FERUS Festival 2021

National Sawdust’s sixth annual FERUS Festival has earned its reputation as a showcase for cutting-edge audio, multimedia performance and provocative creative discussion, presenting a roster of events that The New Yorker calls “a walk on the wild side of contemporary music.”

With a lineup that includes Ash Koosha and his anthropomorphized artificial intelligence YONA independently collaborating on a uniquely futuristic duet concert; a round table discussion with three of the most influential performance programmers in the country – The Apollo Theater’s Kamilah Forbes, The Kennedy Center’s Marc Bamuthi Joseph and National Sawdust’s Paola Prestini – about the post-pandemic future of the arts; and a re-imagining of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor by the innovative modern electronic composer Jlin presented through the prism of Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M. contemporary dance company, the 2021’s FERUS Festival challenges our assumptions of the aesthetics and intention of streaming performance.