2024 Under The Radar Festival Unveils Additional Programming

The Under the Radar Festival has revealed a wide range of programming to be presented alongside the 18 full productions comprising the reimagined 2024 festival, a collaborative effort by cultural institutions throughout New York City. With the events announced today, Under the Radar doubles down on the festival's roots as a community gathering space and makes meaningful efforts to address challenges that lie ahead for an imperiled industry in need of substantial change.

Conceived and produced by Mark Russell & ArKtype in partnership with the International Presenting Commons (IPC), Creative and Independent Producer Alliance (CIPA), and HowlRound Theatre Commons, the 2024 Under the Radar Symposium (January 12 at NYU Skirball) convenes 250 arts presenters, producers, service organizations, funders, and artists to explore paths toward a stronger sector of national and international performing arts.

The event begins with keynote speeches and performances from 9:30-11am. This portion of the event is open to the public and will feature remarks by Jeremy O. Harris (playwright), Ravi Jain (Artistic Director, Why Not Theatre), Kaneza Schaal (director/performer), and Hana Sharif (Artistic Director, Arena Stage); along with live performances from Taylor Mac and Sunny Jain and Love Force, featuring Julia Chen, Almog Sharvit, Alison Shearer, David Adewumi and Armando Vergara.

From 11:30am to 4pm, invited professionals will participate in an extended discussion forum.

Under the Radar presents UFOs, a series of encounters with new works-in-progress from a few of today's most vital experimenters, throughout the 2024 festival. These include:

Matt Romein's Bag of Worms

Onassis ONX Studio (645 5th Avenue Lower Level, NY 10022)
Wednesday, January 10 at 7pm
Thursday, January 11 at 7pm
Friday, January 12 at 7pm
Saturday, January 13 at 7pm
Tickets: $18, here
Running time: 40 minutes

In this irreverent and unsettling live-motion-capture theatrical performance, creator Matt Romein plays a tyrannical disembodied head, leading performers Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey through a series of increasingly violent and over-the-top scenarios. Inspired by video game modding and body horror, Bag of Worms considers the human body as something that can become possessed, deformed, and broken, eliciting discomfort and questioning how we should treat bodies in digital and physical spaces.

In Bag of Worms, Weiss and Mousney wear motion capture suits and use technology to create a real-time digital playground. Satirizing video game violence and social media, the performance explores the cumulative trauma we experience through constant media exposure, and asks what happens when we reach our breaking point.

Zora Howard's THE MASTER'S TOOLS

Featuring Okwui Okpokwasili
Produced by Butler Electronics
Chelsea Factory (547 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001)

Thursday, January 11, at 6pm
Friday, January 12, at 6pm
Saturday, January 13, at 3pm and 6pm
Tickets: $25, here
Running time: 40 minutes

Most widely known as a tertiary character in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Tituba was a 17th Century Black woman enslaved by the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem, Massachusetts. When rumors of witchcraft plagued the town, Tituba was amongst the first to be imprisoned for her involvement in the “Black arts.” Though her influence on the witch trials to follow was substantial, she was mostly forgotten in the historical record and the literary imagination. In THE MASTER'S TOOLS, Tituba speaks, post-Salem. At last an agent in her own myth making, Tituba defies the many masters that have laid claim to her story, centering instead her own subjectivity and violent truth. Deftly weaving humor, terror, and spectacle, Tituba subverts our notions of good and evil, challenging our perception of this canonical character and the canon itself.

yuniya edi kwon and Holland Andrews

How does it feel to look at nothing
National Sawdust (80 N 6th St, Brooklyn, NY 11249)

January 12, at 7:30pm
Tickets: $10, here
Running time: 90 minutes

Using a new language of deconstruction, National Sawdust artists-in-residence Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon present an in-process performance of How does it feel to look at nothing, a pre-origin story and collaboratively developed opera about a deity of namelessness. An opera of the elemental, of pre-deities, and illusions of containment, How does it feel to look at nothing is an embodied, interdisciplinary performance emerging through a story of transitional states. Composer-performers, multi-instrumentalists, and extended technique vocalists Andrews and kwon co-create this work through composition, improvisation, dance, physical theater, and ritual.

Sinking Ship Productions & Theater in Quarantine
The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy

The Connelly Theater (220 E 4th St, New York, NY 10009)

Saturday, January 13, at 5pm

Sunday, January 14, at 1pm
Tickets: $15, here
Running time: 40 minutes

The Obie Award-winning digital theater laboratory Theater in Quarantine and acclaimed physical theater company Sinking Ship Productions team up to bring their digital live-streamed hit The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy to the in-person stage for the first time. This hysterical yet poignant sci-fi comedy broke new ground in the nascent medium, earning a New York Times Critics pick from Jesse Green. Helen Shaw, then writing for New York Magazine, lauded the production as “a truly impossible, impressive piece of quarantine theater.”

When space captain Egon Tichy's ship gets hit by a chunk of interstellar detritus, he's sent careening into a minefield of time vortexes. This slapstick adventure melds cutting-edge digital theater with live performance, improbably trapping performer Joshua William Gelb amidst an exponentially expanding cast of one.

Jenn Kidwell and *the blackening

we come to collect (a flirtation, with capitalism)
Chelsea Factory (547 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001)
Saturday, January 14, at 6pm
Tickets: Free with Online RSVP, here

In some ways stand-up, in some ways embodied public discourse, in some ways crowd-sourced funding module, this work-in-process, unplugged jawn is a staged intervention for those in capitalist crisis.

the blackening is jarvis benson, Juliette Jones, jenn kidwell, jaamil olawale kosoko, adam lazarus, jordan mccree, and ashlin parker.

Penny Arcade

The Art of Becoming - Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted (1967-1973)
Joe's Pub at The Public Theater (425 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10003)
Tuesday, January 16 at 7:30 PM
Wednesday, January 17 at 7:30 PM
Thursday, January 18 at 7:30 PM
Sunday, January 21 at 6:00 PM
Tickets:  $25 + 2 drink (or 1 food item) minimum, here

From one of downtown's most articulate survivors comes a humorous and revealing musical memoir, The Art of Becoming. 55 years into Penny Arcade's unique performance career, she embarks on a multi-episodic musical memoir of her life. The Art of Becoming is a multimedia evening of storytelling with original songs sung by Penny, a psychedelic sound score mixed live by Steve Zehentner, and a steady stream of documentary images and videos (rare footage of Andy Warhol's New York), plus all the humor, satire and quotable one-liners that we have come to expect from Penny Arcade.

Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted, is a journey through the glamor and disillusionment of a revolutionary era. From the 1967 Summer of Love in Provincetown, through New York's demimonde to the Balearic Islands with poet Robert Graves, Penny's story travels from a teen runaway on the streets into the heart of the 1960's artistic zeitgeist.

The Art of Becoming is created by Penny Arcade and Steve Zehentner. It features original songs by Penny Arcade and music by Penny Arcade, Chris Rael and Steve Zehentner, and is produced in association with ArKtype.

Throughout the 2024 Under the Radar Festival, legendarily ostentatious performance artist, playwright and vocalist Salty Brine—the creative force behind The Living Record Collection, a series of cabaret performances which weave together iconic, popular albums with cultural touchstones from classic literature to opera and beyond—will subvert the typical artist talkback format with Teatime with Salty Brine, an offbeat series of interviews and engagements with Under the Radar artists. The Guardian has called Salty “a storyteller in total command of voice, a cocked eyebrow and his audience.” TeaTime is a television talk show, a kiki, and an informal Q&A with the theater world's best and brightest, all steeped and simmered up then served boiling hot to a live studio audience. New episodes will be available daily, January 11-16 via BRIC TV, and archived for future viewing on the Under the Radar website. Episodes will premiere at 4pm EST. 

On January 13 from 12-4pm at Chelsea Factory, Under the Radar presents Coming Attractions, which consists of nine conversations between an artist and a supporter of their work, about projects in development or ready for touring. The event aims to be an innovative, informal, fun, and human pitch session. Acceptance to Coming Attractions includes a small honorarium to both the artist and their supporter. Featured presenters include Dahlak Brathwaite, Aaron Jafferis, and Daniel Roumain; Sophia Brous; jaamil olawale kosoko; Alberto Medero; Matt Romein; Annie Saunders; Andrew Schneider; and Marianne Weems and members of The Builders Association.

Audiences, creative collaborators, and most especially all women of color are welcome to join Under the Radar's free Queens of Sheba's Anti-Misogynoir Disco on January 13 from 8pm - 1am at Lincoln Center's David Rubenstein Atrium (West 62 Street and Columbus Avenue). In 2015, the popular London nightspot DSTRKT turned away would-be dancers at the door for being “too fat” or “too dark.” That incident, and the ensuing protests at the club, inspired playwright Jessica L. Hagan's choreopoem Queens of Sheba, running this January at Lincoln Center as part of the  Under the Radar Festival. In solidarity with that work's message of inclusion, the Under the Radar community is invited stay up late and join the Queens cast on the dance floor. Local DJs Twelve45, DJ Shannon, Lady Nik, and Miss Hap will spin an eclectic and Afrocentric mix of soul, house, pop, and Afrobeat tunes, harnessing the unifying power of music and sisterhood to carve out a welcoming space for Black women, femmes, and those who love them. The evening will also feature a short performance by the Black woman-led dance company EMERGE125. Admission is free until the house reaches capacity.

Reimagined in 2024 as a new, citywide annual festival of theater and performance emerging from New York and around the world, the 2024 iteration of Under the Radar introduces some of the most innovative international 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.

The festival's featured presentations come from Abrons Art Center and Ping Chong Company with Nile Harris's this house is not a home; the Fisher Center at Bard and The Invisible Dog Art Center with Tania El Khoury's Cultural Exchange Rate; Japan Society with Yu Murai and his company Kaimaku Pennant Race's Hamlet|Toilet; La Mama Experimental Theatre Club with Motus' Of the Nightingale I Envy the Fate and John Jarboe's Rose: You Are Who You Eat in collaboration with The Bearded Ladies Cabaret; Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts with Jessica L. Hagan's Queens of Sheba in partnership with Factory International and Soho Theatre, Inua Ellams' Search Party, and Pan Pan Theatre's The First Bad Man; Performance Space New York in collaboration with Mabou Mines with Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey's Open Mic Night; New York Live Arts | Live Artery, with Albert Ibokwe Khoza's The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu and Dynasty Handbag's Titanic Depression; NYU Skirball with William Shakespeare's As You Like It, A Radical Retelling by Cliff Cardinal; St. Ann's Warehouse in association with Irish Arts Center with Luke Murphy's Volcano; Theatre for a New Audience and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's presentation of the Soho Rep and NAATCO National Partnership Project's production of Shayok Misha Chowdhury's Public Obscenities; BRIC with a limited encore of Krymov Lab NYC's Eugene Onegin and Sister Sylvester's The Eagle and the Tortoise; and MART Foundation, Arlekin, and BAM with Igor Golyak's production of Tadeusz Słobodzianek's Our Class.

Mark Russell, in collaboration with festival producers Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne of ArKtype, continues to evolve the legacy of Under the Radar. On June 1, 2023, The Public Theater announced that for financial reasons—in the midst of near-ubiquitous hardship within the American theater—it could no longer produce the festival, after 18 editions, 17 of them at the Public. Now, Under the Radar reemerges with the enthusiasm of New York City's most adventurous presenters and artists, bringing together special programming beneath Under the Radar's banner. The Festival's resurgence speaks to the importance of collaboration as part of the solution for the theater world in its post-pandemic crisis while uplifting the historic impact of experimental work on New York City culture. In a tumultuous era for the performing arts, Under the Radar is a bold new proposition for a festival founded on inter-institutional collaboration, a testament to the vitality of New York's cultural organizations, and work continuing to be made worldwide under challenging conditions. By engaging numerous leaders in the arts and the visionary organizations they run as curators, Under the Radar welcomes a kaleidoscopic understanding of today's boldest work.

Under the Radar Festival opens the 2024 edition of JanArtsNYC, the citywide month-long initiative from the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment that celebrates the vibrancy of NYC's live entertainment sector at a critical moment in the performing arts. More information can be found at JanArtsNYC.org.

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