Dark Matter

As winners of Performing Arts Houston’s 2025/2026 New/Now award, we are thrilled to present the world premiere of Dark Matter, a concerto for flute and strings by composer Jaylin Vinson, on a shared program with fellow winners Mezclada Dance Company led by Joel Aguilera and Kay Prince. Vinson’s new work features flutist Tyler Martin, and takes inspiration from the speculative worlds of Octavia Butler, who redefined the boundaries of science fiction and, in so doing, offered expansive visions of Black futures.

As 2026 marks twenty years since Butler’s passing, this new work celebrates the ongoing legacy of the Black imagination in speculative and science fiction. "Dark Matter" unfolds across five movements, each exploring a different kind of space — from the grounded to the galactic, the digital to the mental interior. The work employs sonic storytelling as a modality of the continued exploration of Black futures, building new mythologies and folklore through sound.

The first of these five movements concerns terrestrial space: it explores concepts of genesis, the protagonist’s rootedness in their environment, and their sense of becoming. The second, aquatic space: the merging of consciousness, depths of personality, and the protagonist’s sense of desire. The third, outer space: the protagonist drifts through, encountering and orbiting foreign bodies. The fourth, cyber space: a glimpse behind the curtain upon the glitches in the fabric of reality, and an envisioning of a possible post-human future. The fifth, psychic space: the protagonist’s senses of time and of memory begin to rupture.