A Polar-Bear Plunge for the Mind, at Under the Radar

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story

Helen Shaw
Staff writer

You’re reading the Goings On newsletter, a guide to what we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Sign up to receive it in your in-box.

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.

Joshua William Gelb’s “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy.”

Photograph courtesy Theater in Quarantine / Sinking Ship

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

Aparna Ramaswamy.

Photograph by Arun Kumar

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

Contorted women with braids over their eyes, a man in a silver trench coat surrounded by fog, and a masked figure in ski goggles with a pixelated neon smile are not usually images conjured by the word “opera.” But the Prototype Festival has long nullified preconceived notions of the genre. With both black-box and larger-scale productions, mixed-media presentations and all kinds of music, Prototype confirms that the art form is not dust-ridden but undeniably forward-leaning. The first run of shows includes “Black Lodge,” a combination of opera, dance, rock, and chamber music that dramatizes the torturous plight of a writer; “Positive Vibration Nation,” a rock-guaguancó opera by the Grammy-nominated Sol Ruiz; and the world première of “Eat the Document,” an exploration of activism and consequence, based on the novel by Dana Spiotta.—Jane Bua (Jan. 9-19.)

Prog Rock

Geordie Greep.

Photograph by Yis Kid

As the front man for the progressive-rock band black midi, Geordie Greep helmed one of the more invigorating acts of the past five years, but in August the London musician unceremoniously revealed that the band was “now indefinitely over.” Ten days later, Greep announced his next move: a solo début, “The New Sound.” With a title like that, one would expect a reinvention; instead, the album feels like a continuation—black midi’s drummer, Morgan Simpson, is a guest, and a couple songs are retooled from the band’s vaults. If anything, Greep sounds refreshed. His new music is possessed by an even more flamboyant theatricality, channelling post-punk, jazz fusion, prog, and even show tunes. At Bowery Ballroom, Greep is supported by fellow-eccentric NNAMDÏ, an alt-pop singer-songwriter and legion of one.—Sheldon Pearce (Jan. 13.)

Movies

The New York movie year starts off with a blast—yes, from the past—with MOMA’s annual series “To Save and Project” (Jan. 9-30), which presents notable new restorations. One offering, the Czech director Věra Chytilová’s 1982 almost romantic comedy “Calamity,” presents a young man’s near-misses as emblems of the Soviet-occupied country’s blinkered chaos. The protagonist abandons university studies and finds work as a train conductor, for which he is manifestly unqualified. Mechanical things fall apart through bureaucratic rigor and the dead weight of gerontocracy; failed flirtations suggest the blithe frivolity of hopelessness. When an actual catastrophe ensues, Chytilová antically dramatizes, in a scathing set piece, the system’s disregard for human life and the desperate cheer of its would-be victims.—Richard Brody (“Calamity” is also streaming on Criterion Channel.)

On and Off the Avenue

Rachel Syme indulges in winter marmalade.

Illustration by Chiara Brazzale

Anyone who pays attention to the natural rhythms of the produce aisle knows that the best citrus fruit blooms in the wintertime; just as the days start to grow short and dark, clementines and grapefruits and kumquats rise like surrogate suns. I have rarely been able to make it through a New York winter without ordering a Hail Mary case of Hale Grove Honeybells ($59.99 for twelve), a rare breed of knobby Floridian oranges that taste practically sugar-dipped. Still, when it turns cold, all I seem to want to eat is marmalade, preferably piled high on a hot, buttered English muffin. The funkier and chunkier the better; I like mine bitter, thick, and laced with wedges of peel that squish like gummy worms between the teeth. One particularly addictive varietal is “Sunrise” Pixie Tangerine Marmalade, from the new California brand Marmalade Grove ($9 for five ounces); it’s zingy, bright, and packed with pith. For a more unexpected twist, I encourage seeking out bergamot marmalade, made from the green-skinned fruit that looks like a lime but tastes closer to a lemon. Much of it is made in Greece, but you don’t have to travel past your keyboard to try some; a jar of K. Klonis Bergamot Preserves is just a click away ($13 for sixteen ounces). Meanwhile, I discovered perhaps the best marmalade I’ve ever eaten, this fall, at a farmer’s market in the Berkshires. At the stand of Brigid Dorsey, who runs a small jelly-and-preserves business called Les Collines, I tried her Scots Bitter, made with hand-cut Seville oranges and Laphroig single-malt whisky. It was a revelation: sweet, sour, and smoky, with a hint of charred Lapsang tea. The spread takes two days to make, sells out quickly, and a twelve-ounce jar costs $32, but I find it worth the splurge. Hey, whatever gets you through the season.

P.S. Good stuff on the Internet: