Under the Radar Festival: A Preview with Co-Creative Directors

About the Under the Radar Festival

• 🎭 The Under the Radar Festival, now in its 21st year, is a New York City festival celebrating experimental theater.
• 🌍 It aims to be a citywide festival, featuring 31 shows across 24 venues in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn.
• 🤝 The festival brings together artists, producers, and managers from various disciplines including theater, dance, and music, fostering collaboration across venues and international borders.

Rotating Leadership Model

• 💡 For the first time, the festival is programmed under a rotating leadership model, with co-creative directors serving two-year terms.
• 🗣️ This model aims to incorporate diverse perspectives and tastes, fostering a multiplicity of voices at the core of the festival.
• 🤝 Leadership is a collaborative effort involving the co-creative directors, the festival founder Mark Russell, producers, and 24 venue partners.

Featured Performances and Artists

• labor 12 Last Songs at La Mama is a 12-hour durational performance celebrating New Yorkers and the labor that makes the city run, featuring workers demonstrating their jobs live on stage.
• 🎶 The Hot Plates, a company of musicians, will perform their work Dream Feed at the Here Art Center, drawing on vast musical genealogies.
• ✊ Love Force by Sunny Jane, at Symphony Space, tells a story of Black and Brown solidarity across decades.
• 🎭 Narcissister presents Voyage into Infinity at NYU Skirball, exploring theatrical tools and scale.
• 🖼️ Mommy, a US premiere by Mario Bonushi at NYU Skirball, uses striking visual storytelling without text to explore the relationship between mothers and children.

Conversations and Panels

• 💬 Data Room at the Performance Garage features three conversations hosted by co-creative director Kaneza Schaal, focusing on knowledge exchange and shared meaning.
• jazz Histories and Futures of Experimental Jazz will be discussed with Esperanza Spalding and Kyle Abraham.
• 🎤 Genealogies of performance practice will be explored with Helga Davis, Alicia Hall Moran, and Daniel Alexander Jones.
• 📜 Mythologies of Practice will be the focus of a conversation with Anne Hamilton and Liliana Blaine Cruz.

Festival Information

• 🗓️ The Under the Radar Festival runs through January 25th.
• 🌐 Full program details can be found at utrfest.org and the websites of the 24 partner organizations.