We’ve always been a fan of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, but the 2018 lineup is poised to rock our world, quite literally. An annual event that showcases an international assortment of cutting-edge theater, the upcoming edition includes works about Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, and legendary rock critic Lester Bangs. The festival runs January 4-15, 2018 and single tickets go on sale Tuesday, November 7. You can find the complete lineup below.

Now celebrating its 14th year, the Under the Radar Festival has become a fixture of New York City’s January performance calendar. The 2018 edition brings together theater companies from the around the world, including Cuba, Canada, Japan, Slovenia, Poland and more. Curated by UTR Festival Director Mark Russell, the festival’s basecamp continues to be the Public Theater, but this year expands to Japan Society, La MaMa, and NYU Skirball.

This year’s lineup features some returning players as well as some exciting new voices. In the former camp, you’ll find Roger Guenveur Smith (Rodney King, UTR 2014), Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Life and Times: Episodes 1-4, UTR 2013), and Toshi Reagon (Sacred Stories, UTR 2014). Guenveur Smith comes with a Jimi Hendrix-inspired piece entitled The Hendrix Project. Nature Theater of Oklahoma teams up with Slovenian dance troupe EnKnapGroup for Pursuit of Happiness. And, Toshi Reagon and her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, have created an opera based on Octavia E. Butler’s afro-futurist novel Parable of the Sower.

As far as notables who are new to the Under the Radar Festival, Canada’s Choir! Choir! Choir!, aka Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman, will be inciting a mass sing along in the lobby of the Public Theater. New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik mines his own life for The Gates: An Evening of Stories with Adam Gopnik. And, Dickie Beau performs Re-member Me, a work that finds him channeling actors who have played Hamlet.

For more information about the Under the Radar Festival and to purchase tickets, visit the festival’s website.

UNDER THE RADAR 2018 LINEUP
UNDER THE RADAR AT THE PUBLIC:
Re-Member Me
January 4-14
(Running Time: 60 minutes)
Dickie Beau (UK) When award-winning lip sync maestro and intrepid drag fabulist Dickie Beau realized that he might never play Shakespeare’s tragic prince, he decided to turn himself into a human Hamlet mix-tape. He would channel audio recordings of great historical performances of theater’s most famous role to “re-member” the ghosts of Hamlet from the past. Humorous and haunting, RE-MEMBER ME is part documentary theatre, part 21st-century séance adventure through cultural landscapes and a contemporary ghost story. In an ode to the impermanence of personhood and posterity, Beau chronicles the remarkable story behind the greatest Hamlet almost never seen.

After
January 4-14
(Running Time: 80 minutes)
Andrew Schneider (USA)
Andrew Schneider and his team follow up their revolutionary, OBIE Award-winning tech-theater masterpiece YOUARENOWHERE with a mind-bending examination of what constitutes a single life and the endless possible outcomes at the precise moment of death. Collaborators Alicia ayo-Ohs, Alessandra Calabi, and Bobby McElver join Schneider to continue their exploration of hyper-precise trademark design. They command thrilling light and sound effects with deft physical performance alongside a rapid-fire flow of text that blends pathos and humor with intelligence and vulnerability. From the spellbinding chaos of digital machinations and pulsating sensory extremes emerges a poignant, shared consciousness perceiving where we are, how we got here, and what comes AFTER.

Margarete
January 4-15
(Running Time: 55 minutes)
Janek Turkowski (Poland)
In 2008, Janek Turkowski discovered a cardboard box containing 64 reels of 8mm film in a North German market close to the Polish border. Each reel consisted of images of the same woman, Margarete Ruhbe. Captivated by the celluloid subject, Turkowski embarked on an artistic reconstruction of the life of a woman he didn’t and possibly couldn’t know. Set against powerful images of the Communist Bloc, the story of MARGARETE unfolds from Turkowski’s curiosity-driven purchase to his private investigation into the identity of a woman who left only a brief but indelible mark through home movies. Using digital and 8mm projections that he edited from the found footage, this intimate solo performance is a reflection on memory, how it can be recorded, and how it can be perceived.

How to Be a Rock Critic
January 5-15
(Running Time: 85 minutes)
Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen (USA)
Gonzo journalist, America’s greatest rock critic and inventor of the word “punk,” legendary music writer Lester Bangs was an American icon. Outsized, manic, chaotic, and impossibly creative, Bangs traveled with some of the most mythologized musical figures of the 20th century: The Clash, Bob Marley, Lou Reed—peeling away the veneer between star and audience and exposing the greats as flawed human beings. As the ragged, rebel ethos of the 70s gave way to the corporate pop of the 80s, Bangs lost the myth he’d built a life around and died of a drug overdose in 1982. This solo play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen (award-winning writers of The Exonerated and Aftermath) adapts Bangs’ writing to chart the life, work and death of one of the 20th century’s most ground-breaking, risk-taking, pioneering voices.

The Gates: An Evening of Stories with Adam Gopnik
January 5-14
(Running Time: 90 minutes)
Adam Gopnik (USA)
With his signature wit, and keen observational eye for the manners of everyday domesticity, bestselling author and beloved New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik chronicles his early days in the tumultuous decade of the 1980s—where a life begun in the smallest apartment in Manhattan opened the gate to professional misadventures in the worlds of high fashion, art and public speaking. Jumping forward 20 years, Gopnik also tells the story of raising two children in the utterly different New York of the aughts and builds a moving portrait where imaginary friends, misunderstood texts and even steam bath sexuality all manage to confound and shape his understanding.

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower
January 8-15
(Running Time: 120 minutes)
Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon (USA)
Based on the post-apocalyptic novel by the late Afro-futurist and science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower is a genre-defying opera that harnesses two centuries of Black music. Conceived by Toshi Reagon, whom Vibe magazine called “one helluva rock’n’roller-coaster ride,” in collaboration with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, the iconic singer, scholar and activist, Parable chronicles the spiritual awakening of young Lauren Olamina amidst a dystopian America wracked by the violence brought on by unrelenting greed and systemic injustice. Parable fuses science fiction, African-American spiritualism, a deep examination of gender, race and environmental activism to construct a mesmerizing work of rare power and beauty that reveals deep insights on the future of human civilization. Based on the novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.

Antigonón, un Contingente Épico
January 10-14
(Running Time: 80 minutes)
Teatro El Público (Cuba)
Performed in Spanish with English supertitles Havana’s leading provocateur in the underground counterculture of fashion, spectacle, cabaret, theater and drag confronts the tyrannical themes of Antigone with sharp humor and robust essentiality in this internationally acclaimed production direct from Teatro El Público. Two myths collide in one epic explosion of poetry and heroics crafted by audacious director Carlos Díaz and inventive young playwright Rogelio Orizondo. Old and new figures from Cuba’s tumultuous history populate this brave work in which icons are reborn and others are abandoned — in particular, the myth of renowned poet José Martí, considered the founder of Cuban revolutionary thought. Five highly physical performers join the echo of the Greek tragedy, embroidered with exotically absurd costumes which move poetically through a series of flashbacks, all set against a backdrop of archival news footage that connects the past with the present in unnerving and profound ways.

We’re Only Alive for A Short Amount of Time
January 11 and 12
(Running Time: 90 minutes)
David Cale (USA)
David Cale gives words to escaping the volatility of his parents’ marriage by singing Petula Clark songs, by tending to the tropical birds in the Bird and Animal Hospital he built in a garden shed, by embodying vivid memories, and by learning to live when death is suddenly everywhere. Weaving together family portraits, narrative storytelling and original songs lushly arranged by Matthew Dean Marsh, Cale tells his harrowing autobiographical story of growing up in an industrial English town with an intimate authenticity and lays bare the violent act which changed everything and the surreality of being propelled out.

Shasta Geaux Pop!
January 10 and 12
(Running Time: 60 minutes)
Ayesha Jordan & Charlotte Brathewaite (USA)
FREE in The Public’s Lobby
Shasta is celebrity. Shasta is the future. Completely uncensored and outrageously fabulous, this renowned icon brings you her signature brand of basement get-down party. Opposites collide for an irreverent and uplifting gospel of laughter in a night of Shasta’s free-flowing emcee-style performance. With contagious energy and sexy southern charms, Shasta tackles naughty topics and pays sonic homage to the classic era of Hip-Hop, elevating the listener to new highs.

UNDER THE RADAR + JOE’S PUB: IN CONCERT
Parallel Lives: Billie Holiday & Edith Piaf
January 5-6
(Running Time: 90 minutes)
Nona Hendryx (USA)
In many ways, Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf lived parallel lives: the two women, whose heartrending loves and lives fed the soulful, singularity of their voices, were born during the same year on opposite shores and became two of the signature voices of their generation. Curated by revolutionary art-rock, new-wave goddess Nona Hendryx, and an international roster of contemporary vocalists, PARALLEL LIVES: BILLIE HOLIDAY & EDITH PIAF is an exploration of the lives and music of these two legends— and a global celebration of “Lady Day” and the “Little Sparrow.” The show will feature contemporary vocalists like Tamar Kali, Kiki Hawkins, Keith Fluitt, Asa Arnold, Etienne Stadwjck and more. Hendryx is the inaugural recipient of Joe’s Pub’s Vanguard Residency award and yearlong series, which kicks off with these performances.

Erin Markey’s Rainbow Caverns: Greatest Hits of All Time Including the Future
January 6, 7, & 14
(Running Time: 75 minutes)
Erin Markey (USA)
Judge Judy once said: “Don’t Pee On My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining.” But Erin Markey is not sure that that isn’t rain. Because in her world, her flower laden open casket service is a theme park, and all the rides are about how confusing sexuality, desire and identity are. What we’re trying to say is that Erin Markey and co-composer Emily Bate will present musical excerpts from their critically acclaimed musical A Ride On The Irish Cream (2016), slow-jam cabaret funeral Boner Killer (2017), and in-development Beach Boys/Spice Girls inspired energy concert Little Surfer (2019). They wouldn’t dare do it by themselves, though. With them is a rock band, a girl group, infamous schmerm/lover Becca Blackwell and many disgusting exceptions to Markey’s no-sequins rule in the costume department. The audience is invited to watch as Erin’s comedic storytelling melts into gorgeous harmony driven music, but guaranteed: Erin will turn her wild eye on you and give you a slumber party command you don’t dare disobey.

The Transformations Suite
January 7, 9, & 14
(Running Time: 90 minutes)
Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes (USA)
Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes’ THE TRANSFORMATIONS SUITE combines music, theatre, and poetry to examine the radical history of resistance within the communities of the African Diaspora. Continuing the tradition of artists such as Bob Marley, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday, and Tupac Shakur, the Suite paints a musical picture of the current state of social inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond. The Transformations Suite connects contemporary issues, such as the prison industrial complex and the Black Lives Matter movement, with the history of revolutionary movements of color. It asks probing questions and builds an urgent case for rebellion in the present moment.

Lashed But Not Leashed
January 8, 10, & 12
(Running Time: 80 minutes)
Martha Graham Cracker (USA)
From the frenzied mind, body and spirit of Pig Iron Theatre Company cofounder Dito van Reigersberg comes Martha Graham Cracker. Backed by a live band, Martha croons this music-driven fever-dream of a performance about a life of hard living and even harder loving. The dazzling drag-cabaret darling excavates her distorted past, belting out original tunes and dishing ridiculous stories and side-splitting asides. Roughed up and worked over, Martha comes up with an unusual plan to barricade herself from loves lost, but not forgotten: tonight is the night she will bury her heart.

Choir! Choir! Choir!
January 13
(Running Time: 120 minutes)
Choir! Choir! Choir! (Canada)
FREE in The Public’s Lobby with reservation at www.undertheradarfestival.com
Audience becomes choir in this live, powerful pop music mass sing-along! Singers and non-singers alike are invited to The Public Theater’s historic lobby to take part in an interactive musical collaboration. Pushing the boundaries between practice and performance, artist and audience, CHOIR! CHOIR! CHOIR! brings soul-lifting atonement to the plague of contemporary disconnection: a community brought together through the common language of music. You don’t need to know how to read music. Just show up, you’ll get lyrics, and they’ll teach you everything you need to sound great. Directors Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman have amassed a dedicated and passionate community of singers in their native Toronto, as well as around the world, and have performed with the likes of Patti Smith, Tegan and Sara, Rufus Wainwright, The Flaming Lips, Rickie Lee Jones and Debbie Harry.

UNDER THE RADAR AT PARTNER VENUES
Panorama
December 29 – January 21
Motus with the Actors of LaMaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Theatre (Italy/USA)
La MaMa 66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
Tickets: $25
Italy’s Motus returns to direct and devise PANORAMA, a new work in collaboration with LaMaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company. Contemporary philosopher and feminist, Rosi Braidotti wrote about a “belonging open to Multiplicities” proposing a post-nationalistic identity for all the populations of the world, focusing on the concept of fluid identity and nomad identity. Motus and Great Jones Repertory Company delve into the heart of this issue, interweaving their personal histories of identity, departure, and remembrance to create new existential panoramas in which migration is actually an intrinsic existential condition. The companies have devised this work together from the present on out, building performance up from interviews, improvisations, and associated research in pursuit of an answer to the core question: how can we move from the dominant force – we the people – to the process of perpetually becoming – we are the other? Panorama is a dynamic and open exploration upon the human need to be in movement, in flux. Previews on December 29 and 30 not open to critics. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club coproduction with Motus.

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)
January 4-21
(Running Time: 80 minutes)
Split Britches (USA/UK)
La MaMa 66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
Tickets: $25
Combining a Dr. Strangelove-inspired performance with a daring forum for public conversation, UNEXPLODED ORDNANCES (UXO) explores ageing, anxiety, hidden desires and how to look forward when the future is uncertain. In our Situation Room, twelve audience members are invited to become a Council of Elders to discuss the global issues of the day, as the company weave in satirical insights and humour. Adopting the characters of a bombastic general and ineffectual president, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of Split Britches lace this interactive piece with both playful urgency and lethargy, encouraging discussion about the political landscape. The pioneering theatre-makers see unexploded ordnances as a metaphor for the unexplored potential in elders and hope to uncover buried resources in us all. La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club production in association with Split Britches.

Thunderstorm 2.0
January 6-7
(Running Time: 85 minutes)
Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental & Wang Chong (China)
NYU Skirball 566 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012
Tickets: $25
Performed in Chinese with English supertitles Cao Yu’s early 20th-century drama Thunderstorm, regarded as a masterpiece in Chinese theater, is dismantled and reassembled in this new interpretation helmed by internationally acclaimed director Wang Chong. Using real-time video editing and sound mixing from action occurring on stage, a hypnotic, nearsilent movie unfolds to tell the explicit story of two female characters discovering that they have been cheated on by the same womanizing playboy. Updating the story to a Beijing official’s home in the 1990s, Wang and his company of Beijing performers reinvent the classic play to reflect the complexities of contemporary capitalist-communist society, the ubiquity of technology and the sex-obsessed global landscape. Wang incorporates live Pingtan players, a centuries-old form of traditional Chinese musical storytelling, to create the dialogue and soundtrack onstage. Co-presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and NYU Skirball.

Mugen Noh Othello
January 11-14
(Running Time: 90 minutes)
Satoshi Miyagi (Japan)
Japan Society 333 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017
Tickets: $35
Performed in Japanese with English supertitles Following a sold-out run of Medea in 2011, Satoshi Miyagi and his company SPAC return to New York with another literary masterpiece, Othello. Miyagi re-tells Shakespeare’s famed tragedy through noh theater’s most distinct storytelling structure, mugen noh, or a play that features a spirit. Told from the perspective of Othello’s wife, Desdemona, who returns as a ghost after her death, Miyagi’s production is replete with stunning masks and costumes as well as powerful live music and chanting. Presented by Japan Society.

The Hendrix Project
January 11-14
(Running Time: 60 minutes)
Roger Guenveur Smith & CalArts Center for New Performance (USA)
BRIC House 647 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tickets: $25
On New Year’s Eve 1969, Jimi Hendrix’s electronic blues trio, Band of Gypsys, played a legendarily funky concert at New York City’s Fillmore East. Twelve disciples have gathered in the upper balcony to bear witness, as heat is brought to a nation caught in mid-winter chill. As “bullets fly like rain,” at home and abroad, the ensemble movingly reimagines an iconic moment in rock and roll history through the timeless power of Hendrix’s music. It’s the end of the Sixties. And Jimi Hendrix’s final New Year’s Eve. Co-presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, CalArts Center for New Performance, and BRIC.

Pursuit of Happiness
January 12-14
(Running Time: 115 minutes)
Nature Theater of Oklahoma and EnKnapGroup (USA/Slovenia)
NYU Skirball 566 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012
Tickets: $25
OBIE Award-winning, New York-based performance group Nature Theater of Oklahoma takes on the American Dream and the bleak desert of its aspirational aftermath. Created in collaboration with six dancers of the highly acclaimed Slovenian dance company EnKnapGroup, the piece charges through a rough-and-tumble, endlessly morphing myth of the Wild West, where whiskey pours, fists fly, and bullets ultimately settle the score. Through hyper-masculine high jinks and disruptions of submissive stereotypes this fast-paced, entertaining and affecting piece careens towards a shocking and unseemly Hollywood end. With a brief detour to Baghdad, this raucous dance-theater performance hybrid travels from the dark corners into which we collectively chase our wildest dreams to the anarchic frontiers of lust, greed and violent means to examine the “unalienable right” to happiness. Co-presented by The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and NYU Skirball.

INCOMING! SERIES
Mission Hamlet
January 4 and 13
George & Co.
(Running Time: 90 minutes)
Do the clouds sit heavy upon you? Do you harbor violent thoughts? Is that a skull you’re talking to? MISSION HAMLET is no faithful recreation, but a live and unruly reconstruction of Shakespeare’s work. Armed with only an inky cloak and an iPhone, this Hamlet catapults into New York City and uses live feed between the streets and the theater, to battle existential melancholy and political woe, while creating radical opportunities for civic participation.

Memory Retrograde
January 5 and 13
harunalee
(Running Time: 75 minutes)
The discovery of a pocket watch in a timeworn attic catapults a pair of old lovers through an epic expanse of generations and landscapes—the Venetian Renaissance, an Egyptian burial, a 1970s doctor’s office, and a virtual reality forest in the near future. In this dioramic triptych of realism, post-modern historic farce, and media performance, harunalee confronts the ways memory and trauma are racialized and gendered across time. MEMORY RETROGRADE negotiates the inextricable relationship between personal and cultural memory, and transforms the English language into an emotional territory, where heightened experience is synonymous with the irrationality of words and language.

¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn
January 6 and 13
Modesto Flako Jimenez
(Running Time: 70 minutes)
“Listen to the beats / The rhythm of my Bushwick streets.” Brooklyn impresario Modesto Flako Jimenez conjures his beloved borough in this bilingual elegy, told through poems, projections, and music. With lyrical brilliance and irreverent play, ¡OYE! FOR MY DEAR BROOKLYN complicates our perceptions of race, language, and gentrification and calls us to be truly present. With savage lyricism, Flako populates the stage with immigrants, drug dealers, condoritos, tiguerasos, mothers and sons, all asking the same question: “What is my moral worth?”

Our Country
January 7 and 14
Annie Saunders with Becca Wolff
(Running Time: 75 minutes)
“Who do you think decides what is a big deal and what isn’t?” Sophocles’ Antigone acts as a provocation for this autobiographical unearthing, based on recorded conversations between the artist and her younger brother—a citizen of the still-Wild West, California’s marijuana country. Recalling a time when we were little—as siblings, as a nation, as a democratic system—OUR COUNTRY interlaces origin mythologies from the Wild West and Ancient Greece with psychoanalytic theory and childhood memories.

Black Is Beautiful, But It Ain’t Always Pretty
January 8 and 14
Kareem M. Lucas
(Running Time: 60 minutes)
Sometimes the best way to deal with your biggest problem is to avoid it. Kareem M. Lucas reanimates the memory of a never-ending night—a wild rollercoaster ride through alcohol, drugs, sex, joy, loss, and selfdiscovery. He weaves together his past and present to interrogate our desperate need for significance, in life and after death, and mythologizes the everyday experience of a common Black man in America. BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT AIN’T ALWAYS PRETTY is an epic poem about fulfilling one’s purpose— if there is any—before time runs out. The clock is ticking.

[50/50] old school animation
January 10 and 14
Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey
(Running Time: 50 minutes)
In under an hour, what seems utterly innocuous becomes outrageously ultra-violent. A classical ghost story for our contemporary moment, this deceptively simple examination of misogyny, cruelty, and memes is equal parts long-form confessional monologue and serial teen drama. Exploring female friendship, the restlessness of youth, and the romanticization of the brutalized female body, [50/50] OLD SCHOOL ANIMATION flirts with the horrific and dips into the surreal.