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Alex Harvey, The Willows

  • February 22, 2026 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
  • Stonykill Coffee & Records

    36 Main Street
    Chatham, New York 12037
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Description

A hallucination in sound and voice, Alex Harvey’s adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows exploits a tension between dream-time and clock-time through Victoria Finney’s lamplit one-woman recitation. 

Drawing on Blackwood’s entanglement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, occult modernism and early 20th-century mystical experimentation, Harvey and Finney’s interpretation treats the text not merely as fiction but as an incantation— a deliberate shaping of inner experience through rhythm, cadence, breath and a phantasmic sound design. Blackwood and his esoteric contemporaries believed that words, spoken in the right order, could open the mind, expand perception, even shift reality. This adaptation approaches the story in exactly that way.

What emerges is both intimate and mythic—a fire-lit encounter with a text that links 19th-century gothic nature writing to the birth of 20th-century psychological horror.

Date & Time

Sun, Feb 22, 2026 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM

Venue Details

Stonykill Coffee & Records

36 Main Street
Chatham, New York 12037 Stonykill Coffee & Records
PS21 : Center for Contemporary Performance

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A vibrant center for contemporary performance in the Hudson Valley, PS21 “presents work that challenges and invites” (The New York Times). Our adventurous productions by leading and emerging American and international artists showcase what’s new and thought-provoking in music, contemporary circus, dance, theater—and in entirely new genres. Largely supported by our generous donors, we’re a must-see, must-experience destination for performances that you won’t find anywhere else, at ticket prices that welcome all. 

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