IN SHORT
In many ways darker is more like an object than a piece of music. An extreme exploration of emotional restraint, darker is both highly detailed and relentlessly restrained, requiring an almost superhuman focus in order to keep it moving, inexorably, towards its end. – David Lang
ABOUT THE SHOW
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.
David Lang and Bill Morrison have collaborated for nearly 25 years and darker is their tenth collaboration.
Lang and Morrison drew inspiration from a minimal score to create a film that, like the music, can exist both before and under the viewer’s eyelids: a slowly, lilting depiction of the sublime, where actors, dancers and acrobats reappear and then disappear back into a bubbling morass of time.
In many ways darker is more like an object than a piece of music. An extreme exploration of emotional restraint, darker is both highly detailed and relentlessly restrained, requiring an almost superhuman focus in order to keep it moving, inexorably, towards its end. –David Lang
“With his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for the little match girl passion (one of the most original and moving scores of recent years), Lang, once a postminimalist enfant terrible, has solidified his standing as an American master.” –The New Yorker