Over two decades and counting, Under the Radar (UTR) has grown to become America’s largest theatre festival, providing a global launchpad for literally hundreds of art makers from around the world. Since 2003, Festival founder Mark Russell and his team have faithfully coordinated the annual production of a January tidal wave of cutting-edge theater, first at The Public Theater and now at a selection of historic and emerging theaters all across New York City. In coordination with Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne of ArKtype and with the addition of this year’s highly-esteemed co-creative directors Meropi Peponides and Kaneza Schaal, UTR is positioned to capitalize on the Festival’s rich history and expand on a tradition of artistic risk-taking and trailblazing.
This season of Under the Radar directly responds to our global moment of political and cultural instability with a program that thematically, creatively and structurally prioritizes risk.
Currently announced highlights include:
Bronx-based family trio The HawtPlates break down vernacular music styles into multiple modes of vocalizing in Dream Feed, producing their soul sound in the spirit of the family heirloom while defying genre, produced by HERE Arts Center, originally commissioned and developed through the HERE Arts Residency Program (HARP), with additional commissioning support by Under the Radar.
Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés throw their bodies into a complex conversation in DARKMATTER, applying the Chopped and Screwed method to their movement language to seek new forms for—and ways of looking at—the body and the outside world to which it relates, presented by Performance Space New York.
Narcissister channels a punk aesthetic in Voyage Into Infinity, a feminist homage to the 1987 film The Way Things Go that collides repurposed materials and masked spectacle to explore states of impending collapse, featuring a live score performed by Holland Andrews, presented by NYU Skirball.
In MAMI, Albanian-Greek director Mario Banushi crafts a hymn to the mother-child bond, transforming the stage into a memory-scape of unsettling intimacy, presented by NYU Skirball.
DATA ROOM, a series of conversations hosted by New York-based theater, opera and film artist Kaneza Schaal, presented at The Performing Garage. “What do I do as an artist? I make secure spaces for storing and sharing materials with select individuals: I make data rooms. This experiment launches a multi-year project focused on how we share ideas in the world we live in today.”
Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein bring their signature blend of dance-adjacent physicality and theatrical disorientation to Friday Night Rat Catchers, wherein a disco-drenched 1976 game show spirals from glittering spectacle to surreal collapse, performed with Marianne Rendón and presented by the Live Artery Festival at New York Live Arts.
