Siyanko agreed, though her next project is focused on New York City. The Down to Earth Festival, debuting in September, will bring performances to the stages of the City University of New York and to city parks.

“The need for the festival is really obvious,” she said in an interview. “In the New York performing arts scene, there is a glut of expensive new real estate, from the Shed to the Perelman Arts Center, with overpaid executives and tickets so expensive that the majority of New Yorkers can’t afford to go.”

To counter these trends, the Down to Earth performances will be free. And by presenting on CUNY stages and in parks “without the extravagant resources of destination ZIP codes,” she said, the festival seeks to meet new audiences in their own spaces. This is an idea that Siyanko first tried at PS21, bringing events to Crellin Park in Chatham. When Amoukanama Circus gave a free performance there in 2023, 800 attended. “The people who came to Crellin Park simply were not the same who used to come to PS21,” she said.

Siyanko and Down to Earth’s co-director, Frank Hentschker, the longtime executive director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center, are relying mainly on private donors — a safer bet, Siyanko said, at a time when federal arts funding may not be reliable. (During Siyanko’s tenure at PS21, she greatly expanded the donor base and grew the organization’s board from a few of the founder’s friends to a formidable collection of philanthropists and artists.)

Along with an edition of Prelude, the Segal Center’s annual experimental theater festival, the inaugural season of Down to Earth will include the tightrope walker Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga, whose performances rope in the public; acrobats from Senegal’s only circus troupe; a British installation opera sung by New York’s Master Voices in Green-Wood Cemetery; local flex dancers; and an Italian work that makes music from jump roping.

“New York feels more atomized than ever,” Siyanko said. “We hope that this kind of creation in public spaces will help bring people together.”