Helen Shaw
Staff writer
It’s a new year! Hurrah! Time to kick off our fluffy slippers and blast away our winter daze to start 2025 correctly—by watching a metric ton of experimental theatre and dance. Thanks to a barrage of January performance festivals, there’s suddenly a lot going on. Under the Radar, Prototype, Live Artery, and the Exponential Festival all administer a series of shocks to the system, like polar-bear plunges, but for the mind.
The season’s marquee festival, Under the Radar, spreads almost three dozen offerings across Manhattan and Brooklyn, Jan. 4-19. If you’re feeling playful, you could see a South Korean show performed by talking rice cookers (Jaha Koo’s “Cuckoo,” at PAC NYC), an adults-only Harajuku fairy tale (Shuji Terayama’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle,” at Japan Society), or the multimedia sci-fi fable “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy” (Fourth Street Theatre), which reworks Joshua William Gelb’s lonely pandemic project, once live-streamed from Gelb’s repurposed closet, for a roomful of people.
Appropriately for the season, there’s also a host of works about strategies for survival, including Khawla Ibraheem’s “A Knock at the Roof,” a solo show about everyday life in Gaza under bombardment (New York Theatre Workshop); the Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani’s “Blind Runner,” a Persian-language piece about a man who helps an unsighted woman in a dangerous race (St. Ann’s Warehouse); and the superb puppetry group Wakka Wakka’s musical “Dead as a Dodo” (Baruch College), which takes extinction as its starting point.
There’s another kind of resilience, too: transgressive theatre-makers who just do not give up the game. I’m most excited for a new take, by David Herskovits, the longtime artistic director of Target Margin Theatre, on the great musical “Show/Boat: A River” (N.Y.U. Skirball), and I’m particularly nervous to see the hard-core provocateur Ann Liv Young’s latest, “Marie Antoinette 1.5,” which places both professional and nonprofessional performers into slippery intimacy with the audience. Young’s work is genuinely controversial and deliberately creates deep discomfort even in its devotees. It’s all part of a balanced theatrical diet, though—amuse-bouches of whimsy to start, a main course of thoughtful works on mutual aid, and a dessert that’s a short, sharp kick in the pants.
About Town
Dance
Each January, as international presenters come to town in the market for shows, various venues offer samplings. The spread from New York Live Arts’s Live Artery (Jan. 8-18) looks particularly promising this year. Faustin Linyekula, a clear-eyed Congolese choreographer, brings “My Body, My Archive,” in which he mines the stories of women in his family. Miguel Gutierrez, whose often humorous and dissenting works are big-hearted and go-for-broke, unveils “Super Nothing,” a quartet about personal interdependence. Milka Djordjevich, in her solo “Bob,” does institutional critique as a gruelling workout; Leslie Cuyjet, in her solo “For All Your Life,” sends up the market for performance as a life-insurance saleswoman. The drag artist Jesse Factor chooses a more dramatic subject to impersonate—Martha Graham—setting her choreography to tracks by Madonna.—Brian Seibert
Off Broadway
Ken Urban’s “A Guide for the Homesick,” sensitively directed by Shira Milikowsky, is a mirrored two-hander, where both actors play double roles. Teddy (McKinley Belcher III), a gay, self-aware finance bro, brings the jittery Jeremy (Uly Schlesinger) back to his Amsterdam hotel room. But, instead of a quickie, Teddy gets protestations and Jeremy’s backstory, involving a closeted Ugandan he recently befriended (Belcher again, in a finely demarcated characterization). Jeremy learns about Teddy’s straight work crush (Schlesinger), and symmetries between each actor’s two characters become apparent. This conceit, together with the slow-burn suspense of Teddy and Jeremy opening up to each other, gives the action interest and tenderness that compensate for its straining of credulity.—Dan Stahl (DR2; through Feb. 2.)
Dance
Intrafamilial conflict dominates the Hindu epic “Mahabharata.” Now an episode from this tale of warring factions and the struggle for dharma (or righteousness) has become the basis for “Children of Dharma,” a dance by the esteemed Minneapolis-based classical-Indian-dance company Ragamala Dance. It’s a collaboration between a mother-and-daughters team made up by Aparna, Ranee, and Ashwini Ramaswamy (all beautiful dancers) and the scenic designer Willy Cessa, whose projections and lighting elegantly evoke temples, forests, and ancient sculpture. Ragamala normally specializes in bharatanatyam, the dominant classical-Indian dance form, but here, in addition, they have included elements drawn from Khmer dance, from Cambodia.—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre; Jan. 8-12.)
Classical
