EVIDENCE: 2026 LAB INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL to Open at Fisher Center

The Fisher Center at Bard, in association with the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, will present 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.

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.

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

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.