AMERICAN THEATRE | Under the Radar, Over the Hump: 3 Leaders in Dialogue

In retrospect, the Under the Radar festival was on the ropes for only a very brief if nerve-wracking timeout—from June 2023, when its longtime host the Public Theater announced they wouldn’t produce a 2024 festival, to last October, when artistic director Mark Russell unveiled plans for the January celebration, in which UTR gave up the comfort and branding of a home base in return for collaboration with many other arts organizations around New York City.

Now the festival is doubling down on that multi-venue approach for its January 2025 iteration, and expanding its visions with two new co-leaders, serving two-year terms alongside Russell: artist Kaneza Schaal and former Soho Rep artistic producer and Radical Evolutions co-founder Meropi Peponides.

The three leaders gathered recently not only to talk up next year’s fest, which runs Jan. 4-19 (and whose already announced highlights include Khawla Ibraheem’s A Knock on the Roof at New York Theatre Workshop, Faustin Linyekula’s My Body, My Archive at New York Live Arts, the Onassis ONX’s TECHNE at BAM, Shuji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at Japan Society, Aakash Odedra Company’s Little Murmur at New Victory Theater, as well as some new UTR commissions), but to talk about what the festival has meant to them and to the field, and what it still may mean for new artists and audiences.

AMERICAN THEATRE: Meropi and Kaneza, can you recall your first encounters with Under the Radar, either through your own involvement or as audience members? 

Kaneza Schaal: I was drawn to Under the Radar for the internationalism that I was starving for in the experimental theatre communities in which I worked. I felt like I wasn’t being asked to use as many languages as I speak, and I was confused. When I decided to make my own work, I didn’t know who to talk to. I thought if I reached out, maybe Mark would chat with me—and he did. He spent an hour talking to me about the first piece I wanted to make and encouraged me on the most challenging parts of the work. An artist I wanted to work with had served time in prison, and I wanted to integrate a parole strategy into our rehearsal development, and Mark wrote me this letter of recommendation that helped me get hooked up with the lawyers that I needed.

To me, Under the Radar has always been about entry points into this city, and access into the processes of making work that we define for ourselves. I didn’t premiere that work with Under the Radar, but Under the Radar was fundamental to me knowing I had somewhere to stand, and that I had a community to think with about what I was trying to do. 

That project platformed my phenomenal collaborator Cornell Alston’s feature in Sing Sing with Colman Domingo. It allowed me to pilot a program at juvenile detention centers in upstate New York and pass it to my other brilliant collaborator Flakoo Jimenez to run and grow. How do we all build platforms for ourselves and each other and invest in the ecosystems in which we practice? This work is fundamentally not transactional, no matter how hard some folks try to define it so.

That 60 minutes Mark took to talk with me is in the fabric of it all. I think about all the 60 minutes-es that Mark has spent, that Meiyin Wang has spent, with artists, interns, funders, technicians, administrators—that fabric is necessary to maintaining entry points to art making in the developer nation empire choking NYC. That fabric is how I first came to know UTR, and fundamental to my own sense of practice.

Meropi Peponides: This is when I’ll out myself as a former Under the Radar intern. I moved to New York and was like, “Wait, there’s a festival of international experimental theatre going on in New York?” I knew that was something I wanted to get in on as soon as possible, and I became an intern. I’ve been in touch with Mark ever since; I worked a few more years for the festival in different project-based capacities before moving on to other things—and now here I’m back full circle in this role.

Mark, we’re curious about the moment the festival emerged from, and why it has felt so important to keep it going and to continue reimagining it, even through recent challenges?

Mark Russell: Under the Radar started in 2005, during the xenophobia of George W. Bush’s presidency. This festival was an answer to that to some extent. Under the Radar also comes from the fact that there was a wealth of devised work being made that wasn’t considered part of the “American theatre.” All of this rich work was happening, and the American theatre was just not acknowledging it. I was inspired by the European festivals I’d been going to. Here in New York it was a completely new idea and people really took to it. I wanted to have American artists bumping up against artists doing similar work from around the world, and to provide an entryway for programmers from elsewhere to come and discover new groups of artists. I received money to do a conference originally, but I took that money and duct-taped it together to make a seven-day festival. Susan Feldman at St. Ann’s Warehouse gave it a space, and it just took off.

Kaneza: You took this model that relates to a European-style festival, but I also feel like you have always had a global sense of programming that lives beyond that European model and had an ear and eye to artists in the global South. And you can’t talk about New York City without talking about the whole world.

Mark: I want this festival to look like New York City, and I want to mix it up as much as possible. It’s all about surprises, and keeping the New York artistic community a little on edge.

Meropi: That first year I was like, “Whoa, theatre can do all this?” It was mind-blowing to see the different ways performance was showing up from all over the world. To this day, artists from New York go to this festival to inspire their own work, and to better understand their place both in the arts ecosystem and the world at large.

Does it feel just as important today to be fighting Americentrism in New York theatre?

Mark: It feels even more important now—we’re in even more danger of being more isolated.

Kaneza: I was in Kigali, Rwanda, for most of the summer, and spent a little time in Nairobi. I spoke with artists in the region about their work and how they’re feeling about the curatorial scene. So many people talked about the current flush of “local” programming, in the spirit of “for us, by us,” and also emphasized that their work is part of a global conversation and they wish for it to be situated as such. We all want our works to be in the global conversation we’re in. New York artists are the same way and want to be in the global conversation they’re in.

Mark: UTR is all about global citizenship. Which I think is not really understood or embraced in the U.S. What are we saying into this larger dialogue? 

Meropi: American exceptionalism has only gotten more intense in the last 20 years, so it feels crucial to be able to chip away at that and try and assert that we’re all in this network and conversation together. The U.S. doesn’t have to be at the center—and in fact is way less at the center than it was 20 years ago. So let’s embrace that. Let’s figure out what the possibilities are, knowing that to be true.

And of course there’s a new dynamism to the festival, with all of the opportunities that partnering with so many different organizations brings, and that is in so many ways collapsing the distances within New York itself—just in the way that these global dialogues that have been opened up by the festival.

Mark: This is our 20th year, but I feel like it’s our second year. Since Under the Radar expanded into a citywide festival, it’s felt completely different. They used to call this “downtown” work, but downtown is a state of mind. And talk about reflecting New York City—now we can do that even easier and better.

Meropi: It’s this plurality of voices in every sense. We’re not just focused on the U.S., we’re focused on many, many different countries, and now many, many different venues are in conversation. These sometimes wildly different cultural institutions are all part of this network and ecology that makes up culture in New York City. 

Just as the festival is pluralistic in its programming, can we talk about what it means to now have more perspectives at work internally, and how your shared leadership replicates the presenting ethos of the festival?

Kaneza: One of the challenges to theatre is the profound sense of disinvitation that has existed for a really long time. My father was a squatter in the East Village; he lived four blocks from PS122, and just around the corner from that, NYTW. He never set foot in either of those buildings. And this was a man who was an intrepid cultural explorer, who came to this country at 19 not speaking the language in so many ways, who was curious about everything and would go into synagogues and churches just to see, “What’s up with God in there?” This is not a man who’s afraid to go into places he’s unfamiliar with—and he never set foot in those theatres.

I performed at New York Theatre Workshop, my first performances in New York City, and I remember writing his name down on my comp ticket. It was this exciting moment: a girl from Nowhere, Calif., getting to be a part of theatre and this extended tradition that is theatre, and to bridge the pieces of my life, my family, with the kind of family you build in the theatre. I remember looking out when we were doing one of our quirky dance breaks to see if he was in his seat. He wasn’t there. And I think so much about why he wasn’t there. It’s not enough to open the doors. It’s not enough to have a broad footprint. It’s not enough to have a free ticket. What does it mean to do the active work of invitation to get these many different New York Cities to talk to each other? That’s what I’m most excited about in joining this team.

Mark: Kaneza talks about the many cities in New York City, which just resonates so much for me. And it’s all about the invitation. That’s what Under the Radar is. It doesn’t have a building. Each performance is a present you could open, and we’re trying to find ways to get people to open them.

Meropi: Each of us come from such different places and histories and perspectives and aesthetics. So it’s exciting to be in that conversation and figuring out, where are the points of convergence and divergence? How do we come together and negotiate these different sensibilities that we have? That has always been one of my favorite parts of programming anything more broadly. The eventual utopian dream is that this work is for everybody and everybody goes. This work of needing to invite in, in this idealized dream, will eventually become irrelevant because everybody will feel as if it’s theirs.

In what concrete ways are hoping to expand Under the Radar’s audiences?

Kaneza: It’s very exciting to me that this year we have venues from the Apollo to BRIC. I was speaking with Michelle Ebanks last weekend, brilliant leadership at the Apollo. We talked about the Apollo being an element on the periodic table. You can’t break it down into unique parts—it is fundamentally a cultural and institutional logic of its own. It must be tended in its own image. UTR is uniquely positioned to be porous with the specific needs of unique cultural enterprises, venues, institutions, whatever we want to call it. In this new life of UTR, what does it mean to expand the relationships between the institutions and audiences that make up the ecosystem of this community? I’m also curious about young people and how do we invite young people to work? Obviously, at its best, there should always be work in the festival that some parents might not want their children to see. I think we’re not doing our job if every parent in New York city would be comfortable with every show. But I’m also super excited about how we invite young people into this conversation. That work is beginning this year as well, with Mary Rose at New Victory Theater.

Mark: This year we have a whole thread of shows that are focused on youth theatre, which is going to be really exciting. And I’m glad that that’s added to this fabric now.

Meropi: Talk about a group of people that is actively disinvited to the theatre! And then we complain that nobody’s showing up to the theatre as adults. But you gotta get them hooked early. 

Kaneza: The most pressing questions of our time get dealt with so often over kitchen tables and within families. 

As Kaneza touched on, each of the individual partner organizations has its respective communities that have developed around it. Can you elaborate on the potential of there being new intersections between these communities invested in these places?

Mark: There’s a lot of turf war in New York City. But this is January, nothing’s happening; you can drop the turf war, let that Lincoln Center audience come down to La MaMa or somewhere they haven’t been. The festival gives everyone a license to experience something new—if we make the invitation right.

Meropi: There’s a really amazing potential for connection and cross-pollination among organizations that might have a really loyal following but might not be part of the sort of nexus of “downtown.” 

As you did last year, you’ll feature a symposium this year, presumably addressing the state of the theatre industry. What do you hope gets discussed this year?

Mark: We’re thinking about solutions. The theatre world has spent a lot of time beating itself up over the last four years. And, like—stop that! What are the solutions, what have you done, what have you seen that’s worked? And there are a lot of things working, but they’re not getting enough notice. How can we be part of that solution instead of all these problems?

Kaneza: We also talked about: This is the 20th anniversary of Under the Radar, and what is Under the Radar in 20 years? How do we all share some of our delights and joys and curiosities about that? 

Meropi: We talked about what it means to be in this sort of practice of imagining. What are your biggest, wildest, most utopian ideas? Let’s get them out there, because maybe some tiny little bit of that is actually possible somewhere. How are we building up that practice of visioning forward with one another? I think that is hopefully going to be a big part of the symposium.

Kaneza: One thing I’d love to begin to poke at are obsessions with and fantasies of permanence. One of the massive residues of imperialism that lives in the theatre, particularly in the U.S., is a fantasy of permanence or fixedness as winning and as success. If permanence isn’t the goal, if it’s more about an ecosystem continuing to work and function healthily among many people, then maybe institutions that stay the same for 100 years, or even 50 years, is not a goal. What does it mean to even look at the history of Under the Radar, for example, without fixed permanence as the ambition, but the healthiness of the change? I would be very excited if that’s a direction that some of the conversations at the symposium could go.

Mark: It’s always important to be in conversation about, what is this in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years? Each year, part of my process has been: Well, should we even be doing a festival, and what should it be? How might it reflect the state of the world and politics? What are the voices that need to be heard and aren’t being heard? It’s been about being open to reshaping the festival to address those things.

Under the Radar is now commissioning work. What does the future of the festival look like as it further embraces this model?

Mark: We’ve made some real commitments to Nile Harris last year and this year as well; to Kaneza, Jennifer Kidwell, and Alexandra Tatarsky. We are producing and commissioning more and more, and making more connections that way. Because, at this moment especially, artists in New York City need some investment. So we have found ways to make those investments.

Meropi: If we’re doing our jobs well, in five years the commissioned artists will be folks that we collectively don’t even know yet. What’s exciting about becoming a producing festival is it gives us the opportunity to collaborate with an artist to build something from the ground up that can then be positioned strategically and built for a global tour. Obviously if we’re meeting artists only once they already have everything complete, we’re missing some folks. Because that’s already a barrier to entry.

This festival is never thematically programmed, but in thinking through this coming year’s offerings, are there any emerging dialogues you’re noticing among them that make a compelling case for experiencing them together?

Kaneza: Abundance!

Mark: One of the things about this festival is, I thought it would be small and sort of low-key, and then, after last year, everyone wanted to participate. So this thing has grown. It has a different kind of strength. But there are some deep threads: There’s this youth theatre thread, there’s puppetry. There’s a concern with what’s going on in the Middle East, and opening up that discussion that’s so fraught now.

Kaneza: I think a kinetic processing of this global moment is present in the festival. My sense is there’s going to be a way many artists are sharing how they’re processing being alive right now.

Mark: There are many spinning plates in this one, and if I already knew the threads, I would be bored.

Meropi: Giving people the space to make meaning of their own experience is in and of itself, I think, something so unusual right now. We are in a media landscape where we are told what to think constantly. Where we are hit over the head with the same messaging, or marketing. So to have a place where you’re given the space and the freedom to experience whatever you choose in the order of your choosing, and then make that meaning for yourself, is an incredibly beautiful and important thing that the festival offers to people.

Mark: That’s what we’re going to find out at the bar, in conversation. That’s where we’ll see how the festival is like big orchestral work: with high parts, fun parts, dark parts. And how it begins to make a whole shape.