UNDER THE RADAR 2026 Unveils Programming Highlights

Under the Radar, the NYC-based festival celebrating new theater and performance works from around the world and down the street, will return for its 21st edition January 7–25, 2026. 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.  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 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. 
 
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.

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).

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