The Fisher Center at Bard, in Association with the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, Presents EVIDENCE: 2026 LAB International Festival, December 4–6

Latest iteration of the Fisher Center LAB’s thematic festival features four commissions from artists whose work pursues evidence in a world where reality is in constant question

Curated by Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester, participating artists include El Khoury, Annie Dorsen, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Sofía Gallisá Muriente & Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

The Fisher Center at Bard, in association with the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, presents EVIDENCE: 2026 LAB International Festival, December 4–6. The fifth thematic festival from Fisher Center LAB, the event is an invitation to explore the nature of evidence in an age marked by a technological race to dominate attention, data, information, and communication. It asks: What constitutes evidence in a world where reality is increasingly augmented, altered, or undermined?

Four commissions will be presented over three days in the Fisher Center’s new Performing Arts Lab, designed by Maya Lin and stewarded by Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Fisher Center at Bard, Gideon Lester, welcoming attendees into the striking spiral building that will officially open in Spring 2027 and house rehearsal and teaching facilities for artists at all stages of their careers. While the Festival creates a hub of exploration of the nature of evidence at Bard, it simultaneously unfolds across three continents, sparking dialogue about the role of art in providing and interpreting evidence for social change across several regions of the world.

EVIDENCE continues a near-decade-long collaboration between Tania El Khoury—distinguished 2024-26 Fisher Center artist in residence, Bard associate professor in theater and performance, and founding director of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College)—and Gideon Lester, marking their third time co-curating the thematic festival. (Previous co-curated editions were 2019’s Where No Wall Remains, an international festival about borders, and 2022’s Common Ground, about the politics of land and food.) In EVIDENCE, the festival becomes a catalyst for new works from artists who produce research, document knowledge, and have the potential to transform public debate.

Through her 2025 collaboration with Ziad Abu-Rish, The Search for Power, 2023’s Memory of Birds, her 2021 collaboration with Basel Zaraa, As Far as Isolation Goes (Online), and more, Fisher Center audiences have become familiar with Tania El Khoury’s probing live art, which offers close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of borders, displacement, and state violence. For EVIDENCE, she has created the multi-media installation and performance Choreography of State, formed around dance notations from six women choreographers as an examination of the movements of state violence and resistance. MacArthur Fellow Annie Dorsen follows up her most recent project Prometheus Firebringer—which premiered at Theatre for a New Audience and was described by Sara Holdren in New York Magazine as a “harrowing and playful,” “quietly stunning, brain-jangling piece of work” that looked “into how the omnipresence of AI is already rewiring our brains”—with a first glimpse of After This. Her latest theatrically resurrects an archive of mentions of "Y2K" and "millennium bug" on broadcast networks in the lead-up to 2000.

Two works propose performance as a restitutional act. Tanya Lukin Linklater, a Sugpiaq artist-choreographer from the Kodiak archipelago of southwestern Alaska, premieres the performance installation Tendon thread, which imagines 19th-century Sugpiaq belongings currently kept in a museum in Russia yearning to return home. Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s lecture-performance Tactics of Transmission continues their years-long collaboration that began when they were Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows and peered into the Institution’s imperial archive; Tactics of Transmission becomes a strategy for reconnecting Puerto Rican historical materials held within to the people and places they belong.

The Festival’s international program, supported by the Center for Human Rights & the Arts, meanwhile includes collaborations with global programs that have developed their own festival or long-term project that considers the nature of evidence within their respective political realities and local communities. They are connected through the sharing of tools, knowledge, documentation, public talks, and publications. re/presentare from Mexico City created The Tlamachtiloyan Children Festival of Resistance, a festival envisioned as a resistance school for children developed through investigations into the processes that have transformed Atlapulco from a water-based farming community to a fragmented, extracted, polluted, and urbanized pueblo originario. For Evidence in Dream City, Tunis, Tunisia, Tania El Khoury and Jan Gooses of l’art rue curated evidence-focused panels and installations from Chokri Ben Chikha, Lara Tabet, Lawrence Abu Hamden, Public Works Studio, and Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige. And continuing their ongoing research on breath as both a biological necessity and a political condition, Rio de Janeiro’s Temporary Arts Platform produced I Won’t Be an Egg Which You Crack: On birth, body and the evidence it carries, a four-weekend-long festival which echoes the four-count deep inhale of active labour.

In a Curators’ Statement, Lester and El Khoury said, “We have commissioned new performances and collaborated with international partners grappling with the notion of evidence in art, especially in the ephemeral and often fictional media of theater and performance. Some works will build cases to be presented in tribunals; some will leave traces and visual markers that are open for ongoing interpretation and discussion. The festival will leave imprints for evidence to be built by others, or be embodied by future witnesses.”

Prior to the most recent thematic festivals co-curated by Lester and El Khoury, these expansive events began in 2014 with The House Is Open, organized by Lester, Bob Bursey, and Caleb Hammons, and asking “what would happen if a performing arts center temporarily reimagined itself as an art museum?” They continued in 2017 with We’re Watching, which explored the vast implications of life in a state of surveillance, and was co-curated by Lester and Hammons.

EVIDENCE: 2026 LAB International Festival Commissions

Tactics of Transmission
by Sofía Gallisá Muriente & Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
North American Premiere

Friday, December 4 at 12 pm
Saturday, December 5 at 5 pm
Sunday, December 6 at 12 pm

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo Artist, Director
Sofía Gallisá Muriente Artist, Director


Alexandra Buschman-Román Composer, Performer
Pelé Sánchez Tormes Assistant Director
Kairiana Núñez Santaliz Assistant Director
Juan Fernando Morales Nazario Lighting Designer
Cristina Agostini Fitch Wardrobe Designer
Roxana Sánchez Production Coordinator

Objects created by
Amara Abdal Figueroa, Rocío Cáliz-Padilla, Richard Cameron, Pedro Pablo Rinaldi Jovet

With additional support from
Finca Carite, El Kilómetro, Agua, Sol y Sereno, Oswaldo Colón Ortiz, Sofía Martínez, Mario Negrón, Naíma Rodríguez, Reniel Rodríguez Ramos, Lara Sánchez Morales, Garvin Sierra, and Kateleen Suárez Suárez

Acting as unruly colonial subjects, Puerto Rican artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente uncover the histories of Puerto Rican collections held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and question the broader logics of possession and preservation that shape archives and museums around the world. In this lecture performance about their experiences infiltrating the imperial archive, they use storytelling, images, and sound as forms of restitution. The work features live sound design by composer and performer Alexandra Buschman-Román.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist whose practice claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her works employ text, image, sound, and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetics and politics. She has exhibited at major international institutions, including the 61st International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, Documenta Fifteen, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, TEOR/éTica, SAVVY Contemporary, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, as well as galleries like Proxyco, El Kilómetro, ifa Galerie, Dazibao and Embajada. Her practice has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, Smithsonian, Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, Trellis Art Fund and the US Latinx Art Forum, among others. She has also participated in artistic residencies with the Vieques Historical Archive (Puerto Rico), Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), Headlands Center for the Arts (California), FAARA (Uruguay), Amant (Italy) and Fonderie Darling (Montreal), among others. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local in San Juan. In 2023, she published the artist book Observatorio de lagunas: notas de campo with Editorial Educación Emergente. She lives and works in Puerto Rico and collaborates regularly with Natalia Lassalle Morillo, with whom she co-founded the production house Cocoloba.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo is an artist and director from Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Merging experimental film and theater methodologies, her practice examines memory and history through extensive and rigorous periods of research and co-creation. Her projects unfold as rehearsals for an alternative historiography, thinking alongside fellow artists, researchers, and non-traditional performers to examine our relationships to the past while simultaneously foregrounding the creation of new mythologies and fictions rooted in the Caribbean. Presented as multi-channel video installations, short and long-form experimental films, and live theatrical performances, her work has been presented extensively in venues, festivals, and theaters internationally. Her project Retiro, developed in collaboration with her mother, Gloria Morillo, is part of the 61 Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh. Other exhibitions include the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (New York), Amant (New York), RedCat (Los Angeles), 22a SescVideoBrasil Biennial (São Paulo), National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Blackstar Film Festival (Philadelphia), Images Festival (Toronto) and Seoul Museum of Art (Korea). Natalia has been an artist fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, and has participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), Amant (NY), Pioneer Works (NY), Mass MoCA (Massachusetts), and Fonderie Darling (Montréal). She has taught film and theater at Maryland Institute of the Arts, CalArts, and Bard Microcollege, and facilitates workshops and knowledge exchanges as a way to socialize her artistic practice. She developed her practice nomadically, but she is currently based in Puerto Rico, where she was born.

Choreography of State
by Tania El Khoury
North American Premiere


Friday, December 4 at 7 pm
Saturday, December 5 at 7 pm
Sunday, December 6 at 7 pm

Tania El Khoury Artist, Director
Participating Choreographers
luciana achugar, Rashida Bumbray, Emily Johnson, Nissa Nishikawa, Bhenji Ra, Farah Saleh

Dancers
Carol Montealegre, Nissa Nishikawa, Brandi Norton, Miriam Parker, Tara-Jo Tashna, Tania El Khoury

Khyam Allami Composer
Abir Saksouk Set Design
Rana Feghali Costume Design
Haitham Haddad Graphic Design
Petra Serhal, Dalia Naous Dramaturgical Support
Ali Beidoun Video Editor, Consultant
Mohamed Ali Agrebi Lighting Consultant
Tania El Khoury invited six women choreographers from diverse practices around the world to create dance notations that analyze power structures and violence perpetrated by the state. The resulting multi-media installation and performance approaches choreography as a counterforensic practice, exposing systems of militarized police training shaped by racialized surveillance, spatial exclusion, and the pacification of resistance. Taking cues from protests, the installation includes videos of movement scores of resistance to be activated by performers and embodied by the audience in a celebration of self-defense.

With support from Creative Capital Foundation. Co-produced by Fisher Center LAB Evidence and Chaillot - Théâtre National de la Danse, Paris.
Tania El Khoury is a live artist who creates interactive installations and performances that generate knowledge and alternative narratives, while reflecting on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her practice is activated through tactile, auditory, and visual materials collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and ultimately transformed through audience interaction. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and shown in 35 countries across six continents in spaces ranging from national museums to the Mediterranean Sea. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessie Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. Tania is a Distinguished Artist in Residence and Associate Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College in New York, where she is also the founding director of the Center for Human Rights & the Arts. She is a founding member of the urban research and live art collective in Lebanon, Dictaphone Group.
After This
by Annie Dorsen
Work-in-Progress


Friday, December 4 at 5 pm
Saturday, December 5 at 12 pm
Sunday, December 6 at 5 pm

Annie Dorsen Artist, Director
Ryan Holsopple Systems Design
Kate Howard Video Design
Ian Douglas-Moore Sound Design
Miriam Felton-Dansky Dramaturgy
Natasha Katerinopoulos Producer

Performers
Hai-Ting Chinn
isabel crespo pardo
Jeff Gavett

In the spring of 1999, a computer science student at Cornell University set up a system to record every mention of "Y2K" or "millennium bug" across the four major broadcast networks. The result is an extraordinary accidental archive: hundreds of 15-minute clips of broadcast television from July 1999 through January 2000.

Since at least 2016, we have been struggling to understand how we got here. After This reckons with that question through an act of theatrical resurrection. Three performers give the archive an incantatory voice, working live against a torrent of broadcast footage. News anchors, laugh tracks, weather reports, game shows, and sitcoms: a whole world going about its business. It is a world that looks familiar but feels like a warning, asking what we choose to remember and what we are seduced into forgetting.

This presentation of After This is a work-in-progress showing.

Co-Producers and Funders
After This was commissioned by Fisher Center LAB and The Walker Art Center, and funded in part with a grant from the Simons Foundation.

Annie Dorsen (concept/direction) is a MacArthur Fellowship-awarded director and writer who works at the intersection of algorithmic art and live performance. Her performances have been widely presented at theaters and festivals in the U.S. and internationally, including at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Sharjah Biennial, Festival d’Automne de Paris, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, and the Holland Festival. She has written essays about art, culture, and technology for The Drama Review, Theatre Magazine, American Theater, Frakcija, and Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), among others. She is also a recent graduate of NYU School of Law, where she focused on tech law and public policy. Currently, she is the Guest Curator for Art and Technology at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Tendon thread
by Tanya Lukin Linklater
World Premiere


Friday, December 4 at 2 pm
Saturday, December 5 at 2 pm
Sunday, December 6 at 2 pm

Tanya Lukin Linklater Artist, Choreographer
Chloe Alexandra Thompson Sound Designer

Ivanie Aubin-Malo Dancer
Talia Dixon Dancer
Mekko Harjo Performer
Brandi Norton Dancer
Chanelle Gallagher Performance Apprentice
Viola LeBeau Performance Apprentice

Mina Linklater Studio Assistant
Sassa Linklater Studio Assistant

For more than a century, a museum in Russia has held a collection of 19th-century Sugpiaq belongings that originate from Kodiak, Alaska—the homeland of Sugpiaq artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater. In her new performance installation, Tendon thread, Lukin Linklater imagines these belongings yearning to return home. Moving through sound and textiles, the performance evokes the terrain of the Kodiak archipelago, creating a meditation on material, displacement, and repair.

Tendon thread was commissioned by Fisher Center LAB. With additional sponsorship and support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Open rehearsals of Tendon thread took place in November 2025 at Ancestral Knowledges: My Grandmother is my School, curated by Kimberley Moultin, at the Tate Modern, London, UK, and in May 2026 at Tanya Lukin Linklater's solo exhibition, Crested (curated by Juliane Bischoff), at Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany.

Ticketing Information

For complete information regarding tickets, package discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at (845) 758-7900.

EVIDENCE: 2026 LAB International Festival Package: see all four EVIDENCE Festival performances for $125.

More Info

Fisher Center LAB
EVIDENCE: 2026 LAB International Festival
Credits

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Rebecca Gold Milikowsky, Daniel Shapiro, Stephen E. Simcock, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Board of the Fisher Center, Fisher Center members and general fund donors, The Shubert Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB is funded in part by the Lucille Lortel Foundation and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold Milikowsky and additional funding from The William and Lia G. Poorvu Family Foundation.
 

About the Fisher Center LAB

About the Fisher Center at Bard

The Fisher Center is a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education that demonstrates Bard College’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. To support artists, students, and audiences in the examination of artistic ideas, the Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire.

Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. This world-class theater building will be complemented by a new studio building designed by Maya Lin, scheduled to open in 2026. More than 200 events and 50,000 visitors are hosted at the Fisher Center each year, and over 300 professional artists are employed annually. As a powerful catalyst of art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide, the Fisher Center produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines every year. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 166-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

The Fisher Center was born from the Bard Music Festival, founded in 1990, which, for the first 13 years of its existence, occupied several spaces on campus, including a large tent. Each summer, the Music Festival focuses on the life, work, and influences of one composer, promoting new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience. When the Fisher Center and its two theaters opened in 2003, the summer festival expanded to include a fully staged opera, as well as theater and dance performances. The highly acclaimed opera program brings unjustly neglected works to the stage in major productions—often making their U.S. debuts.

Through Fisher Center LAB, the Center’s acclaimed residency and commissioning program, artists are provided with custom-made support toward their innovative projects, and their work has been seen in over 100 communities around the world. Resident choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s 2018 Four Quartets was recognized as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” by The New York Times. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally by the Fisher Center in 2015 before transferring to New York City. Illinoise, a 2023 Fisher Center world premiere from artists Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury, was recognized with a Tony Award for Best Choreography following its tour and transfer to Broadway.

The Fisher Center is home to several of Bard’s academic programs in the performing arts. Year-round, it hosts performances by the undergraduate Dance Program and Theater and Performance Program; the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music; The Orchestra Now (TŌN), a Bard graduate program that is training the next generation of classical-music ambassadors; and students at the Bard Conservatory, the first (and so far only) conservatory to require all its students to pursue a bachelor of arts degree in a field other than music in addition to their specialized music studies. As a hybrid institution, the Fisher Center brings together professional and academic art-making of the highest caliber, where student and professional artists work side by side, learning from each other and informing one another’s practices.

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For more information, please contact Blake Zidell of Blake Zidell & Associates at [email protected] or 917.572.2943.

(10/27/26)

This event was last updated on 10-27-2026

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