In January 2024, the Under the Radar Festival will be reimagined as a new, city-wide annual festival of theater and performance emerging from New York and around the world that incisively speaks to our moment. Rather than being tied to a single host institution, this iteration of Under the Radar is curated in collaboration with an array of New York arts organizations and curators, each harnessing the community-building, connective, celebratory nature of the festival format to introduce some of today’s most innovative voices to wider audiences. The festival sets an example of how ??collaboration can get the American theater through this moment of existential crisis: reinvigorated and ready to create a theater that can embrace diversity, risk and reinvention.
Joining Under the Radar Founder and Director Mark Russell and Creative Independent Producer ArKtype to resurrect the indispensable festival are Abrons Arts Center with Ping Chong and Company, Fisher Center at Bard with The Invisible Dog Art Center, Chelsea Factory, Japan Society, La MaMa, Lincoln Center, Mabou Mines with Performance Space New York, New York Live Arts | Live Artery, NYU Skirball, St. Ann’s Warehouse with Irish Arts Center, Theatre for a New Audience with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Soho Rep and NAATCO National Partnership Project, BRIC and MART Foundation, Arlekin and BAM Fisher Space.
Under the Radar 2024 Events:
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: In Our Own Words
Dmitry Krimov/Krymov Lab NYC (US)
Presented by BRIC
Dmitry Krymov, “one of the world’s finest theater-makers" (NYT), leads his new US company in a raucous, inimitable retelling of Alexander Pushkin’s immortal classic.
The Eagle and the Tortoise
Sister Sylvester (US)
Presented by BRIC
A participatory experience of journalism, mythmaking and empathy, The Eagle and the Tortoise begins when you open the book and become one with the story.
Our Class
Arlekin Players Theatre (US)
Presented by MART Foundation, Arlekin and BAM (Fisher Space)
Based on real life events around a horrific 1941 pogrom in Poland, this New York premiere follows ten young people—five Jewish, five Catholic—through love, friendship, hatred and betrayal, in a contemporary new production helmed by Ukrainian-born Jewish director Igor Golyak.
The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu
Albert Ibokwe Khoza (South Africa)
Presented by New York Live Arts | Live Artery
A healing ritual of movement, sound and sheer physicality, The Black Circus wields theater as a weapon to counter centuries of dehumanizing spectacle.
Cultural Exchange Rate
Tania El Khoury (Lebanon/US)
Presented by Fisher Center at Bard and The Invisible Dog Art Center
An interactive live art project in which artist Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria.
The First Bad Man
Pan Pan Theatre (Ireland)
Presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
The real story at this book club isn't the novel, it's the funny, profane and worryingly confusing cast of characters that showed up to read along.
Hamlet | Toilet
Yu Murai and his company Kaimaku Pennant Race
Presented by Japan Society
Notoriously iconoclastic and scatological director Yu Murai's Hamlet | Toilet runs the Bard's highbrow tale of existential woe through the poop chute.
Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate
Motus (Italy)
Presented by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
An ancient story finds raw, exquisite life in this intense and challenging one-woman retelling of the Greek Cassandra myth.
Open Mic Night
Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey (US)
Presented by Performance Space New York and Mabou Mines
An experimental theater piece about the end of an experimental theater, Open Mic Night says goodbye to what it is at its beginning. And things only get stranger from there.
Public Obscenities
Shayok Misha Chowdhury (US)
Presented by Theatre for a New Audience with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Soho Rep and NAATCO
A bilingual play from the visionary writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury about the things we see, the things we miss and the things that turn us on.
Queens of Sheba
Jessica L. Hagan (UK)
Presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Through laughter, tears, song, dance and sisterhood, the powerful Black Queens of Sheba upend misogynistic and racist narratives to share their own story.
Rose: You Are Who You Eat
John Jarboe (US) in collaboration with The Bearded Ladies Cabaret
Presented by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
In this true story of gender cannibalism, singer and performer John Jarboe charts a wildly original path toward self-actualization, giving whole new meaning to the phrase "you are what you eat."
Search Party
Inua Ellams (UK)
Presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Playwright and poet Inua Ellams opens his archives for an interactive peek inside the creative process where you decide what he chooses to share.
this house is not a home
Nile Harris (US)
Presented by Abrons Art Center and Ping Chong Company
A gingerbread minstrel, Dimes Square vape fiends and a beloved children’s movie cowboy howl frenzied rants of Afropessimism from within a brightly colored bounce house.
Titanic Depression
Dynasty Handbag (US)
Presented by New York Live Arts | Live Artery
All aboard queer alt-cabaret artist Dynasty Handbag's surreal Titanic, where that sinking feeling in your gut is for the global disaster.
Volcano
Luke Murphy (Ireland)
Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse in association with Irish Arts Center
Erupting with passion, intrigue and beauty, this futuristic dance theater—part mini-series, part sci-fi—offers audiences multiple paths to its experience.
William Shakespeare's As You Like It, A Radical Retelling by Cliff Cardinal
Cliff Cardinal (US/Canada)
Presented by NYU Skirball
It's Shakespeare like you've never seen it before, but playwright Cliff Cardinal just needs to do a little housekeeping before we start.
