The Comfy Map of Cozy Corners is here

In this issue: a scene report from PS21’s The Dark, and below the fold: the debut of my Comfy Map Of Cozy Corners, because it seems that winter is never going to end.

Yesterday, before the 12th blizzard of the year blew in, I drove up to Chatham to see the scene at PS21’s inaugural winter event, The Dark.

The two-week festival hosted 80 performances of 30 productions including national and world premieres across Columbia County – dance, theater, live orchestra, readings, immersive audio, and more – that organizers hope brought a little light to the darkness of late winter.

I stepped into what may have been the darkest performance at The Dark: Andrew Schneider's “NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars)” in PS21’s Black Box Theater.

“Every point in space occurs once at each moment of time,” Schneider writes in his performance statement.

Into the curtained hall I walked, my hand on the stranger’s shoulder in front of me, and it felt as if we disappeared somewhere into the void until my eyes adjusted and took in the room as illuminated by nearly 4,000 LED lights strung from the ceiling to the floor.

I watched as the lights waved, pulsed, and glittered around me, choreographed to a 30-minute sound collage and narration. The voice talked about things like the entirety of human life, how finite but vast our lives can be through shared experiences. Whitney Houston's "I Want to Dance with Somebody" played during a section that illustrated a person’s death in a startling, textured way that reached for the sublime.

It was also memorable because, by its nature of being in the dark, you can’t really photograph it or record it on your phones without totally disrupting the experience, so everyone inside, whether they stood, sat, or lay face-up, was wholly in the moment, no phone to be seen.

Schneider is an OBIE award-winning performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist working in sound and video installations. He says that he’s “mostly interested in how humans telling stories about ourselves to each other can make us better at being humans.”

I couldn’t agree more and look forward to The Dark’s return next year.

Every winter, I chart a map to find the coziest places.

Last year’s map included more than 100 locations – a probably-too-comprehensive list for me to try and accomplish again this year.

So while contemplating the structure of this year’s map, I found myself at the historic Four Corners intersection in Kingston when it hit me: I should find the places with the coziest corners in which to eat, drink, read, find gifts, or just be merry.

After many weeks of driving up and down and all around the region, I think I’ve found some. Let’s go: