At dusk in a small Hudson Valley town, over 100 people gathered last month under an open-air pavilion in below-freezing temperatures. The sound of target practice echoed from a nearby farm.
A man holding a megaphone began a countdown. When he reached one, everyone in the group pressed play on the boomboxes and speakers they were carrying. An eerie, droning composition filled the air, drowning out the noise of the gunfire. Then, in single file and without a word spoken, the group trekked through the snowy landscape for almost a mile, taking downloaded music by the composer Phil Kline with them.
These bundled-up people were the willing participants both in a performance piece, called “Force of Nature,” and in an ambitious new arts festival that took over theaters, bars, a church, a bookshop, a library and even a sauna in Chatham, N.Y., for a full week in mid-February.
“The Dark,” as the festival is known, was created by PS21, an arts complex in Chatham that began programming in 2006, to appeal to both local arts enthusiasts and out-of-town visitors. Artists covering music, theater, dance, virtual reality, installations and performance were selected for their abilities to address the concepts of darkness and light.
Andrew Schneider’s installation of “NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars)” took place in an entirely darkened room in which an unseen narrator guided the audience through a matrix of 4,000 LED lights.
Kara-Lis Coverdale’s trance-like organ performance for 300 people in a packed St. James Church evoked frostbitten landscapes. Immediately afterward, a vocal ensemble performed a haunting recital of “The Little Match Girl Passion,” by David Lang, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story of a poor girl’s hopes and visions as she freezes to death.
In recent years, Chatham, a town of 4,100 about 130 miles north of New York City, has become a significant part of a thriving upstate arts community, with galleries and institutions emerging on Main Street and beyond. But winter does not typically see an influx of visitors.
“It’s very bucolic up here in the summer, it’s beautiful, there’s tons going on,” Vallejo Gantner, PS21’s executive and artistic director and the driving force behind the festival, said. “We decided to build a festival in the middle of the coldest month of the year. The bars are empty, the restaurants are empty. The shops are empty. Hotels are closed. The moment we can have the biggest impact and where we can be exciting is the middle of winter — we feel like this is a radical intervention into the life of the community.”
Weather notwithstanding, the festival is a bold (and pricey) move during a challenging time for the performing arts, with federal funds shrinking and donors being more cautious. Across the state line in Massachusetts, the Williamstown Theater Festival at Williams College in the Berkshires recently announced that it would shift to a biennial schedule. And the FreshGrass music festival at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., has said it will skip this season.
To cover the festival’s $600,000 budget, PS21 secured state funding from the I Heart New York tourism program, as well as from donors.
“We’ve raised probably $220,000 from individuals — that needed to be $250,000 and we’re subsidizing it with our internal costs” Gantner said. “So we’re going to lose a ton on it. We’re OK with that.”
“While I have to balance the budget at the end of the year,” Gantner added, “my job is to use the resources we have in the most impactful way possible. Making money is not the measure by which we gauge success.”
Beyond funding, the cold brought its own unique challenges.
A lighting designer fell ill 10 minutes before dress rehearsal for “Song’s for the Dark” by Sophia Brous and Gundega Laivina, in which members of the community — chosen through chance encounters and open calls in the weeks leading up to the festival — examined their connection to lullabies and the night. The cast, unfazed, rehearsed in the pitch black, illuminated occasionally by the headlights of cars driving by the barn that they worked in.
For “The Vivid Unknown: Cloudqatsi,” John Fitzgerald used A.I. to reimagine the 1982 documentary “Koyaanisqatsi,” projecting images into a veil of mist that had been installed in an animal barn on PS21’s grounds. But creating clouds in below-freezing weather proved problematic, and water vaporizers repeatedly malfunctioned.
After a week of tweaks, the wall of mist poured forth, though with an additional effect — a constant trickle of water that spilled over from the tray of vaporizers, a detail that added additional layers to a mesmerizing piece. Fitzgerald appreciated the surprise.
“I love elements that take on new unexpected forms,” he said. “The water dripping in particular brought up some fun conversations. I remember Oscar, my 6-year-old son, was staring into the drops at one point and told me he had never seen color like that. All of these things help open your eyes to the world around us in new ways.”
Then there was the sauna and cold plunge pool where audience members could take a shvitz while listening to a sound installation by Coverdale and then dunk themselves in the frigid water. At night, the hole in the frozen pond that Gantner cut open with a chain saw, would ice over, and one day when he came to check on the situation, fell through, dog in tow. The dog was unshaken; less so was a mildly annoyed Gantner, his clothes soaked through.
After a week of performances (and of course, inevitable debates about the merits of each, often over beers in the sauna), the new festival surpassed the organizers’ expectations. A total of 7,000 people attended, 47 percent of those first-time visitors to PS21’s programming.
And “The Dark” appeared to have won over many of the locals.
On the second to last night of the festival, William Culley, who first moved to Chatham in 1976, came to see “We Survived the Night: A Coyote Story in Four Parts,” Julian Brave NoiseCat’s spoken word performance, at the Spencertown Arts Academy, one of a variety of locations outside of Chatham that PS21 incorporated into its programming. Finding no available seats, he parked himself on the floor, closed his eyes and listened to NoiseCat’s recital of a 10,000-year-old myth that the artist asked his audience to treat as nonfiction.
“I love coyote stories.” Culley said with a smile.
As in other Hudson Valley towns, there can be tensions between longtime residents and newer arrivals, sometimes derisively known as “weekenders,” because of rising housing costs and other aspect of gentrification. But Culley said he wasn’t too concerned about the influx of new people and money into what used to be more of an agricultural center.
“At the end of the day, even if locals don’t go to some foreign art film, they’re sure as hell happy someone’s buying French fries,” Culley said. “The real economy is, in a way, it is the arts. It’s what wealthy people support. If you’re a contractor around there, you’re making money, hand over fist. Second homers.”
In the back of the room, Christine Mackerer, 27, a seventh-generation Chatham resident, expressed excitement about her town’s evolving identity.
“There’s so many new businesses in the last couple of years, new shops; the arts have exploded out here,” Mackerer, whose mother is a PS21 board member and whose father was a Republican candidate for town council last year, said. “And for people my age that’s the hope, that there’s going to be more of that.”
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