Under the Radar
A FREE digital festival celebrating new theater
January 6–17
OZ Arts Nashville is proud to be a Global Partner for The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival.
Over the last 17 years, The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival has grown into a landmark of the New York City theater season and is a vital part of The Public’s mission, providing a high-visibility platform to support artists from diverse backgrounds who are redefining the act of making theater.
This year’s festival features a FREE line-up of livestreamed and streaming on-demand performances. The exciting mix of innovative artists includes 600 HIGHWAYMEN, The Javaad Alipoor Company, Inua Ellams, Trinidad González, Alicia Hall Moran, Piehole, and Whitney White and Peter Mark Kendall. Explore the festival schedule below and register for free to tune in!
PERFORMANCES
Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran
Javaad Alipoor (UK/Iran)
January 7-10, 14-17
Select Live Performances Online
Run Time: 1 Hour
Written by Javaad Alipoor
Co-Created by Javaad Alipoor and Kirsty Housley
Produced by The Javaad Alipoor Company
The global gap between rich and poor has never been greater. As the world decays, the spawn of the powerful dance like everyone is watching. Winner of the 2019 Scotsman Fringe First Award, Rich Kids: A History Of Shopping Malls in Tehran is a darkly comedic, urgent new play about entitlement, consumption and digital technology, that explores the ubiquitous feeling that our societies are falling apart.
Combining digital theater and a live Instagram feed, it is the sequel to the award-winning The Believers Are But Brothers, and the second part of a trilogy of plays from Javaad Alipoor about how digital technology, resentment and fracturing identities are changing the world.
Capsule
Whitney White and Peter Mark Kendall (US)
January 6-17
Streaming On-Demand
Run Time: 50 Minutes
Directed and Produced by Taibi Magar and Tyler Dobrowsky
Inspired by the past year Capsule is a kaleidoscopic reflection on isolation and longing, about breaking apart and breaking free and the impossible nature of connection. Through original text and music, Whitney White and Peter Mark Kendall grapple with race, the medium of film, and being caught up in the maelstrom of 2020. In a society that insists on blunt, binary responses to complex questions, Capsule is a clarion call in favor of curiosity and abstraction.
Espíritu
Teatro Anónimo (Chile)
January 6-17
Streaming On-Demand
Run Time: 35 Minutes
Written and Directed by Trinidad González
Performed in Spanish with English subtitles
Created by Teatro Anónimo and directed by Trinidad González, Espíritu is a journey through diverse stories that happen during the night of an unknown city, that involve anonymous individuals marked by the spiritual crisis unleashed by the wild consumerism of the times and the exploitation of the neoliberal model in people’s consciousness, through power and the manipulation of their desires. The lack of answers that transcend money and the offer of material possessions will lead these characters to want to find the hidden devil that inhabits the city, and to catch it in a bottle.
Borders & Crossings
Inua Ellams (UK)
January 7-10
Select Live Performances Online
Run Time: 1 Hour
Produced by Fuel
Born to a Muslim father and a Christian mother against a backdrop of sectarian violence, Inua Ellams left Nigeria for England in 1996 aged 12, moved to Ireland for three years, before returning to London. An award-winning poet, performer, playwright, graphic artist, and designer, Inua returns to the theme of migration in his work, exploring his own life experiences and wider global and political questions. BORDERS & CROSSINGS is an opportunity to get to know Inua and hear some of his poetic and dramatic work on this theme, live and online from London.
the motown project
Alicia Hall Moran (US)
January 8-17
Streaming On-Demand
Run Time: 1 Hour
Presented by Joe’s Pub
Part of Joe’s Pub New York Voices Commission
Executive Producer: Thomas O. Kriegsmann / ArKtype
Musical traditions yearning for each other across race, class, and nation grace Alicia Hall Moran’s meditation on the Motown songbook - a cinematic, movement-based aria fusing Sugar Pie Honey Bunch with Mozart while Marvin Gaye’s lyrical pathos finds solemnity in Purcell. Featuring Thomas Flippin (guitar), Steven Herring (vocals), Barrington Lee (vocals), and Reggie Washington (bass) in collaboration with choreographer Amy Hall Garner, the motown project reimagines Motor City poetics in a study of desire and infatuation only soul and opera embodied by one chanteuse could endure.
Disclaimer
Piehole (US)
January 7-11, 14-17
Select Live Performances Online
Run Time: 90 Minutes
Written by Tara Ahmadinejad
Disclaimer: This event contains propaganda, vague promises of Persian food, minimally invasive audience participation, and (gasp) MURDER.
Chef Nargis invites you to her virtual cooking class, and if you both do your jobs just right, you'll have more to look forward to than an aromatic dinner. Help prevent a perpetually impending war from the safety of your home! DISCLAIMER examines identity and fear, the stakes of cultural (mis)representation, the quest for togetherness, and the seductiveness of a classic whodunnit.
A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call
600 HIGHWAYMEN (US)
Playing now through January 17
Live Phone Call
Run Time: 1 Hour
Written and Created by Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone
Executive Producer: Thomas O. Kriegsmann / ArKtype
Pick up the phone. Someone is on the line. You don’t know their name, and you still won’t when the hour is over, but through this exchange – as you follow a thread of automated prompts – a portrait of your partner will emerge through fleeting moments of exposure. A Thousand Ways “takes a simple premise and turns it into magic” (The New Yorker).
Under the Radar is thrilled to present A Thousand Ways (Part One): A Phone Call, the first of an eventual three-part series by Obie Award-winning theatermakers, 600 HIGHWAYMEN, known for exhilarating performances that challenge the very definition of theater.
Taking place around the world, A Thousand Ways explores the line between strangeness and kinship, distance and proximity, and how the most intimate assembly can become profoundly radical.
INCOMING!
Devised Theater Working Group
January 6-17
Streaming On-Demand
Run Time: 30 Minutes
By The Devised Theater Working Group Cohort Members: Savon Bartley, Nile Harris, Miranda Haymon, Eric Lockley, Raelle Myrick-Hodges, Mia Rovegno, Justin Elizabeth Sayre, and Mariana Valencia
This year, The PubIic Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group was challenged to create individual digital expressions for a group compilation video: INCOMING! Immediate, made for the here and now, this 30-minute video will show short pieces from all eight members of this cohort.