By Any Means Necessary

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 across ten venues, offering fifteen productions as well as "UFO" works in progress, a symposium, a dance party, sessions for young producers, and more. Not unrelatedly, the most interesting works in this year's UTR were self-aware on multiple levels and engaged in critical inquiry, including being transparent about modes of production and offering theoretical reflection on theatre's role in society as a form of collective action and conscientious processing of trauma. In structural correlation with these interests, many UTR artists engaged audiences directly in participatory dialogue.Inua Ellams's solo work Search Party presented a calm conversational space in which he used individual words suggested by audience members to search in his own poetry, essays, and short stories for materials to share. Sitting on a couch in the middle of the void space of a Lincoln Center black box theatre, surrounded by books, Ellams pulled up a poem about basketball, a discussion of James Baldwin, and a short story written from interviews with young Eritrean and Sudanese refugees. The short story involved evocative imagery—crossing the desert in a truck, an inflated boat bumping up against floating corpses—and drew us into such intimacy with the protagonists—their relationships, their jokes, their loss—that the audience sat in uncanny silence when Ellams finished reading. "Yeah, it's hard to clap for that," he assured us, as we released a collectively held breath. Ellams also responded to questions from the audience, including one about the form. He told us that he was always nervous about the power inequity of the theatre. "Politicians and artists should serve publics," he said, describing the interactive format of Search Party as a way of breaking down hierarchies and centering multiple voices. He also spoke of his personal struggle with anxiety, thereby connecting embodied and political experiences.In a much smaller studio at The Flea Theatre, Jenn Kidwell and The Blackening's work was also social and reflective, personal and political. In we come to collect (a flirtation, with capitalism), Kidwell said that she's been "thinking about the really big questions," such as the nature of time, labor, and the value of human life. Running through the piece was the phrase "potentially noble fictions," which was used to variously reference money, property ownership, theatre, and the American dream. Presented as a free work in progress, we come to collect was still struggling with its forms as it navigated elements of stand-up comedy, call-and-response, and confessional downtown performance art. Yet, Kidwell's flirtatious charisma ultimately held the room and encouraged the audience to reflect on dominant narratives.As Nile Harris noted multiple times during this house is not a home, "There are no mistakes in the theatre." Sitting on the edge of the stage at Abrons Art Center, he disclosed some details about his relationship with Abrons and UTR, including what was happening with the ticket sales receipts from the show. This frank exposé was layered with many other modes of theatricality and metatheatricality, including a video of collaborator Malcolm-x Betts complaining over social media about Harris putting him in bad whiteface, a choregraphed fight over a vape, and several striking stage pictures involving bubbles, painted plywood signs, and the reveal of a cavernous backstage loading dock. Together, the components of the show formed a postmodern pastiche that burst at the seams of the theatre's containing "house," analogized by a bouncy house that was inflated and then deflated with performers trapped inside it.At perhaps the "climax" of the show, Uniska Wahalo Kano, a performance artist and street performer who is well known on social media for interviewing politicians and racists as "Crackhead Barney," moved through the audience in smeared white make-up, a diaper, and a blonde wig. "Who are you going to vote for?" she asked audience members, and "do you like n*****s?" When she asked the audience if we supported Hamas, there was clapping and cheering, a resounding yes. "Don't be terrorists! Stop doing terrorism!" Harris shouted half-laughingly. Even though this house is not a home has many bitter and nihilistic moments, the work seemed to operate as an exorcism, a catharsis.At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Our Class by Tadeusz Słobodzianek also involved metatheatrical elements, and its audience relations were similarly centralized. Held together within a strong Brechtian staging by director Igor Golyak, the play is set over the course of approximately sixty years—1936–2002—and follows a real-life graduating class from the small Polish town of Jedwabne. With the birth and death dates of the class members written in advance on the towering chalkboard wall of the set, the audience was well aware of what will happen in 1941 to all but two of the Jewish characters. The staging made dexterous use of white balloons with grotesque Jewish caricatures drawn on them by performers, as well as chalk dust, tall precarious ladders, and live-feed cameras. At the beginning of each act, the actors sat in folding chairs with scripts in hand before morphing gradually into the characters. As in this house is not a home, actors address the audience with ironic commentary, and different modes of performance are patterned and layered. Unlike this house is not a home, however, this work seemed to rip into and rip apart the audience rather than offer catharsis. The self-conscious staging did not reveal emotional undercurrents or release tensions; it distanced audiences from scenes that would otherwise be too excruciating to watch: people being beaten to death, raped, burned alive in a barn, and tortured. In this context, alienation and critical distance encouraged metanarration rather than empathetic relations between bodies. The play itself, written in 2009, seemed to take no moral stance other than stark scientific representation of humanity's inherent cruelty.The Eagle and the Tortoise by sister sylvester questioned the role of the observer, the spectator, and the "map-making" interpreter, framing the artist's documentary practices as "amateur ethnography, anthropology, cartography" that self-consciously provides "maps for the war tourist." Sitting behind the audience and speaking carefully into a microphone, sister sylvester guided the audience through topographical layers of myth and meaning, from the tale of Aeschylus' death via a tortoise dropped by an eagle onto his bald head to stories of sylvester's journeys in Diyarbakır and the Qandil mountains to the narrative of Kurdish martyr Deniz (Destan Temmuz). Cued by sylvester and by the brightening and dimming of headlamps given to them to wear, audience members read (mostly privately but once aloud together) from accordion books provided. The books contained engravings of sixteenth century Turkey by Melchior Lorck and intricate drawings by sylvester, as well as instructions for simple gestures to perform, such as making mountains out of tissue paper and shining the headlamp at the backs of our own hands. A live-feed video of a tortoise moving around a tabletop environment amid stacks of books, moss, and photos was shown on a central screen, intercut with more drawings and photographs laid out on a lightbox in real time by the videographer Civan Özkanoğlu. On the other side of the screen, Ozan Aksoy's live playing and singing gave the work a steady pace and shifted moods between mourning, surging resilience, and rhythmic focus. At one point, Özkanoğlu joined Aksoy to play on a tortoise-shell lyre suspended on fishing line from the ceiling.Relentlessly shifting perspectives to both evade and induce different shades of grief and wonder, The Eagle and the Tortoise offered existential crises plainly across its open pages and pitches. "No more images," sylvester declared near the end of the performance, noting that famous Hollywood actor Jake Gyllenhaal is currently capitalizing on Kurdish stories to produce a blockbuster film about "anarchists vs. ISIS." The next reading from the book told the tale of Hermes and how he killed a tortoise to make a musical instrument from his shell. "Corpses become currency," stated the small lettering, printed in thick black ink indenting the soft white pages of the book. At curtain call, sister sylvester gave an unequivocal call for ceasefire, an end to occupation, and a stop to the genocide in Gaza. This work did not merely refer to contexts outside the theatre's frames and houses; it seemed to be drawing itself out like a map of spiritual and socio-political relations, orienting itself around a moral searching as it traced embodied reckonings already in motion through deep time and across shifting lines.The most compelling works in UTR were structured around deliberate relationships with audiences that used self-conscious modes of performance. Each production demanded in its own way that individuals and social groups practice communal meaning-making and confront the very real differences and violences between them. Through experiencing this year's festival, I felt reassured that Under the Radar would continue to support the experimental performance-makers who are processing existential crises by any means necessary.