Under the Radar 2008 a twelve-day theatre festival

The Public Theater has announced the line up for Under the Radar 2008, a twelve-day festival tracking new theater from across the U.S. and around the world.

Now in its fourth year, Under the Radar is a diverse kaleidoscope of new theater�examples from around the world and the U.S. that spotlight artists ranging from emerging talents to masters in the field. Located at The Public Theater as well as partner venues.

�Under the Radar has become a vital and irreplaceable gathering for cutting edge performance,� said Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. �The Public is proud to give a platform to artists this fierce and exciting.�

�Under the Radar 2008 is a look at some of the most innovative theater happening today,� said Producer Mark Russell. �It includes site specific works, amazing poetry, movement, performance art, and re-considered classics. The work is provocative, funny, twisted, and sexy. These are some of the bravest artists working today � in every sense of the word. Every piece on the festival is available to anyone ready and willing to take a theater thrill ride.�

Shows playing at The Public Theater:

Church
Written and directed by Young Jean Lee
Produced by Young Jean Lee�s Theater Company
Synopsis: Playwright and director Young Jean Lee transforms her life-long struggle with Christianity into an exuberant church service designed to test the expectations of the religious and non-religious alike. Using music, dancing, and preaching, four liberal Evangelical Christian ministers with a taste for the surreal offer God as a solution to the hollowness of contemporary life.
Dates: 9 - 19 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 10mins

Disinformation
Written and performed by Reggie Watts
Directed by Tommy Smith
Synopsis: Anthropological humorist Reggie Watts utilizes the latest in presentational technologies to comment on humanity�s refusal to accept an eventual global shift towards unimaginable destruction. A m�lange of absurdist storytelling, video imagery, geometric movement sequences and spontaneous musical compositions, Disinformation is a comedic conceptual deconstruction of the human need to understand itself.
Dates: 10 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 55mins

Generation Jeans
Produced by Belarus Free Theatre
Synopsis: Accompanied by a DJ, journalist and playwright Nikolai Khalezin performs a counter culture ode that is a semi-autobiographical account of a freedom fighter and the beginning of the 'Jeans Revolution.' Generation Jeans exposes the political system in this moving, eye-opening production. Under the current political system in Belarus, the Belarus Free Theatre performances are normally held secretly in small private apartments which constantly change due to security and persecution reasons. In a highly publicized controversy, government forces shut down a production and detained 50 civilian audience members prompting international support from colleagues including Sir Tom Stoppard.
Dates: 11 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 30mins

How Theater Failed America
Written by Mike Daisey
Directed by Jean-Michele Gregory
Synopsis: From gorgeous new theaters standing empty as cathedrals, to 'successful' working actors traveling like migrant farmhands, to an arts culture unwilling to speak or listen to its own nation, Daisey takes stock of the dystopian state of theater in America: a shrinking world with smaller audiences every year. Fearlessly implicating himself and the system he works within, Daisey seeks answers to essential and dangerous questions about the art we�re making, the legacy we leave the future, and who it is we believe we�re speaking to.
Dates: 13 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 20mins

In Spite of Everything
Directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Produced by Spoken word collective
Performed by The Suicide Kings
Synopsis: The story begins the day after a high school shooting. Three poetry teachers are interrogated, calling their backgrounds and teaching methods into question. Mixing fact and fiction, The Suicide Kings document their unlikely escape from the precipice of their lives to the public school system while investigating the systemic factors that contribute to the deluge of high school violence, and most importantly, survival through art.
Dates: 10 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 20mins

LOW: Meditations Trilogy Part 1
Written and performed by Rha Goddess
Directed by Chay Yew
Synopsis: Hip-hop rhythms and raw honesty characterize the work of Rha Goddess � writer, poet and social activist. Her latest foray in performance brings us LOW, a multidisciplinary solo theater piece that explores the mythology, stigma, fear and confusion surrounding mental illness. Incorporating a fusion of poetry, music and prose, Rha Goddess gives a portrayal of one woman�s struggle with mental illness that is at once furious, funny, dark and hopeful.
Dates: 10 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 15mins

Poetics: A Ballet Brut
Written and directed by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska
Performed by Nature Theater of Oklahoma
Synopsis: This young company of performers takes the everyday gestural language of the street and weaves it over the course of a tight 65 minutes into an epic theatrical tapestry, intimate one moment and operatic the next. Demonstrating the power of artlessness, Poetics is a manifesto on presence and performance for our time.
Dates: 10 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 05mins

Regurgitophagy
Written and performed by Michel Melamed
Directed by Alessandra Colasanti, Marco Abujamra and Michel Melamed
Synopsis: In Regurgitophagy, every reaction from the audience (laughter, applause, coughs, etc.) is captured with microphones and transformed into electric shocks applied to the performer�s body. In this hybrid of theater and performance art, Melamed presents a corrosive criticism against the lack of critical conscience in a culture that hammers us with torrents of excess information, short-circuiting cultural assimilation with this poetic and painful protest.
Dates: 10 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr

Stoop Stories
Written and performed by Dael Orlandersmith
Synopsis: Weaving new tales, with the best from her Obie Award-winning acclaimed solo work, Stoop Stories offers a glimpse into the lives of people from Dael Orlandersmith�s past, present and imagination.
Dates: 10 - 19 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 15mins

Terminus
Written and performed by Mark O�Rowe
Produced by Abbey Theatre, Ireland
Synopsis: Catapult from the bustling streets to the skies above Dublin, then plummet deep to the bowels of the earth as three people are ripped from their daily lives and thrown into a fantastical world of singing serial killers, avenging angels and love-sick demons.
Dates: 9 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 30mins

This Place Is A Desert
Conceived by Jay Scheib in collaboration with media artist Leah Gelpe
Produced by Shoshana Polanco
Synopsis: She wants to disappear. She has an affair. She feels worse. Partially seen and partially screened, This Place Is A Desert follows four lovers as they demolish each other in an attempt to defy their irreparable loneliness. See the action in fragments - through windows, reflected in mirrors, through partially-drawn curtains and projected live onto a wide screen looming above the stage architecture. A lone cinematographer careens through the wreckage of bankers and writers, nuclear disasters, and accidents that might better have been avoided. This play is a motion portrait parody of human loves and human emotion increasingly diminished.
Dates: 9 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 50mins

Shows playing at patner venues:

Of All The People In All The World: USA
Produced by Stan�s Cafe
Synopsis: In this beautifully simple performance installation, UK based Stan�s Cafe bring five tons of rice to the World Financial Center, a grain for everyone in the USA. Over the course of two weeks, a team of performers will weigh this rice out into an array of human statistics. When brought together to create a shifting sculptural landscape, these hills and mountains start to tell powerful stories of the world, its struggles, challenges and triumphs. Of All The People In All The World has captivated audiences around the world by humanizing formally abstract statistics and transforming the way people see the world.
Note: Performance installation/art
venue: World Financial Center
Dates: 9 - 20 Jan 2008

Small Metal Objects
Produced by Back to Back Theatre
Synopsis: Small metal objects unfolds amidst the high volume pedestrian traffic at Whitehall Ferry Terminal. With individual sets of headphones, the audience is wired in to an intensely personal drama being played out somewhere in the crowd. Gary and Steve are the kind of men who normally escape notice. But here they play an inadvertent but pivotal role in the night of two ambitious executives they�ve arranged to meet for a transaction. As the intimacy of their situation develops, small metal objects emerges as a sly and luminous depiction of everyday issues most take for granted.
venue: Whitehall Ferry Terminal, Manhattan
Dates: 11 - 14 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr 10mins

BIG, 3rd Episode (happy/ end)
Produced by Superamas
Synopsis: Through a slick, cutting edge combination of off beat monologues, live music, and pop culture audio and video clips, their darkly comic performance reflects on the deceptively elusive pursuit for happiness in the 21st century.
venue: The Kitchen
Dates: 10 - 13 Jan 2008
Running Time: 1hr

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Synopsis: Theatrical cabaret cleverly combines live music, performance and storytelling with films and animations. Using the aesthetic of silent film a series of comic vignettes unfold in which the performers interact with the animations. Hapless cats, marauding gingerbread men and cross dressing devils all make an appearance, not to mention the sinister twins and their misfortunate guests.
venue: Performance Space 122
Dates: 09 - 27 Jan 2008
Note: Festival ends 20 Jan, performances after that date are not part of the festival
Running Time: 55mins

Etiquette
Created by Anton Hampton and Silvia Mercuriali
Performed by You Produced by The Foundry Theatre and Rotozaza
Synopsis: Etiquette is a half-hour experience for two people in a public space. You sit across from each other at a table in a restaurant wearing headphones that tell you what to say to each other, or to use one of the objects positioned to the side. Etiquette exposes human communication at its most delicate and explores the difficulty of turning our thoughts into words we can trust. For it to work you just need to listen and respond accordingly.
venue: Veselka
Dates: 09 - 20 Jan 2008
Running Time: 30mins

Trojan Women
Adapted and directed by Alfred Preisser
Produced by Harlem Stage and Classical Theatre of Harlem
Synopsis: Hecuba: somewhere an idiot�s face on television says this was done for freedom. Are we somehow complicit in the disintegration and violence that is happening somewhere else? Trojan Women is a radical re-envisioning of the Greek classic set in the imagined wreckage of Penn Station, integrating testimony from survivors of recent civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. If there is truth in the Greek concept of tragedy, in which cycles of order and disorder are governed by fate, the catastrophic disaster that is always happening elsewhere, would some day happen here.
Dates: 10 Jan - 10 Feb 2008
Note: Festival ends 20 Jan, performances after that date are not part of the festival
Running Time: 1hr 30mins