Under the Radar returns for its 21st edition January 7–25, 2026, serving as a singular catalyst for the city’s performing arts organizations to introduce the best of U.S. and international experimental performance—what festival organizers refer to as the “global downtown”—to New York City. Since its reemergence in 2024, Under the Radar has gathered artists, audiences, and theater industry experts around a thrilling array of contemporary performances shaped by fearless experimentation. 2026 marks its third year as a citywide collaboration informed by the multiplicity of visions of the partner institutions’ artistic leaders. Under the Radar 2026 inaugurates a new leadership model: Co-Creative Directors Meropi Peponides and Kaneza Schaal join Founder and Artistic Director Mark Russell to form the first of what will be rotating cohorts of festival curators, ensuring that the festival’s programming is ever-evolving and of-the-moment. The festival is produced by Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne of ArKtype.

Under the Radar 2026 navigates the high stakes of our ever-evolving political and cultural landscape by embracing creative risk as a working condition and guiding principle. Today, Under the Radar revealed a glimpse of the lineup, ahead of a full announcement to come this Fall. Among numerous offerings are works that embrace instability and collapse as sites for discovery and emotional depth. Spanning multiple performance disciplines, these works reflect a shared commitment to audacious experimentation. The highlights announced today include:

• Bronx-based family trio The HawtPlates break down vernacular music styles into multiple modes of vocalizing in Dream Feed, producing their soul sound in the spirit of the family heirloom while defying genre, produced by HERE Arts Center, originally commissioned and developed through the HERE Arts Residency Program (HARP), with additional commissioning support by Under the Radar. 

• Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés throw their bodies into a complex conversation in DARKMATTER, applying the Chopped and Screwed method to their movement language to seek new forms for—and ways of looking at—the body and the outside world to which it relates, presented by Performance Space New York. 

• Narcissister channels a punk aesthetic in Voyage Into Infinity, a feminist homage to the 1987 film The Way Things Go that collides repurposed materials and masked spectacle to explore states of impending collapse, featuring a live score performed by Holland Andrews, presented by NYU Skirball. 

• In MAMI, Albanian-Greek director Mario Banushi crafts a hymn to the mother-child bond, transforming the stage into a memory-scape of unsettling intimacy, presented by NYU Skirball. 

• DATA ROOM, a series of conversations hosted by New York-based theater, opera, and film artist Kaneza Schaal, presented at The Performing Garage. “What do I do as an artist? I make secure spaces for storing and sharing materials with select individuals: I make data rooms. This experiment launches a multi-year project focused on how we share ideas in the world we live in today.” 

• Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein bring their signature blend of dance-adjacent physicality and theatrical disorientation to Friday Night Rat Catchers, wherein a disco-drenched 1976 game show spirals from glittering spectacle to surreal collapse, performed with Marianne Rendón and presented by the Live Artery Festival at New York Live Arts.

Under the Radar will once again offer an industry symposium for professionals from around the world to address the most pressing issues facing the creative sector; will present numerous opportunities to experience major works in progress; and will provide new community gathering spaces for audiences and artists. 

Under the Radar Festival Founder and Executive Director Mark Russell said, “After 20 years as artistic director of the Under the Radar Festival, I am pleased to pass the artistic leadership of the festival to Kaneza, and Meropi, working beside all of our venue partners and producers. They bring fresh perspectives to the festival and have created an exceptional lineup that reflects the vibrancy of artistic exploration in our city and around the world. These five works are just a glimpse of the breadth and reach of Under the Radar 2026 – our 21^st edition.”

Under the Radar Festival Co-Creative Director Kaneza Schaal said, “Under the Radar is comprised of all these different performance venues choosing to collaborate together. That is a commitment to generosity. Formally, this new life of Under the Radar over the past three years is built on the tending of ecosystems that have been created over 20 years, a tending of literal genealogies of creative practice, seeded across the world. This unique collaboration is one of the sacred risks of this festival and it’s being done for the sake of New York City.”

Under the Radar Festival Co-Creative Director Meropi Peponides said, “What excites me about putting this slate of work out there is that one person might be confused by any individual show and the person right next to them might be thrilled. A third person in the audience may have yet another, very different response. I see the festival as holding space for all of those extremes and everything in between. Just because something delights me doesn’t mean it won’t enrage somebody else. This is crucial, because so much of our media landscape is geared toward us being told what to think, constantly. So the act of exploring divergent reactions with curiosity, with generosity—that is the thing we can all gather around. This festival exists in the act of taking a chance on something unknown—of most everyone in the audience taking that collective risk together.”

Beyond the highlights announced today, Under the Radar, in the coming weeks, will announce programming presented in partnership with more than 20 New York City cultural organizations, including La MaMa, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and The Chocolate Factory Theater.

Mia Yoo, Artistic Director of La MaMa ETC, said, “La MaMa is honored to come together with our NYC performing arts community to partner on this mutually supportive network that is the Under the Radar Festival in its 21st year. Under the Radar remains an exciting platform for artists who play the vital role of helping us question, process and inspire change. This citywide collective action provides NYC with a cultural life force that feels so necessary in this moment.”

Shanta Thake, Ehrenkranz Chief Artistic Officer of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, commented, “We love that our annual partnership with the seminal, citywide Under the Radar Festival allows Lincoln Center to join in the celebration of the world’s boldest visions from the prescient global theater artists of our time in partnership with venues across our great city. Under the Radar is the kind of fearless cultural collaboration New York City needs to thrive in these challenging times.”

Brian Rogers, Co-Founder and Artistic Executive Director of The Chocolate Factory Theater, said, “The Chocolate Factory is proud to be a part of the Under the Radar Festival, and join the community of venues across the city that come together annually to bring the festival to life amidst one of the world’s most vital performing arts industry gatherings and in increasingly challenging times. We love being an essential part of the critical work Under the Radar does to further the mission of bringing US artists to the global sphere, and the world’s most vital voices to NYC. The cultural landscape of NYC and the five boroughs needs this now and in the future.”

UNDER THE RADAR 2026 – PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS

The HawtPlates, Dream Feed, HERE Arts Center 

The HawtPlates’ Dream Feed is an electroacoustic song cycle that drops audiences into the humor, terror, beauty, and allure of an active mind within a slumbering body. A 2023 HERE Arts Residency Program (HARP) commission with additional commissioning support by UTR, this psychedelic live concept album makes its world premiere in the 2026 Under the Radar Festival.

The HawtPlates is a family singing group that was formed in a one-bedroom apartment in The Bronx. They create live vocal works by breaking down vernacular musical forms and reconstituting them into other modes of performance, producing sound tonics and “one pots,” harkening to the spirit of the family heirloom recipe.

Cherish Menzo, DARKMATTER, Performance Space New York 

In DARKMATTER, Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés explore ways to detach their bodies from public perception and their daily reality. Among other references, they look up to the sky, at dark matter, at black holes that meet and collide to give birth to a new, (afro)futuristic and enigmatic body. Menzo rids themselves of biased ways of looking at one’s own body, at that of the other, and at the stories we attribute to bodies in general. Together, Menzo and Cortés throw their bodies into complex conversations that they want to both enter into and transcend—a duality that feeds the performance. As in her previous project, JEZEBEL, Menzo stretches her movement vocabulary further by “Chopping and Screwing” her choreography via the Houston, Texas hip-hop remix technique in which the tempo of a song is sharply reduced and the pitch is lowered. By stretching the notions of time, the performing body generates new readings and perceptions. In DARKMATTER, Menzo aims to create a thorough reshuffling of our atoms, looking for a new form for—and way of looking at—our body and the complex outside world to which it relates.

Cherish Menzo is a choreographer and dancer, who lives in Brussels and Amsterdam. In 2013 she graduated from The Urban Contemporary (JMD) at the ‘Hogeschool voor de Kunsten’ in Amsterdam. In her work, Menzo mainly looks at how the body can transform itself on stage and physically represent different ideas. She often uses images that seem recognizable at first glance, but by subsequently underlining the complexity and contradictory nature of what is presented, she generates new forms that also bring new connotations. Menzo seeks out new forms of movement and being, while placing beauty and the grotesque on an equal footing. She consciously seeks out the alienating effect that results from this in order to guide both the viewer and herself away from the known. Away from the familiar that we sometimes too easily equate with ‘the (only) truth’.

Narcississter, Voyage Into Infinity, NYU Skirball

Rooted in a fascination with states of impending collapse, both literal and metaphoric, Voyage Into Infinity captivates viewers through an inventive collision of reclaimed, everyday items with the spectacle that has defined much of Narcissister’s two-decade practice. The performance pays homage to Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s canonical video The Way Things Go (1987), in which the duo created and documented an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. In contrast to the inspirational work’s unseen male creators, Narcissister’s rendition will foreground the artist and other female-appearing performers as both drivers of the action and subjects of the crowd’s fascination.

Borrowing its title from a song by the hardcore band Bad Brains and featuring a live score performed by musician Holland Andrews, Voyage Into Infinity channels raw energy and a punk aesthetic. Through this work, which will also be filmed and made into a video of its own right, the artist offers a contemporary, feminist revisioning of The Way Things Go. As in all of her projects, the emblematic Narcissister mask—originally repurposed from a 1960s-era wig display form—provides eerie commentary on entrenched beauty standards, the objectification of women, and the malleability of race. Voyage Into Infinity is presented in collaboration with Pioneer Works.

Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Masked and merkin-ed, she works at the intersection of dance, art, and activism in a range of media including live performance, film, video, collage, and sculpture. She presents work worldwide at festivals, nightclubs, museums, and galleries. She won “Best Use of a Sex Toy” at Good Vibrations Erotic Film Festival, a Bessie nomination for the theatrical performance Organ Player, Creative Capital and United States Artists Awards, and interested in troubling the popular entertainment and experimental art divide, she appeared on America’s Got Talent. Her first feature film, Narcissister Organ Player, premiered at Sundance 2018. Her activist short film Narcissister Breast Work premiered at Sundance 2020 and won a Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at Outfest 2021. Voyage Into Infinity, a large-scale performance commission, had its world premiere at Pioneer Works in 2024. Narcissister is currently developing a new theatrical piece as part of Playwrights Horizons’ New Works Lab.

Mario Banushi, MAMI, NYU Skirball 

Creator of a stage language all his own, the 26-year-old Albanian–born Mario Banushi has been hailed internationally as the wunderkind of Greek theater. If, in his previous works, the theme was mourning, in MAMI it is the source of life. In Banushi’s personal mythology, the almost identical Greek words mami and mam become identical: Mami, as in mother; Mam, as in food. One pulls out one’s heart and offers it to another like a warm loaf of bread. The stage becomes a landscape of memory, as eerie as it is familiar. The performers, immersed in silence, create moments of profound emotion and urge us to recognize and confront our own memories, our own relationships, and the freight of the emotional legacy we carry. Recently presented to rave reviews at the Avignon Festival, MAMI is a visual poem about the mother-child relationship, a show that serves as a tribute to the women who nurtured us.

Mario Banushi was born in 1998 and lived in Albania until the age of six, when he moved permanently to Greece. He studied acting at the Drama School of the Athens Conservatory, graduating in 2020.

His directorial debut in theatre was Ragada, a performance developed and presented in a private home in Athens during the pandemic lockdowns.

In 2023, Banushi premiered his second work, Goodbye, Lindita, at the Experimental Stage of the National Theatre of Greece. The acclaimed production toured to  the International Theatre Amsterdam, the Adelaide Festival in Australia, and many other locales. Banushi’s third work, Taverna Miresia – Mario, Bella, Anastasia, premiered in July 2023 at the Athens Epidaurus Festival to sold-out audiences and has toured internationally since early 2024.

Banushi is an Onassis AiR Fellow for 2023–24 through the Dramaturgy Fellowship.

Kaneza Schaal, DATA ROOM, The Performing Garage

DATA ROOM is a series of intimate, public conversations conceived by New York-based theater, opera, and film artist Kaneza Schaal. Staged at The Performing Garage, the project explores how we exchange knowledge, preserve creative lineage, and build shared meaning in a time of fragmented attention and digital overexposure.

“What do I do as an artist?” Schaal asks. “I make secure spaces for storing and sharing materials with select individuals: I make data rooms.”

This first iteration marks the launch of a multi-year project focused on the architectures—physical, social, and conceptual—that shape how ideas circulate today. DATA ROOM operates as both metaphor and method: a site for critical exchange, cultural memory, and imaginative refuge.

Kaneza Schaal is a New York City-based artist working in theater, opera, and film. Her work has shown in divergent contexts from NYC galleries, to courtyards in Vietnam, to East African amphitheaters, to European opera houses, to USA public housing, to rural auditoriums in the UAE. By creating art that speaks many formal, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and experiential languages she seeks expansive audiences.

In her commitment to artist-centered institutions, Schaal co-founded the Gihanga Institute for Contemporary Art in Kigali, Rwanda; The Collective Practice, a resource sharing structure for theater makers; and served on the board of PS122/PSNY; and the leadership council for the artist employment and guaranteed income initiative Creatives Rebuild New York. She is currently a co-director of Under The Radar Festival in New York City.

Schaal is the recipient of a Doris Duke Artist Award, LA Opera Stern Artist Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, United States Artists Fellowship, and Creative Capital Award.

Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein, Friday Night Rat Catchers, Live Artery I New York Live Arts

Beneath the shimmer of a disco ball, lucky contestants dance like they have the world on a string. The year is 1976, an irresistible bassline drives, and the martinis never run dry. What could go wrong?

While the contestants nearly lose their minds with the pleasure of being selected, The Host has reconfigured the game. Ripped headfirst from their shrimp cocktail, gameplay unfolds at breakneck speed. Cement punctures the dancehall, the party grinds to a halt, and an inky night belches to the surface. 

Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein are NYC-based experimental dance makers and performers whose work has been dubbed “The High Weird” by critics. Intensely physical and visually maximal, the pair’s works are rooted in dance-adjacent physicality but reimagine what choreography can be used to accomplish theatrically. Recent work includes Deepe Darknesse (Jan 2024 in New York Live Arts’ Live Artery, received a full-page review in The New York Times by critic Brian Seibert; and June 2023 at The Collapsable Hole), 1-800-3592-113592 (March 2024 at MITU580 with performance collective CHILD, of which Fagan/Engelstein are founding members; included in Helen Shaw’s “Best Theater of 2024” for The New Yorker), Catches No Flies (Jan 2020, Exponential Festival, recipients of inaugural Exponential Fellowship), Red Carrots (Jan 2019, Exponential), and many more short works and experimentations. Their work has been supported by Baryshnikov Arts Center (2023 BAC Open), NYSCA Individual artists grants, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists in Dance 2025, Mercury Store, and others. Along with their work as a collaborative duo, credits include: Fagan: No President by Nature Theater of Oklahoma (dancer), experimental opera HILMA at Tony Award-winning theater The Wilma (choreographer), Open Throat at Little Island NYC (choreographer), THESE DAYS short indie series premiering at Sundance 2021 (choreographer), Promenade by Maria Irene Fornes, dir. Morgan Green (choreographer). Engelstein: American Idle, a 20-person public performance commissioned by Times Square Arts by Maia Chao (choreographer); this is the beginning, this is the end by Joanna Kotze (dancer), Oceanic Feeling by Faye Driscoll (dancer), They All Lived There by Isa Spector (dancer), all i want is what you want (co-director/performer with Jo Warren).

ABOUT UNDER THE RADAR

Under the Radar is a NYC-based festival celebrating new theater and performance works from around the world and down the street, produced and programmed in collaboration with venues from around the city. Led by Artistic Director Mark Russell, Co-Creative Directors Kaneza Schaal & Meropi Peponides, and Producers Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne, UTR addresses a city, a country, and the world with the voices of innovative multidisciplinary artists speaking to their time. It represents global citizenship, innovation, and a platform for those whose voices have yet to be heard. The Under the Radar Festival began as a beta concept in 2003 co-produced by the University of Texas at Austin and Performance Space 122. The first NYC edition was realized at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2005, before moving to the Public Theater for the next eighteen years and becoming one of the world’s seminal annual meeting points for producers, presenters, and their international counterparts. The festival mixes international work with national and local artists, to give a spotlight on new artists and new global developments in the field, providing a breakout platform for many artists, and introducing them to international presenters and a wider New York and national audience.

ABOUT ARKTYPE

Established in 2005, Tony nominated production company ArKtype is recognized among the world’s leading producers of new and experimental work. Specializing in new work development and production of multi-disciplinary performance worldwide, ArKtype recently made its Broadway premiere with Sufjan Stevens & Justin Peck’s Illinoise at the St. James Theater, receiving a nomination for Best Musical, and was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination and awarded Best Picture at the Cinema Eye Awards for Sam Green’s 32 Sounds with music by JD Samson. Past work includes projects with Kaneza Schaal, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Peter Brook, Victoria Thiérrée-Chaplin, nora chipaumire, Yael Farber, Annie-B Parson & Paul Lazar, Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen, Peter Sellars, and John Cameron Mitchell. Recent premieres include CHRISTEENE’s The Lion The Witch & The Cobra featuring Peaches, 600 Highwaymen’s The Following Evening & A Thousand Ways, nora chipaumire’s Dambudzo, Bryce Dessner’s Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) directed by Kaneza Schaal, John Cameron Mitchell’s The Origin of Love, Kaneza Schaal & Christopher Myers’ Cartography, Sam Green & Kronos Quartet’s A Thousand Thoughts, Big Dance Theater & Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Man in a Case and Nalaga’at Deaf-Blind Theater’s Not by Bread Alone. Upcoming premieres include Bryce Dessner & Kaneza Schaal’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds from the book by Ocean Vuong, Sam Green’s Untitled Trees Documentary Project with Rebecca Solnit, Yo La Tengo & Caroline Shaw, Jesse Malin’s Silver Manhattan, and Penny Arcade’s autobiographical epic The Art of Becoming. ArKtype is a founding member of CIPA (The Creative & Independent Producer Alliance). More information at arktype.org.