PRELUDE 2026 Festival to Expand Into Brooklyn at Segal Theatre Center

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will present the 23rd annual PRELUDE Festival October 7–10, bringing together works-in-progress, performances, site-responsive projects and conversations with artists working across contemporary theatre, dance and interdisciplinary performance. This year's festival expands beyond the Segal Center's Midtown home at the CUNY Graduate Center to Coffey Street Studio in Red Hook and the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, as well as private residences in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Since 2003, PRELUDE has provided a free annual survey of contemporary New York experimental theatre and performance. This year's artistic cohort spans solo performance, ensemble work, contemporary dance, clown, theatre, performance art, music and multidisciplinary work. Artists were invited to present whatever best serves their practice at this particular moment, whether a complete piece, an excerpt of a work in development or a new response to an unconventional site.

This year's festival is organized by Alessandra Gómez-Misserian, Olivia Mermagen and Dylan Sherman, in collaboration with PRELUDE founder Frank Hentschker. The PRELUDE team is Alessandra Gómez-Misserian, Curatorial Director; Olivia Mermagen, Artistic Producer/Producing Director; Dylan Sherman, Assistant Curator; Charli Sas, PRELUDE Coordinator; Johnny Gasper, Technical Director; Henry Alper, Front of House; Molly Lambert, Segal Center; Jess Applebaum, Segal Center; and Frank Hentschker, Segal Center.

Panelists will include Linda Brumbach, Jake Brush, Nora Chellew, Morgan Griffin, Emma Orme, Dylan Sherman, Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley of ACOMPI, Bailey Williams and Christina Yang.

The following programs make up PRELUDE 2026:

Wednesday, October 7, 7:00 p.m., Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Avenue, Williamsburg. Nile Harris presents “Devotion (The American Negro),” paired with Ethan Philbrick's “Music and Masturbation,” an essay-song for solo cello and voice on aesthetics and autoeroticism. Harris is a performer and director of live art; Philbrick is a cellist, artist and writer and curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project. More information and RSVP

Wednesday, October 7, 7:30 p.m., a private Upper West Side residence. Ethan Eva Karas presents “the [home] project,” an interactive site-specific performance about home, performed in homes across New York City and never returning to the same home twice. Karas is a director, writer and designer working in theater, opera and related performance forms, and served as an Artistic Fellow at Playwrights Horizons in the 2025/26 season. More information and RSVP

Wednesday, October 7, at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. “Blasted” is part of the opening day's PRELUDE programming. The work is by NTUS, National Theatre of the United States, led by artist Yehuda Duenyas; Duenyas is a multidisciplinary artist known for immersive, participatory and technologically driven performance work. More information and RSVP

Thursday, October 8, 6:00 p.m., Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Amando Houser presents “DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch,” in which a swamp witch seeks to become a “real girl” and join a human basketball team, alongside a work-in-progress by Sophie Becker and JoyBoy's “5 Dancer Medley,” which explores intimacy through five dancers and eclectic pop music with audience participation. Houser is a trans-masculine actor and clown; Becker is a performer and actor working at the intersection of ventriloquism, theater and experimental comedy; and JoyBoy is a Bessie Award-nominated interdisciplinary performing artist, writer and educator based in Queens. More information and RSVP

Thursday, October 8, 7:00 p.m., Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center. “Working the Elements: Site-Responsive Performance” brings together dancer and choreographer Morgan Griffin and the curatorial project ACOMPI, founded by Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, for a conversation about site-responsive performance. Griffin is a New York dancer, choreographer, producer, curator and teacher; ACOMPI is a New York research-driven curatorial project devoted to site-responsive and interactive work. More information and RSVP

Thursday, October 8, 7:30 p.m., a private residence in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Karas presents a second iteration of “the [home] project,” created and performed by Karas and produced by Jacob Leaf. Karas is a director, writer and designer working in theatre, opera and interdisciplinary performance. More information and RSVP

Thursday, October 8, 8:00 p.m., Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Kenneth Keng presents “Buong Buo Binago!,” an audience-participative dance and colonial-history lesson that asks how creative renewal is possible in the face of cultural annihilation, followed by Gianfranco Reyes's “Bacchanalia,” which collides military ceremony with cabaret, karaoke, dance and excess. Keng is a New York-based Filipino-Chinese playwright and performer; Reyes is a Peruvian-born, New York-based transdisciplinary performance artist whose work examines authority, citizenship and public space. More information and RSVP

Friday, October 9, 6:00 p.m., Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Iris McCloughan presents “I Prefer to Die in This Moment,” a work-in-progress about trans power, objectification, sex, gender and the audience-performer encounter, alongside Isa Spector's “a small gift” and Anna Thérèse Witenberg's “Thoughts on Practice.” McCloughan is a New York director, performance maker and writer; Spector is a writer, choreographer and director whose work moves between theater and dance; and Witenberg is a New York dancer and choreographer who has worked with Sarah Michelson, Nick Mauss and the Merce Cunningham Trust. More information and RSVP

Friday, October 9, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. “An Independent Producers Roundtable” brings producers together for a conversation about the practical realities of developing and presenting contemporary performance. The discussion is part of PRELUDE's critical-conversation strand. More information and RSVP

Friday, October 9, 7:15 p.m., Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Liz Westbrook presents “Centerpiece,” a dance work in which performers move through a cinematic tableau of shifting memories, desires and physical relationships. Westbrook is a New Hampshire-born dancer, choreographer, actor and movement director based in New York who creates fantasy dance worlds reflecting human experience. More information and RSVP

Friday, October 9, 8:15 p.m., Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Alex Tatarsky uses the audience as test subjects for new performance experiments involving such subjects as the Garden of Eden, haunted furniture, American magic and boxed macaroni and cheese. Tatarsky is a performance artist working between comedy, dance-theatre and performance art, with works including “Americana Psychobabble,” “Untitled Freakout” and “Sad Boys in Harpy Land.” More information and RSVP

Saturday, October 10, 2:00–4:00 p.m., Coffey Street Studio, 153 Coffey Street, Brooklyn. Jake Brush presents “Manhunter,” a video installation and performance built around anonymous sexually explicit voicemails, a face mold of the caller and reenactments using prosthetics and CGI; the presentation is followed by a conversation with Dylan Sherman. Brush is a New York artist working in video, performance, sculpture and installation whose work has been shown at Wave Hill, The Shed and Electronic Arts Intermix. More information and RSVP

Saturday, October 10, 6:00 p.m., Coffey Street Studio, 153 Coffey Street, Brooklyn. Hanna Novak's “Protection,” Raja Feather Kelly's “FUGUE: An Unauthorized Dramatized Eight-Episode Netflix Docudrama About How I Murdered David Lynch,” Symara Sarai's “(Untitled)” and Ja'Moon's “MudMothers: Memory in and of the Wake” explore tragedy, popular culture, home, love, lineage and ritual through theatre, dance and performance. Novak is a writer, director and producer; Kelly is a choreographer, director, writer and artistic director of the feath3r theory; Sarai is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary choreographer and 2025 Dance Magazine “Top 25 to Watch”; and Ja'Moon is a Juilliard-trained movement artist whose work draws on African diasporic traditions, physical theatre and collective witnessing. More information and RSVP

Saturday, October 10, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. The festival concludes with the “Franky Awards Ceremony,” celebrating artists and the community surrounding PRELUDE. More information and RSVP

For information and RSVP, visit www.TheSegalCenter.org

Events are free and open to the public; some site-specific programs have limited capacity and require advance RSVP.