater projects, including Ghost Story, a site-specific cycle for soprano Nicoletta Berry with Yarn/Wire, recently premiered at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; and BLINK, an upcoming opera about a fugitive family encountering the spectre of Nikola Tesla in the ruined New Yorker Hotel at the end of time—an early version of which was workshopped by Works & Process at the Guggenheim in 2024.
His music is available on the Cantaloupe, Starkland, and CRI record labels.
“A real original.” —The New York Times
The Dark is supported through a Market New York grant, awarded to PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance from Empire State Development and I LOVE NY, New York State’s Division of Tourism.
Digital content coverage for The Dark is supported by Bloomberg Connects.
The Dark‘s business sponsors are Millay Arts and The Mountains Media.
Thank you to the many generous individual supporters who helped fund The Dark.
PS21’s programs are made possible in part with support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
This performance/installation is designed to be experienced as a walk-through or ground procession.
We are happy to accommodate accessibility needs whenever possible—please email Adriana at boxoffice@ps21chatham.org to let us know how we can assist you.
