Sister Sylvester

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

After stealing a hat from the costume collection of famous communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, multimedia artist sister sylvester embarks on a forensic quest to trace the hat’s possible past wearers. Paying homage to Brecht’s “scientific theater,” which endeavored to spark revolution, Drinking Brecht is an innovative interactive documentary using microbiology and genetics to merge past and present.

“A documentary that you can drink, the work ingests worn-out scientific narratives and turns them into a marxist-feminist ritual, and a celebration of science for the people.” —sister sylvester

Premiered at IDFA 2024. Touring includes Open City, London; Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greece; AFO, Czech Republic, and ONX, New York. Previous versions of the work in development have been performed at Joe’s Pub, Prelude Festival and MAX Festival.

Special Thanks: Onur Karaoglu, Dr Sara Hanson, Genspace, Beth Tuck, Ryan Platt and the students of CC bio-art class.

sister sylvester is a multimedia artist and amateur microbiologist. Her installation work Constantinopoliad (‘24), premiered at CPH:DOX where it won the INTER:ACTIVE prize and toured to the Venice International Film Festival as part of the Best of Festivals selection. Her work Drinking Brecht: An Automated Laboratory Performance (‘24) premiered at IDFA and continues to tour internationally including to Open City and Thessaloniki Film Festivals. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and toured to IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival and SXSW; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Recent works include: Constantinopoliad, with a live-score by Nadah El Shazly, commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) as a site specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the International Theater of Amsterdam; The Eagle and The Tortoise, which showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC, and premiered at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, as a part of IDFA On Stage (‘22), and in NYC as part of Under The Radar 2024. 

She is a 2025 Creative Capital fellow, a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.

Her work has been called ‘genuinely subversive’ by Time Out NY; ‘imaginative and original’ by New York Times; ‘perplexing’ by Theaterscene, ‘apocalyptic’ by Artforum, and an ‘otherworldly, intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm’ by Life Magazine, Greece.

DM R is a Bogotá-born composer, sound artist, and educator based in New York City—and a lifelong 90s anime enthusiast. Their work sits at the intersection of cultural theory, migration, and digital culture, often drawing on the in-between feeling of immigrant life and the blur between digital and material worlds. They work with sounds pulled from digital spaces like subreddits, Instagram reels, and other corners of the internet, alongside live-processed acoustic instruments such as the Colombian gaita and violin. The music moves between dense, immersive textures and quieter, more intimate moments.

Their practice pulls from post-spectralism, ambient music, Colombian folk traditions, Rock en Español, and pop culture. Their music has been performed by groups including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, ECCE Ensemble, and TAK Ensemble, and presented at venues such as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the DiMenna Center, Americas Society, and the MATA Festival. Recent projects include Longings, which exists both as an electroacoustic installation for the National Sawdust Ensemble and as a mixed ensemble work; Deny. Defend. Depose., an evening-length piece for the trio Sputter Box; and Let it burn, written for three accordions and gaita hembra.

DM R holds a doctorate from Columbia University, where they currently teach as a Lecturer in Music. Their dissertation examines a large-scale sound installation built from hundreds of computer fans as a lens on how contemporary music institutions, digital systems, and material infrastructures shape artistic value, authorship, and withdrawal. Through both critical analysis and collaborative creative work, the project reflects DM R’s broader interest in how artists navigate precarity, belonging, and exit across digital and physical worlds.

Written, directed and narrated by sister sylvester
Score and experiment narration by DM R
Percussion by Ellery Trafford
Dramaturg Andrew Kircher
Set designer Installation design by sister sylvester
Lighting designer Programming for lighting by Ahmet Kizilay
Sound engineer Murat Çolak
Video/projection designer Color grading by Nathan Saucier, Additional fly cinematography by Sophia Lisco, Rachel Ganz, Morgan Harrison, Pere Jaeger.
Stage manager Marisa Conroy
Production manager Marisa Conroy
Technical director Cosette (Ettie) Pin

Produced by sister sylvester, Co-produced by Onassis ONX, Associate Producer/Project Manager: Marin Day 

Commissioned by Co-commissioned by IDFA Doc Lab

Microscope sponsor: Dinolite

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.

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.