Reverberating Acts

On January 5, 2011, the same day the Under the Radar Festival opened to New York audiences, a massive burial with approximately five thousand mourners was held in Tunisia for Mohamed Bouazzizi, the twenty-six-year-old Tunisian produce cart operator whose self-immolation triggered the initial protests in central Tunisia that would lead to the ouster of autocratic President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The importance of this date was not yet relevant to most Americans, let alone to the world, until perhaps a few weeks later when demonstrations that toppled leaders in Tunisia spread to Egypt with the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, and that now—as I write these lines—threaten rulers in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Oman. Given the recent uprisings that have spread across the Middle East against authoritarian regimes and totalitarian governments, it is safe to say that we are currently living in an age of embattled turmoil, social frustration, and perhaps, hopefully, engagement and change. The role of the passive spectator faithfully consuming what is dogmatically thrust upon him is changing.

In his keynote address to the 2011 Under the Radar Festival and Symposium, Ben Cameron, Program Director of Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, spoke about the critical role of the arts in a time of radical reformation:

We are essentially in the midst of, if not a revolution, at the very least a profound reformation— political reformation, social reformation, a reformation in human consciousness— and why should we expect the arts to stand above this fray?

Although Cameron was not directly referring to the events in Tunisia that were happening that very same day, his remarks now reverberate in significant ways. For what Cameron was referring to is the unprecedented intrusion of technology into our everyday lives, the accessibility and breadth of information that affects our humanity in ways yet unbeknownst to us and that ultimately did play a tremendous role in the historical street demonstrations that took place in the Middle East. The choice to question, engage with, and expand a narrowing worldview is critical if we are to go against the grain and resist intolerance. The arts, and namely theatre, as Cameron reminds us, can no longer stand above this fray: “to work in the theatre is to have a platform . . but it is not a platform to be taken for granted any longer.” If a desperate twenty-sixyear-old chooses to light himself on fire, in public, in order simply to be heard, to have a voice, it is emblematic precisely of a world that has made having a platform increasingly difficult. In this moment when political upheaval and technological innovation are taking exponential leaps, the Under the Radar Festival featured artists with a desire to stand up to the call of what it means to have such a platform at their feet. The festival highlighted different ways artists are engaging with presence: as a force, albeit ephemeral, not to be reckoned with, and as a living testimonial that a lasting human exchange takes place with reverberating consequences.

Housed at the Public Theater and now in its seventh year, the Under the Radar Festival is an international festival of contemporary theatre and the brainchild of Mark Russell, the former Artistic Director of Performance Space 122, who during his twenty-one-year tenure helped to expand experimental theatre and performance art in New York City. Russell began Under the Radar at St. Ann’s Warehouse during the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference as a conversation about new theatre, and as a way for local and international experimental theatre companies to gain more exposure, hopefully creating larger, more mainstream audiences for this kind of work. The agenda, in Russell’s own words, was “to get this work to another level: to introduce it to regional theatres and regional presenters.”¹ Thus far, the festival has been successful in this aim, and this year marks the inaugural year of the “Devised Theater Initiative,” where...