Filed under: art, art institutions, community, theatre | Tags: downtown, indie, loss, Next Wave Festival, off off broadway, Public Theater, theater, theatre, Under the Radar, weirdo performance
My friend and I enjoy coming up with more accurate names for performing arts festivals here in NYC. You like the Next Wave Festival at BAM? Me too! We call it the Previous Wave, though, because almost everything in it hit its stride 30 to 40 years ago. Which is not to say it’s not good! Pina Bausch’s company still performs her work with integrity and style. But Pina Bausch died 14 years ago and the last time she was a new up and coming artist was around about 40 or 50 years ago.
Now everyone’s talking about the Under the Radar Festival recently, due to its being canceled, either permanently or temporarily. My friend and I used to call it the Directly in Line with the Radar Festival due to its shows mostly being works and companies already receiving a fair amount of attention, often European. That is, directly in line with the radar if you happen to have a radar that detects weirdo performing arts. Most of NYC’s Indie Arts scene could be standing directly in front of the Public Theater (home of Under the Radar or UTR) waving our arms and shouting, “Hey Radar! Run that radar this way, would you?” But somehow almost everyone I know was under Under the Radar’s radar.
I’m not trying to spit on UTR’s grave. I’m just as sad as everyone else that this festival has been axed. It is a great loss. They put up genuinely interesting work and often the kind of work you couldn’t find in any other venue in NYC. They were sort of the last hold out for putting up weirdo performance here. It was a place for weirdo performance to go to the market and to get written up by major publications. You could rent a space and produce your own weirdo work somewhere but to be sure someone would actually see it? You couldn’t do better for your weirdo performance than to get it into the Directly in Line with the Radar Festival.
But what’s becoming clear as the memorials for UTR come in is that the shows in the festival WERE Under the Radar for a lot of people. If your radar is calibrated for Broadway and Big Presenting Houses like BAM and St Ann’s Warehouse, then the shows at UTR WERE, in fact, Under that radar, which is starting to feel like the only radar that matters any more.
If there’s any comfort in the death of UTR, it’s the outrage and elegizing at its demise. We didn’t do this when we lost venues like Todo con Nada, Collective Unconscious, Collapsable Hole and Galpagos in Williamsburg, The Theatorium, Culture Project, Surf Reality, Manhattan Theatre Source and on and on. (Well, the League of Independent Theater has been documenting these, bless them.) There wasn’t an outcry when we lost the COIL Festival or American Realness or FringeNYC. What seems to be happening is that UTR, in being one of the last ones standing, is standing not only for the loss of itself but all that was lost before it. It is the shit cherry on the top of the shit sundae of the NYC theatre scene. Before, most people were not talking about “downtown” theatre and indie theatre and off off theatre and avant guarde and all sorts of stuff just being pushed further and further to the sidelines until it felt like it would disappear. A lot of it has disappeared. I suppose Under the Radar was somehow the last straw but I guess a lot of people on both sides of the theatre divide had something invested in it. Those “uptown” folk liked to go downtown to see the radar friendly weirdo performance art and those downtown maybe hoped that one day the radar might fall on the them. On us. I used to faithfully send invites to the UTR office just like everyone else. It was good to have a place to dream of seeing one’s show one day.
After twenty two years of making theatre here in NYC, I certainly didn’t have a single hope of one day being presented in the UTR festival – nor any other festival that wouldn’t charge us an entrance fee – but I liked to go see what was in direct line of the radar, in just the same way I enjoy going to see shows from the Previous Wave.
And this isn’t about wanting to see younger “fresher” artists or something. I would probably be more excited to see a 90 year old artist making their BAM debut with something really next wave, or below the radar line, than someone doing stuff we’ve seen before but, like, young. I would be thrilled to see things that are truly Next Wave or truly Under the Radar – but theatres, like movies and TV, are compulsively putting out the things that sold well in the past rather than taking actual risks on innovative stuff. Slowly but surely all the venues that allowed for more marginal artists have been disappearing, along with press coverage for them and all the structures that might allow true innovation to thrive. That’s the really big loss – but it is long lost, ages ago – this is just the latest and most visible loss. I’m glad we’re talking about it and I mourn alongside the rest of the theatrically bereaved.
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