This season at Performance Space New York, we continue to listen to our artists’ evolving questions instead of searching for fixed answers—we open up artists’ processes to our community, provide space for work to develop in private, and invite a broader performance ecosystem into our spaces to share resources, and collaborate. Across commissions, presentations, and community partnerships, artists perform, improvise, host conversations, gather community, and test new ideas as they fuse and embrace nonlinearity beyond form, genre, and medium.

Fall 2026 at Performance Space New York opens up with our 2026/2027 OPEN ROOM resident, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, who transforms our lobby/community space into Cavernous Shoal–a listening room with a bespoke sound system and a sculpture composed of mangrove roots that assemble a temporary ecology opening on Saturday, September 19th. Across the year-long programming, this sound system made specifically for this occasion splits the space open through experimental listening sessions, co-hosted open decks and pairings of underground sonic artists. Swiss global network and science consulate SWISSNEX (Sept. 22nd-25th), returns to Performance Space New York and activates our space as a site of global climate activism for three days of communal climate thinking and action.

October brings a new performance series at Performance Space New York, HOUSE PARTY, where the spirit of house parties is used to instigate more spontaneous, responsive, immediate, less formal programming that inspires togetherness through shared experiences. For our inaugural House Party, Dauan Jacari presents “Yes, And…” (Oct. 23rd) where the garment designer and dancer collapses the boundaries between fashion, dance and performance for one night only. Tania Willard and Dana Claxton curate a new performance Playing Safe: Queering the Indigenous Performance Archive (Nov. 5th-7th) by Vance Wright, a curatorial fellow at grunt gallery, an artist-run centre, founded in 1984 on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, Canada). Queer|Art (Nov. 20th-22nd) celebrates its 15th anniversary with a multidisciplinary program, its inaugural publication, and a multi-day summit on community practices and the state of queer artistry in times of crisis. In collaboration with Queer|Art and across the season, we will co-host OFFICE HOURS–drop-in open hours with curators, administrators, producers, and technicians from NYC arts institutions, offering opportunities for artists and arts workers to meet, review portfolios, and build connections. Art Workers are Artists Too (Dec. 4th)–a program performed, run, and designed by technicians, designers, front of house, and other art workers who work at Performance Space New York returns. This year, the 6th edition of AWAAT extends into Performance Space New York’s annual holiday party.

In Winter 2027, we will present a new work with experimental theater, dance, and performance festival, Under the Radar (January 2027), alongside co-creative directors Janet Wong and Jenn Kidwell. New York based visual and dance artist, Malcolm-x Betts, leads, participates in, and organizes a two-week residency with a cohort of invited artists through a curatorial framework called Chain Reaction (Jan. 25th-Feb. 6th), inspired by Betts’ curiosities around labor, silent rage, and improvisational dance. Our 2025-2027 Keith Haring Curatorial Fellow Janggo Mahmud’s PERFORMANCE GIRL NEW YORK (Feb. 26th-March 12th) considers how a community is formed around objects, specifically those on offer from a fictional cosmetics company. Audience and consumer, converted via social media, are one and the same.

In Spring/Summer 2027, Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro, better known as the brilliant minds behind the larger-than-life puppets of Poncili Creación, stage a new work Montaña De Raiz (March 10th-12th). For the first time the brothers will be collaborating with their father, Juan Del Hierro, for this three-night run. Sonic/visual artist and composer Jules Gimbrone‘s multi-channel audio installation and composition Dark Fringe (April 29th-June 1st) is the ongoing research of an extended dialogue with astrophysicist Max Isi. Composed of five sculptural sound instruments, Dark Fringe, builds on Gimbrone’s development around what he calls Trans-Sensing modalities–situating these sculptural sound instruments as trans-sensors that invite patterns of undoing and remaking. Choreographer and movement artist, Symara Sarai, will continue their developmental residency (May 10th-15th) ahead of an upcoming U.S. premiere at Performance Space New York. Closing out our 2026/2027 season, Nazareth Hassan’s EMOTES (June 24th-26th) is a new work and theatrical meditation on dance and movement as it moves between analog and digital worlds, morphing through the algorithms into entirely new practices.

Anchoring our season are recurring programs Open Movement and First Mondays as well as an experimental new position, an Access Residency. Sunday afternoons from noon to four, participants of all ages and abilities are invited to participate via dance, documentation, observation—or any way they choose in Monica Mirabile’s Open Movement, where simply sharing the space becomes a means of connection and self-discovery. At 4pm, we shift into weekly workshops and participatory practices, guided by artists and members of our extended community. Sarah Schulman’s monthly First Mondays brings veteran and novice writers together to share works in progress, with a special celebration this year to honor Robert Gluck’s 80th birthday. The Access Residency at Performance Space New York involves a New York City-based artist / access worker to creatively explore access at the intersection of various departments—production, audience services, and front of house—for two large-scale commissions.

Lastly, occupying a special place in our program will be a memorial for Charles Dennis (October 3rd, 2026), one of the founding forces of P.S. 122, the organization now known as Performance Space New York. The way Charles and his fellow artists led P.S. 122 deeply shaped who we are and remains central to our DNA and mission. The event will celebrate Charles’s life, spirit, and the worlds he helped make possible.