PS21 presents the three-night North American Premiere of ANIMA, an immersive multimedia performance installation

PS21 presents ANIMA, an immersive multimedia performance installation fresh from the 2023 Venice Biennale and Tate Modern, for its North American Premiere, Aug. 31–Sept. 3

Created by French photographer Noémie Goudal and theater director Maëlle Poésy, ANIMA explores “deep time” and natural landscapes to provoke new Perspectives on the future of climate change
The PS21 debut marks ANIMA‘s only U.S. appearance

ANIMA
Aug. 31, and Sept. 2 & 3, 2023
PS21 Performance Spaces for the 21st Century
Pavilion Theater
2980 NY-66, Chatham, NY
PS21chatham.org
(518) 392-6121

Chatham, NY, July 20, 2023 – PS21 Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, a vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, presents the North American premiere of ANIMA, an immersive, multi-media installation of photography, large-scale moving image projections, and live aerial performance, created by French visual artist/photographer Noémie Goudal and theater director Maëlle Poésy in collaboration with aerial artist Chloé Moglia and DJ and composer Chloé Thévenin, August 31 through September 3, 2023.

A sensation when it premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in 2022, ANIMA grew out of Goudal’s earlier Post Atlantica, which was exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles that same year. It is informed by the artist’s fascination with recent discoveries by paleoclimatologists, who find concrete evidence from the remote past—fossils, pollen, carbon atoms—that permit them to understand today’s landscapes and form hypotheses about the planet’s climate past and future.

Most recently, ANIMA was performed in London in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for three sold-out performances in July 2023, and at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Anchored in ideas around “deep time” (which can be loosely defined as a geological history of the planet), paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) and relational geographies, Noémie Goudal’s complex and performative series of films and constructed photographs reflect on the interconnectedness of human and non-human life.

“It’s fascinating that we can still see traces of our past in the landscape,” says Goudal, “How buried deep under the Antarctic ice are the remains of tropical rainforests, and today’s arid Sub-Sahara was once swampland dotted with palm trees. Paleoclimatology is a vertiginous oscillation between the past, the present and the future, because it’s by looking at the past that we can learn about the future.”

ANIMA, with its illusionistic installations and videos of natural landscapes, takes audiences along on that vertiginous journey. Weaving elements of visual arts, photography, music, large-scale moving image projections, and aerial performance, it references the climate crisis, but it’s also a reflection about time.

Images of palm trees that at first seem static, accompanied only by the sounds of birds, metamorphose, and the electronic music, composed by Chloé Thévenin, reaches a deafening pitch. Rocks crumble, flowing water appears to shred the canvas where it had earlier seemed a mere representation, the forest burns. One after another, the images disappear, until only the bare metallic scaffolding remains. At last the aerial artist (originally Chloé Thévenin; at PS21, Mathilde Van Volsem) appears, suspended from the scaffolding, spinning and sliding while multiple landscapes and timeframes move into and out of focus in the background, gradually morph, and ultimately vanish.

ANIMA, like Goudal’s other work, isn’t narrowly about climate change. According to the artist, it’s about how we perceive the world and our place in it, and is an invitation to reconsider our position within the world (as opposed to apart from it), and thereby reconsider our future in order to avert disaster.

“The time of the human race is but a mere minute compared to the time of the planet,” she notes. “During our life on Earth, we are effectively incapable of perceiving its movements . . . ANIMA is an attempt to change our point of view and perceive the world as it is intrinsically, by definition, in perpetual motion. It’s all about seeing the landscape as a moving entity. We see it as very fixed and very stable, but actually, it’s moving all the time. Even the Alps are moving, three or four centimeters per year.”

About the Artists:

Noémie Goudal
Noémie Goudal received an MA in photography at London’s Royal College of Art. Her practice involves the construction of ambitious staged, illusionistic installations centered on landscape, which she documents in film and photographs and into which she incorporates performance. Her interventions are grounded in research into the intersection of ecology and anthropology, in particular paleoclimatology, the analysis of climate and geology from the perspective of deep time, to explore the earth’s past and future. Her work has been presented at institutions and events in France including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Les Rencontres d’Arles; Festival d’Avignon; Le Grand Café Centre d’Art Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire; Musée Delacroix, Paris; and internationally at the Tate Modern, London; Kunstverein Hildesheim, Germany; Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Australia; Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland; The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; The Photographer’s Gallery, London; FOAM Museum, Amsterdam; Whitechapel Gallery, London; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon; and the Horniman Museum, London. Goudal’s work is held in public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; David Roberts Art Foundation, London, UK; FOAM Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India and The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK. Noémie Goudal lives and works in Paris.

Maëlle Poésy
Actress, writer, and director Maëlle Poésy is Director of the Théâtre Dijon Bourgogne, Centre dramatique national. She trained at the École supérieure d’art dramatique of the Théâtre national de Strasbourg. In her work, she pursues a “theatre of confrontation” which questions society and its individual components. She appears often at the Festival d’Avignon, Lincoln Center, and the Festival TransAmériques and has directed, among other works, 7 Minutes at the Comédie-Française, Glory on Earth, at the Théâtre de la Cité Toulouse and Théâtre en mai festival (Dijon), and the short film Sans sommeil.

Chloé Moglia (at PS21 performed by Mathilde Van Volsem)
Chloé Moglia is a French trapeze aerial artist, choreographer, and dancer. Born in 1978, Moglia began her training on the trapeze at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque de Rosny-sous-Bois (ENACR) and studied at the Centre national des arts du cirque (CNAC). In 2009, she founded Compagnie Rhizome, which she continues to direct. Called “the artist who explodes the boundaries of the circus,” her practice is equally influenced by martial arts. Her shows and performances play with bodies, slowness, the laws of physics, and vertigo. A defender of embodied thought and of a sensitive representation of physicality, she combines attention and acuity by weaving together physical practice, reflection, and sensitivity.

Chloé Thévenin
Parisian DJ and musician Chloé Thévenin creates work ranging from techno to confessional downtempo and blues-influenced indie rock. Her experimental, cinematic solo albums feature guitars, intimate vocals, and abstract song structures. As a DJ, she spins at clubs and festivals around the world, including Le Pulp and Lumiere Noire in Paris. She also composes classical music, soundtracks, and scores for art and dance pieces.

About PS21 Performance Spaces for the 21st Century
A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times): adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists in music, dance, and theater, and visionaries creating entirely new genres. On our open-air Pavilion Theater stage, across our expansive, unspoiled grounds, and in the diverse surrounding communities, PS21 cultivates and presents productions that transcend aesthetic boundaries and revitalize existing artistic languages and grammars. Throughout the year, we host developmental residencies for dancers, musicians, actors, and creators of original, even unclassifiable new work. Rooted in community collaboration, PS21’s programming engages creatively with critical global and social issues. It is a mecca for innovative and original artistic voices, a destination for performance that can be experienced nowhere else in the region.
PS21’s Pavilion Theater is a green-energy marvel surrounded by 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands that are a haven to wildlife and visitors across the region. Integrated into our unspoiled campus, the theater embodies our commitments to the public: open, inviting, and optimized for their enjoyment and encouraging citizen expression and participation.

PS21 and the Environment
The presentation of ANIMA continues PS21’s commitment to programming that raises questions or addresses the need for action around environmental preservation, global warming, and the quest for a sustainable future. Since 2020, we have featured productions from around the globe that tackled these themes in works of the highest artistic caliber. Highlights of our 2022 season included Philippe Quesne’s ecological fable Farm Fatale (from France); the Israeli Vertigo Dance Company in One. One & One, a vision of sustainability; Bang on a Can All-Stars cofounder Michael Gordon’s Field of Vision – 36 Percussionists performing on PS21’s rolling landscape; and a screening of Earth, Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s masterly 1930 critique of the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, to live accompaniment by DakhaBrakha, the Ukrainian ethno-chaos band.

In 2021, we brought Heartbeat Opera’s The Extinctionist to PS21, a cautionary vision of a future threatened by rising sea levels, and in 2020 the New York State premiere of John Luther Adams’s Ten Thousand Birds (2020). These and other performances took place in PS21’s Pavilion Theater, a green-energy marvel surrounded by 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands that are a haven to wildlife and visitors across the region. Integrated into the unspoiled campus, the theater embodies PS21’s commitments to the public: open, inviting, and optimized for their enjoyment, encouraging citizen expression and participation.

In 2022, PS21’s adventurous summer season embraced genres and companies from around the globe, 19 productions in four months, including seven from South Korea, Nigeria, Haiti, Canada, France, Israel, and Ukraine, with programs that address challenging contemporary issues. A number of the works were presented as part of PATHWAYS, PS21’s ambitious, multi-faceted series of spectacle, performances, art installations, international contemporary circus, and participatory events connecting nature and the arts. They included Farm Fatale, Field of Vision, and Compagnie Galmae’s C’est pas là, c’est par là (It’s not here, it’s over here). Writing about Farm Fatale, New York Times critic at large Jason Farago said “’It’s not easy being green. Full marks to Philippe Quesne’s sprightly eco-clown show ‘Farm Fatale,’ at PS21 in Chatham, N.Y. — a country theater that outclasses most of Manhattan.”

The production/performances of ANIMA received support from Villa Albertine
Additionally, this engagement is supported by The Audience Building Project, a program of the Lake Placid Center for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Governor and New York State Legislature; and members of PS21 Producers Circle, with a lead support by Deborah Lans and Sharon Grubin.

Tickets
Reserved Seating: $45
Student Tickets: $10
Order Tickets
Performance Schedule:
Thurs., Aug. 31 at 8:00 p.m.
Sat., Sept. 2 at 8:00 p.m.
Sun., Sept. 3 at 8:00 p.m.
September 2 Dinner and a Show package option
Dinner 6 PM
Show 8 PM

On September 2, enjoy a pre-show family-style, farm-to-table dinner en plein air, on our beautiful 100-acre campus. Limited tickets available. For more information or to make reservations, email: info@ps21chatham.org

Visiting PS21
Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, a state-of-the art venue on 100 acres of unspoiled meadows, trails, and woodlands in the heart of the Hudson Valley.
Transportation from New York City

September 3. Charter mini-bus
Cost: $50 one way
The bus will leave PS21 shortly after the show, around 21:15 pm on September 3, dropping off our guests at Lincoln Center. To hold a reservation, payment is required by September 1, 2 pm. For more information or to make reservations, email: elyssa@ps21chatham.org
Accessibility

PS21’s theater is fully accessible and reservations for wheelchair spaces and aisle seating for those with mobility needs are available upon request. Ample parking is available, with spaces reserved for the disabled closest to the theater. Headsets may be requested at the box office prior to the show. Accessible restrooms are located in the theater lobby. For more information visit ps21chatham.org

Directions
PS21 is located at 2980 New York Route 66, in Chatham, New York. Driving time from Manhattan is approximately 2-2.5 hours. Free parking is available. If taking Amtrak, PS21 is 15 miles from the Hudson station, and 21 miles from the Albany/Rensselaer station, amtrak.com. Transportation to and from the train stations are available through uber, and local taxi companies Northern cab (518-828-4222), H Transport LLC, (518) 577-5388, htransportllc.com, and McCanns Taxi (518-610-0071).

High resolution images can be found here
MEDIA CONTACT: Tristan Geary
tristan@ps21chatham.org
(518) 392-6121
Image: ANIMA by Steven Taylor

Our 2023 Season
On June 2, PS21 launched its 2023 season with the 10th anniversary edition of The NEXT Festival of Emerging Artists, the first of more than fifty unique events, featuring a constellation of celebrated and emerging dancers and choreographers, musicians and singers, actors, directors, and international street artists.
Among the season’s highlights:

Dance: From Italy: Save the Last Dance for Me, Italian theatermaker Alessandro Sciarroni’s inventive reincarnation of the polka chinata, a nearly lost Bolognese courtship dance from the last century; Paul Taylor Dance Company, in a program of three Taylor masterworks; An Immigrant’s Story, by Wanjiru Kamuyu (Kenya/France), and Never Twenty One, SmaÏl Kanouté & Compagnie Vivons! (Mali/France)

International Theater: US premiere of L’Étang (The Pond), Gisèle Vienne’s adaptation of Robert Walser’s bitter family drama, with Pina Bausch veteran dancer Julie Shanahan and César winner Adèle Haenel and music by doom metal band Sunn O))) frontman Stephen O’Malley

Contemporary Performance: ANIMA, from France, a collaboration between French photographer and visual artist Noémie Goudal, theater director Maëlle Poésy aerial artist Chloé Moglia, and composer Chloé Thévenin. An immersive, multi-media installation of photography, projected video, and live performance, ANIMA is grounded in Goudal’s interest in recent discoveries in the field of paleoclimatology. Runners, an invigorating work of Czech New Circus from Cirk La Putyka. A hit at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Guardian calls Runners “a moving exploration of time . . . through dance, music, acrobatics and dialogue.”

Music: Attractions include global sounds and a dance party in our Pavilion Theater from Spain’s La Banda Morisca and Puerto Rico’s Plena Libre, our distinctive House Blend chamber music series, and the World Premiere of Four Meditations on Impermanence, a new work created especially for PS21 by visionary composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra. Plus a vastly-expanded schedule of PATHWAYS activities on-campus, in Hudson, and across Columbia County, in programs involving 3 local public schools and 13 community-based partners; Movement Without Borders masterclasses with visiting international artists, and ecology walks; a participatory installation; and much more.

PS21’s Mission

PS21, Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, is committed to:

Presenting innovative performances by leading and emerging artists in our state-of-the-art, green-energy black-box and open-air pavilion theaters

Fostering creativity through residencies and collaborations between performers working across disciplines and genres

Serving the community via free and low-cost workshops, performances, and other programming

Preserving our more than 100 acres of open spaces, meadows, woodlands, and orchards as an important resource for artists and the community

Extending opportunities for arts engagement to all, regardless of age, economic status, and cultural background

Our commitments are incorporated in the design of our new theater and the surrounding grounds: open, inviting, and optimized for the public’s enjoyment and to encourage citizen expression and participation

PS21’s Theater and History
A true cultural crossroads, PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, is a state-of-the-art theater complex completed in 2018 a mile from the center of Chatham village. PS21’s new theater is a 350-seat open-air proscenium stage protected by a pavilion roof, which converts in cooler months to a geothermally-heated and air-conditioned black box seating 99. The new facility is built with technologically advanced systems that can accommodate all levels of artistic needs—from the analog use of our extensive system of sprung dance floors so critical for the safety of movement-based performance, to our state-of-the-art lighting and sound capacities. The theater features one of the only fully LED green theatrical lighting systems in the country. Our new building sits above a nineteenth-century apple orchard at the apex of over 100 acres of beautiful Hudson Valley land, at the foothills of the Berkshires. Just five acres have been developed; the rest are meadows and woodlands. Nearby are the Dance Barn, a rehearsal and performance venue, and two artists’ residences accommodating 16 visitors, and the Chatham Animal Haven, an animal farm sanctuary.“A beautiful, reconfigurable indoor-outdoor space that appears to have landed like an exotic bird in the midst of a 100-acre former apple orchard in this tiny Hudson Valley town. It’s not the first place you would expect to encounter cutting-edge performance, yet PS21 offers little else.” The New York Times.

Founded in 2006, PS21 has evolved into a mecca for innovative programming by leading and emerging artists in music, dance, theater, contemporary performance, and the visual and multimedia arts in the Hudson Valley. PS21 supports artists’ creative endeavors, connecting them to a broad, diverse audience outside the conventional urban setting, and offers the region’s year-round inhabitants the opportunity to engage with the arts regardless of economic status, age, or cultural background.

PS21 PATHWAYS: Education and Enrichment Programs
Through our own programming and partnerships with local organizations, PATHWAYS has emerged as the linchpin of PS21’s activities, fostering collaboration among community groups and increasing participation by low-income families. We strive to shatter the “glass barricade” that often discourages nearby residents from sharing, as both spectators and participants, in the wealth of cultural, recreational, and intellectual programming on offer. PATHWAYS programs are engaging, accessible, participatory, and welcoming to all. Community workshops and residencies, open to all ages and levels.

Movement Without Borders
This summertime cure is a weekly series of innovative experiences dedicated to the mind, body, and spirit. PS21 offers yoga, fitness, ballet, and movement classes in the PS21 Dance Barn, Theater, and on the trails, led by Hudson Valley-based artists.

Free Resident Artist Workshops
Throughout the summer, artists, ensembles, and companies in residence offer free performance and participatory workshops to the community. People of all ages and abilities can discover new ways to move with dancers from the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Nouveau Cirque artists Cirk La Putyka, celebrated Pina Bausch company veteran Julie Shanahan, and Amoukanama Circus. Explore new ways of listening and creating sound with Hub New Music, the Ulysses Quartet, La Banda Morisca, and Susie Ibarra. And dive into a summer of social and contemporary dancing with the Plena Libre Orchestra, Polka Chinata dancers Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini, popping and hip-hop workshops with Compagnie Vivons!, and others.
Unfolding Dramaturgies of the Anthropocene

The PATHWAYS 2023 season continues PS21’s multifaceted engagement with climate issues, with films, talks, and educational programs that expand the reach of programs including ANIMA, Four Meditations on Impermanence, and other artistic productions throughout our expansive, natural grounds.

PS21: An Open Laboratory
PS21 is an open, creative laboratory where, throughout the season, artists are at work in our theater, barns, and fields. PS21 is open from dawn to dusk every day, and while wandering the trails, meadows, and woodlands, visitors can see creative artists in action while experiencing our untamed natural landscape.