PS21, a newly prominent center for contemporary performance in Chatham, N.Y., has a new artistic and executive director, it announced on Thursday. Vallejo Gantner has already stepped into the role.
Gantner comes to the position from a long career in arts administration, including leading the similarly named but unconnected East Village theater PS122 (now Performance Space New York) from 2005 to 2017.
“I’m looking forward to maintaining a trajectory of seeking out work by the most exciting artists in the world and demonstrating what can be done outside of the usual urban artistic centers,” Vallejo said in an interview.
Founded in 2006 by the local philanthropist and conservationist Judy Grunberg, PS21 presented shows in a tent on its 100-acre site until 2018, when it opened a state-of-the-art proscenium stage with roofed open-air seating. (It can also be converted to a black box theater.) The next year, just before Grunberg died, the center hired its first artistic and executive director, Elena Siyanko, who quickly established PS21 as an internationally recognized destination for new music, experimental dance, circus arts and genre-blurring performance.
The current season — which starts on May 30 with the Hatched Ensemble, led by the South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza — was organized by Siyanko, who left at the end of last year to work on projects like Down to Earth, a new multidisciplinary festival in New York City. But Vallejo said he planned to introduce new programming as early as the winter.
“I want to think about what we can do when it’s dark and cold and local businesses are suffering,” he said. “We’re going to turn that bug into a feature and build out programs that speak to local audiences.”
In addition to taking better advantage of the center’s grounds and looking more deeply into its ecology and Indigenous history, Vallejo’s vision for the future of PS21 is centered on that kind of audience expansion.
“We’re going to increase the quantity of work that is engaged with long-term, multigenerational local residents and communities that the venue might not have served,” he said. “This is a moment, politically and culturally, when we need to be going outside of our comfort zones and trying to speak with people who might not necessarily think like us.” He cited Siyanko’s practice of requiring all artists to engage in community workshops as a good start.
The arts are under threat, he said, citing the cost of urban real estate and the changing priorities of institutional funders and the federal government, as well as what he called “a crisis of relevance.” In facing these challenges, PS21 has some advantages, including access to a different donor base and grants earmarked for rural communities. But Vallejo also noted a difference in attitude among local donors and arts lovers. “In the city,” he said, “the arts are often taken for granted, but I don’t think that complacency exists up here. You can make a difference in Chatham.”
Siyanko agreed, though her next project is focused on New York City. The Down to Earth Festival, debuting in September, will bring performances to the stages of the City University of New York and to city parks.
“The need for the festival is really obvious,” she said in an interview. “In the New York performing arts scene, there is a glut of expensive new real estate, from the Shed to the Perelman Arts Center, with overpaid executives and tickets so expensive that the majority of New Yorkers can’t afford to go.”
To counter these trends, the Down to Earth performances will be free. And by presenting on CUNY stages and in parks “without the extravagant resources of destination ZIP codes,” she said, the festival seeks to meet new audiences in their own spaces. This is an idea that Siyanko first tried at PS21, bringing events to Crellin Park in Chatham. When Amoukanama Circus gave a free performance there in 2023, 800 attended. “The people who came to Crellin Park simply were not the same who used to come to PS21,” she said.
Siyanko and Down to Earth’s co-director, Frank Hentschker, the longtime executive director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center, are relying mainly on private donors — a safer bet, Siyanko said, at a time when federal arts funding may not be reliable. (During Siyanko’s tenure at PS21, she greatly expanded the donor base and grew the organization’s board from a few of the founder’s friends to a formidable collection of philanthropists and artists.)
Along with an edition of Prelude, the Segal Center’s annual experimental theater festival, the inaugural season of Down to Earth will include the tightrope walker Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga, whose performances rope in the public; acrobats from Senegal’s only circus troupe; a British installation opera sung by New York’s Master Voices in Green-Wood Cemetery; local flex dancers; and an Italian work that makes music from jump roping.
“New York feels more atomized than ever,” Siyanko said. “We hope that this kind of creation in public spaces will help bring people together.”
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