Under the Radar Festival
January 7–18, 2025
New York City
Since its founding in 2003 by Mark Russel, the Under the Radar Festival has played a central role in shaping the landscape of contemporary performance in New York. In 2006, the festival was included in The Public Theater season. The festival emerged in response to a growing field of artists working outside traditional theatrical forms, bringing together experimental theater, performance art, dance, and interdisciplinary practices. Over two decades, Under the Radar has become a key site for international exchange and U.S. premieres, supporting work that prioritizes formal experimentation, political urgency, and live inquiry. The festival’s curatorial approach has consistently foregrounded risk, hybridity, and practices that resist easy categorization.
The highlights selected here were chosen for how clearly they articulate distinct strategies within contemporary performance. Each work demonstrates a rigorous relationship to form, whether through image composition, engineered systems, durational structure, or embodied research. Rather than offering a survey of the program, this selection focuses on pieces that reveal how artists are working now: how they construct meaning through constraint, how bodies function as archives or instruments, and how performance continues to operate as a site of experimentation, friction, and sustained attention.
MAMI
Mario Banushi
Presented by NYU Skirball
Banushi’s MAMI builds a visual-poetic theatre language in near-silence, using image composition and staged memory to approach the mother-child relationship as an emotional landscape. The work’s force comes from its refusal to over-explain, relying instead on choreographed proximity, objects, and the slow reveal of tableau to carry grief, tenderness, and inheritance. The program framing links “mami” (mother) and “mam” (food), placing nurture beside hunger, offering beside consuming, and locating care inside a charged, uncanny domesticity.
Dates: Tue, Jan 7 (7:30 PM); Wed, Jan 8 (7:30 PM); Thu, Jan 9 (7:30 PM); Fri, Jan 10 (7:30 PM)
Tickets: https://nyuskirball.org
photo: © Pinelopi_Gerasimou for Onassis Stegi
PETRA
Tina Satter / Half Straddle
Adapted from The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Presented as part of Park Avenue Armory’s Under Construction Series and by Half Straddle
This work-in-progress adaptation treats Fassbinder’s chamber drama as an engine for performance tension: a sealed apartment, a concentrated relational field, and a romance that quickly becomes an architecture of control. The Under Construction framing invites attention to how Half Straddle builds performance, how text, bodies, and design systems produce volatility, and how intimacy turns procedural. The narrative stakes are clear, a designer in isolation, an obsessive attachment to a model named Karin, and a breakdown in emotional governance.
Dates: Thu, Jan 8 (6 PM); Fri, Jan 9 (7 PM); Sat, Jan 10 (7 PM); Sun, Jan 11 (5 PM and 7 PM); Mon, Jan 12 (7 PM)
Tickets: https://commerce.armoryonpark.org/overview/4562
TECHNE Homecoming
Curated by Onassis ONX
Presented by Onassis Culture Under The Radar+2Under The Radar+2
TECHNE Homecoming functions as an expanded performance ecology, an exhibition format that treats installation, immersion, and durational encounter as its primary dramaturgical tools. The program describes six large-scale installations and immersive performances that investigate identity and kinship through biological, mythological, and digital bonds, positioning the audience as moving witness inside a networked environment rather than a seated receiver. Featured artists include Andrew Thomas Huang, Damara Inglês, Miriam Simun, Sister Sylvester, Natalia Manta, and Tamiko Thiel, signaling a curatorial logic oriented toward hybrid media languages and embodied interface.
Dates: Fri, Jan 9; Sat, Jan 10; Sun, Jan 11; Mon, Jan 12; Thu, Jan 15; Fri, Jan 16; Sat, Jan 17; Sun, Jan 18 (each day 1 PM–7 PM)
Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/techne-homecoming-onassis-onx-tickets-1797105323399
Voyage Into Infinity
Narcissister
Presented by NYU Skirball Under The Radar+2Under The Radar+2
Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity is constructed as a chain reaction, a live, chaotic causality machine that collides reclaimed objects with the spectacle logic that has shaped the artist’s masked practice for two decades. The work explicitly riffs on Fischli and Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987), then shifts the authorship optics by foregrounding female-appearing performers as drivers of the action and as the image under pressure. A live score by Holland Andrews pushes the piece toward punk charge, with the title drawn from a Bad Brains song. The signature Narcissister mask operates as critique and distortion, holding beauty standards, objectification, and the malleability of race in a single visual device. The result reads as choreography, stunt system, and feminist revisioning at once.
Dates: Jan 16 (7:30 PM); Jan 17 (7:30 PM); Jan 18 (3 PM)
Tickets: https://nyuskirball.org/events/voyage-into-infinity/#tickets
Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works
TESTO
Wet Mess
Presented by Under the Radar at Dixon Place
TESTO works through “mess” as method, using movement and pre-recorded interviews to push at testosterone, drag edges, and the performance of transition as an unstable, comic, abrasive score. The program language is explicit about the piece’s surreal spectacle and its commitment to confusion, camp decision-making, and bodily rhetoric that moves between the mundane and the made-up until those categories collapse into each other. Rather than presenting a clean arc, the performance leans into instability, testing how desire and identity appear when language slips, when images overrun explanation, and when the body becomes a shifting site of projection.
Dates: Tue, Jan 13 (9:30 PM); Wed, Jan 14 (9:30 PM); Thu, Jan 15 (10:00 PM); Fri, Jan 16 (10:00 PM); Sat, Jan 17 (9:30 PM)
Tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/testo
Photo: © Lesley Martin
NOTHING: more
Autumn Knight
Commissioned and Presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater U
Knight frames NOTHING: more as an “anti-still life,” a durational composition built from object movement, disruption, and continuous reconfiguration. Three performers produce momentary images through shifting arrangements of size, texture, and density, then break those arrangements, re-read them, and sometimes merge body with object to create new composites. The work explicitly resists narration and legibility, favoring process and renewal as its central structure, a practice of assembling the self out of parts under conditions of ongoing change.
Dates: Fri, Jan 16 (7 PM); Sat, Jan 17 (7 PM); Sun, Jan 18 (7 PM)
Tickets: https://www.showpass.com/autumn-knight/
