Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause

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!

FESTIVAL PASS

Prisoner’s Cinema is a collaboratively composed and performed work by Sarah Hennies and Tristan Kasten-Krause for double bass, percussion, and a single candle flame. This piece explores the links between sight, hearing, and perception and is partly inspired by “trataka,” a style of yogi purification meditation that involves staring at a single point (such as a candle flame) for extended durations. The audience will be instructed to fix their gaze on the flame of the candle while Hennies and Kasten-Krause perform a work of high sustaining tones. The instruments are closely tuned to one another to produce beating effects and psychoacoustic phenomena such as “three-dimensional” sound, where it feels as though the music is moving through space. Hennies and Kasten-Krause believe in a style of adventurous music that is both challenging and accessible and that offers any potential audience member an experience that may change and broaden their experience of music, sound, the world, and themselves.

Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound rom the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from the Creative Work Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. She has performed internationally and the 2023 large-ensemble work “Motor Tapes” was featured as part of the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She is currently an assistant professor of music at Bard College.‍

Tristan Kasten-Krause is a bassist and composer living in Brooklyn, New York whose work enlarges the minutiae of close tones and subtle gestures. His music utilizes psychoacoustics to examine perception, time, and the disconnect between cognition and reality. As a bassist he has been credited with lending his “low-end authority to vital New York institutions” (the New Yorker) and, as a composer, praised for his “heavenly” (the Guardian) original compositions. Over the last decade Tristan has worked with vital and experimental artists such as Alvin Lucier, Sigur Ros, Meredith Monk, Ichiko Aoba, Caroline Shaw, and Henry Threadgil. His work exploring duration and expanded time has led to multiple sets on the Hudson Basilica’s 24-Hour Drone festival, performances of extended, endurance-based works with extreme metal band Scarcity, and the premiere of a marathon 6-hour opera (2023’s Stranger Love) for the LA Phil.

Sarah Hennies – Percussion,

Tristan Kasten-Krause – Double Bass

The duo of Sarah Hennies & Tristan Kasten-Krause works collaboratively to compose large-scale compositions employing drones, psychoacoustic phenomena, and extended techniques on double bass and an array of gongs, bells, vibraphone, and other percussion instruments. Their work includes delicate interplay of high-pitched tones, deep resonances from bass tones and gongs, and patient, slowly unfolding extended durations that evoke a mysterious sonic landscape.

Commissioned by Wassaic Project through a generous grant from the New York State Council on the Arts

Copyright: Sarah Hennies, Tristan Kasten-Krause

Music licensing: Sarah Hennies, Great and Small Publishing

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.

Please note that this performance has an unconventional seating, limited seats or standing room only. 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.