Under the Radar Festival, New York City, January 5–21, 2024.
The theatre is constantly questioning its own existence. It enacts this questioning through self-reflexive experimental and dialectical forms of performance and throughout its institutional, academic, and practical discourses. In New York City, theatre’s ongoing crises are often expressed by non-profit administrators, who bemoan the lack of funding, decry the absence of younger audiences, and critique the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion, all while refusing or unable to restructure their modes of production. Last year, fears of the impending death of experimental theatre opportunities were confirmed by the Public Theater’s decision to drop Under the Radar, a big-budget international festival it had hosted for seventeen years. But the festival did not disappear after all. Through the support of private donors, collaborations with major institutions, and representation by the production company ArKtype, a new Under the Radar (UTR) festival unfolded...