There are almost 100 shows produced by the eight annual theater festivals listed below, all of whom begin in January. Largely experimental, avant-garde, mixed-genre, and at much lower ticket prices than most theater in New York, they take over venues throughout New York every January. That’s the month the Association of Performing Arts Presenters holds its annual convention here — thousands of people who book shows for a living, a natural audience for cutting-edge work from all over.
It’s worth sorting through the festival offerings yourself (their titles below are linked to their websites.) The shows are too numerous, and their descriptions often too cryptic, for me to offer anything but a cursory preview, presenting the festivals in more or less chronological order with some highlights, first impressions and suggestions:
Under The Radar Festival
January 4 – 19
various venues
Twenty months ago, the Under the Radar Festival, the oldest and largest of the January theater festivals, was declared dead as a dodo, when the Public Theater said it could no longer afford to sponsor it. Now, “Dead as a Dodo” is the title of one of the thirty-two works from some dozen countries that will be presented at venues throughout the city at the 20th anniversary Under the Radar Festival, having been saved last year by a consortium of Off-Broadway theaters.
“Dead as a Dodo,” at The Baruch Performing Arts Center from January 8th to February 9th, is actually one of the shows I want to make sure to see, because it’s by the puppet theater company Wakka Wakka, who won me over with its surreal, bawdy and barbed production eight years ago, Made in China. This one is described as an ever-shifting underworld that comes alive through its puppetry.
Other shows by artists with track records familiar to New York theatergoers:
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Schenkkan takes a break from epic political drama (The Great Society, The Kentucky Cycle) for an outrageous political satire: OLD COCK, January 8th to 19th, presented by Mala Voadora, Portugal in association with Twilight Theatre Co. and Peacedale Global Arts at 59E59. The Rooster of Barcelos, Portugal’s most popular souvenir, demands answers from Prime Minister Salazar, the fascist dictator who ruled Portugal for 40 years.
Show/Boat: A River, at NYU Skirball from January 9 to 26, reimagines the 1927 Kern and Hammerstein musical Show Boat, “exploring America’s transformation from 1880s Jim Crow to the challenges of today.” It is adapted and Directed by Target Margin Theater’s David Herskovits
Nothing Doing , at Chemistry Creative January 8 to 18, is the latest absurdist plunge into exhibitionism and chaos by Alex Tatarsky, whose previous polarizing performances have included Sad Boys in Harpy Land , and in the 2023 Prelude Festival:
Some shows, presented in partnership with familiar companies, are themselves decidedly unfamiliar and all the more intriguing because of it:
Amir Reza Koohestani’s “Blind Runner” performed in Persian with English subtitles, is presented in partnership with Waterwell at St. Ann’s Warehouse January 4 – 19. It is set in a jail cell in Tehran, and a road in Paris, where the husband of the Iranian prisoner trains and guides a young blind woman for a race.
In SpaceBridge, presented January 7 – 11 by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts and Visual Echo, is devised and performed by eleven young Russian refugees, aged ten to fifteen, who fled to the US due to their families’ anti-war stance and now live in NYC shelters, https://utrfest.org/program/spacebridge/
Three shows are set in the Middle East: The Search for Power, in Beirut (January 9 – 19 at the Invisible Dog Art Center); The Horse of Jenin (La MaMa, January 9-12); A Knock on the Roof in Gaza (NYTW, January 10 – 19);
Exponential Festival
January 2 – February 2
seven Brooklyn venues
The tenth annual Exponential Festival presents 19 shows at seven Brooklyn venues and online. It opens at The Brick with kanishk pandey’s Prisoncore, a multimedia show that takes place in a panopticon. (I had to look up panopticon; it’s a prison design that puts all the prisoners under constant surveillance under the theory that this will force them to modify their behavior.) That’s followed by Eulàlia Comas’s “haircut play :€“ (that emoji is part of the title) at the Loading Dock in Fort Greene. The description: “a girl wants a haircut and no one will give her one, until she stumbles on a hidden language of gates and keepers, gasses and lights.” (There is a content warning: “This show contains loud noise, violence, and explicit sexual content treated with little attention to realism.”) While the Exponential Festival shows don’t have the comically long titles as in past yearsl, many of the blurbs still don’t conjure up a clear sense of what they’ll be like (other than “different”), at least not for someone who is as literal-minded as I am. There are some exceptions. Susannah Yugler’s Cassandra “reimagines Euripides’ The Trojan Women…Using a pre-recorded script and a cast of dancers, dialogue acts only as a score for the movements, gestures, and tableaux vivants on stage, illustrating multiple parallel narratives: of a women-led talent agency, of ancient war, of corporate America, and of the delusions that sustain them.”
The International Fringe Encore Series
January 2 – March 16
SoHo Playhouse
This festival presents a dozen winners from various fringe festivals. The show already getting the most attention is “Gwyneth Goes Skiing” (January 20-26) inspired by the unsuccessful lawsuit by retired optometrist against Gwyneth Paltrow after a 2016 ski crash; this time, the audience is the jury. It’s one of the four shows that played at the Edinburgh Fringe, including My Mother’s Funeral: The Show (January 4-25, Kelly Jones’s riff on the high cost of death, and of art about death) FAMEHUNGRY (January 22 – February 8, London performance artist Louise Orwin’s deep dive through the Tik-Tok universe.) Later shows in the festival include In Pour Taste, which combines wine-tasting with joke-telling, and Gil Scott-Heron’s Bluesology presented by his daughter Gia Scott-Heron. The festival opens with Stories from India, (January 2 – 15) by three spoken-word artists, who originally performed their show at the Prague Fringe.
PhysFestNYC
January 9 – 19
Stella Adler Center for the Arts
It describes itself as a “physical theater festival,” but what that means, if last year is a guide, is: clowns. Lots of clowns, in many different styles, expanding (if not exploding) the definition of clown, and quite accomplished: Last year’s festival, which was its first year, featured clowns of the caliber of Bill Irwin (including Bill Irwin) This second year promises some 100 artists and companies in more than 20 shows (most of them one-night-only) and 15 workshops. Among the highlights:
New Immigrants, on a bill with Veni, Vidi, Vici. “New Immigrants” is excerpted from “Catching Silhouettes,” a lovely show I saw on the streets of Chinatown, featuring Timmy Ong and Shan Y. Chuang acting out their separate stories of arriving in New York as artists and feeling overwhelmed to the point of breakdown.
Koal. In this one-woman show performed by Jacinta Yelland, a baby koala, a coal miner and an Indigenous girl all strive to hold onto their homes in Australia before wildfires burn them all down.
Broken Box Mime Theater, a best-of collection of original short stories told entirely through movement.
Move It! A clown cabaret from Parallel Exit featuring pecial guests Randy Kato (cyr wheel), Book Kennison (juggling), Logan Kerr (unicycle), Ermiyas Muluken (freestanding ladder), Spencer Novich (eccentric performance), AJ Silver (roping), and newcomer Everett Lonergan (juggling).
The Fluxus Brothers Present: Good Art Bad Art. The brothers Ben and Mason Rosenthal who perform as the Fluxus Brothers, along with Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews, discourse on and demonstrate performances from the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, including Yoko Ono’s 1962 “Wall Piece for Orchestra,” and add some of their own (e.g. “Touch Me Touch You,” “BANG”)
Prototype Festival
January 9 – 19
four venues and online
The twelfth season of this opera festival will present seven pieces and concerts. If the descriptions aren’t always helpful, most of the individual show pages feature a short video that samples the music and the visual style of the show.
John Glover and Kelley Rourke’s Eat the Document, with a folk-rock feel, shifts between the protests in the 1970s and the consequences of those choices in the 1990s.The world premiere production takes place at HERE from January 9 – 17
Also at HERE, from January 11 – 14, is Sol Ruiz’s Positive Vibration Nation, described as a “rock guaguanco opera.” It offers more than a hint of Miami Sound (which combines funk, soul, disco, boogie, samba, and jazz) as it promises to investigate contemporary issues and explore Miami’s cultural singularity, through a sci-fi futurist/tech lens..
In Khary Laurent’s ten-minute Telekinetik, which fuses hip-hop with opera and is offered as digital theater, a would-be vigilante, tortured by a telepathic shaman, learns a difficult lesson about justice versus bloodlust
David T. Little and Anne Waldman’s Black Lodge, at Village East by Angelika, is an escape room that “draws on the complicated mythologies of the surrealist writer William S. Burroughs.” Opening night on January 11 promises (or threatens) an immersive pre-show called Bardo, “a liminal space between life and death where lost souls linger.”
Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleishmann’s In a Grove, January 16-19 at La MaMa, is inspired by the same short story Akira Kurosawa’s famous film “Rashomon,” where many characters offer conflicting versions of a murder,
Special Effects Festival
January 9 – 11 (Wild Project)
This festival, begun in 2014, is returning this year after a long pause with three days of group shows, starting with “Illuminated Skies: A Night of Puppetry,” featuring Cumulo by Emily Batsford, an excerpt from Shiny One by Jon Riddleberger, Cast From Heaven by Jacob Graham, and Where Did You Go, Connie? by Amanda Card
The Fire This Time Festival
January 23 – February 2
The Wild Project
The six ten-minute plays in the 16th season of this festival by emerging Black playwrights center on the experiences of Black women of different ages and eras from different backgrounds
Next Stage Festival
January 27 – March 10
Second Stage at Signature Center
The festival features five plays by early career playwrights, four of which are one-night-only staged readings; only one of them is presented in January, “Inside Voices,” Ross Golan’s musical based on the strange true story of Kasper Hauser, who was found as a youth wandering the streets of Nuremberg in 1828, claiming to have grown up isolated in a dark cell. In “On The Evolutionary Function of Shame,” the one full production, from February 12 to March 9, playwright D.A. Mindell riffs on the Adam and Eve story, with Adam a transgender man expecting a child who meets with his twin sister, Eve, a pioneering scientist.
