Artists Lead the Way at the 2026 Under the Radar Symposium

In recent years, the Under the Radar Symposium has often functioned as an indicator of the most pressing challenges to the live and performing arts field. Hundreds of theatre professionals—mostly producers, presenters, and administrators, with a few artists sprinkled in—have gathered to address the challenges of championing performance amid the long shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, ever-dwindling funding for the arts, adversarial political and institutional environments, and all the other greatest hits of the polycrisis. Participants typically process these issues à la Socrates, with roundtable conversations structured around a set of provocative questions. This year, however, the daylong dialogue took on a different flavor. Its focus, as festival founder and director Mark Russell noted in his opening remarks, was on artists. 

“Most of us in this room would not exist without artists,” Russell said, “They are the reason we keep our doors open.” He meant this literally and continued on to name other tasks attendees handle—donor relationships, audience growth, facilities maintenance—in the name of art. Yet the metaphor of the open door stayed with me as the day went on. I was not there to participate in the symposium conversations, but to document them as I did in 2024 and 2025; and from my position as observer I witnessed artists create the conditions, time and time again, that motivate administrators and audiences alike to keep doors open. 

This insistence began just before 9:30 a.m. on 8 January 2026, when bright mariachi music filled the lobby of the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Flor de Toloache wove through the assembled attendees, inviting all to follow them through the open doors of the theatre. After playing a few songs, they ceded the stage to a rapid-fire set of welcomes from the festival’s leadership, including Mark Russell, Meropi Peponides, Kaneza Schaal, and ArKtype (Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne); Skirball’s executive director, Jay Wegman; and the director of theatre programs and partnerships for the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, Carla Hoke-Miller. In the last of these, another unintended metaphor struck me. Hoke-Miller remarked that she couldn’t see anything in the darkened theatre, and someone quickly, calmly called back “We’re out here.” Isn’t that just right, for a room full of people who are so integral to the arts ecosystem but so often just offstage? 

The remainder of the morning session was dedicated to keynote speeches from Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Martine Dennewald, and Daniel Alexander Jones. Chowdhury’s talk traced a new and useful uncertainty that he has been feeling, which has caused him to listen more and speak less. He reflected on the way he used to be excited to make his voice heard, even as a child. The theatre industry tends to reward this kind of outspokenness, particularly in applications for residencies or grants where artists’ livelihoods are determined by their ability to say something meaningful. But once Chowdhury realized that this drive had more to do with competition than ambition, it receded and allowed other, more compelling ideas to surface. Quoting an old teacher, he framed this as trading out a good story for a real story, and he invited the audience into the state of not-knowing from which the real stories can emerge. 

Dennewald’s keynote also interrogated the kinds of stories we tell. As a festival maker and programmer, she called upon other “custodians of cultural and symbolic power” to examine the kinds of art they platform. She raised the idea of sankofa, or reaching back to retrieve what has been forgotten or suppressed in the past, and then highlighted artistic and curatorial projects that model this retrieval. Her examples situate language as resistance, serve the artists and arts workers who most urgently need the support, and reinvent existing structures to share power. After each one, she repeated: “How can we carry this forward?” 

The final keynote completed our reorientation from business to artistry as Jones began his talk at “this crossroads/ of art and marketplace/ with an offering/ of fragments/ and spaces between.” He spoke of the people in his own life who taught him to honor his story and the stories of others, from an elementary school teacher to his father to Robbie McCauley. Those lessons are harder to come by in a contemporary environment mediated by algorithms that degrade our intention, imagination, and connections to one another, but that does not make them less sacred or necessary. Before sealing off the speech with a song that urged the audience to “have heart,” Jones compelled us to “Cross back from canon to archive./ Take back our attention./ I dare you,/ in this killing time, ask your/ neighbor to trust you with/ a story./ Make it your business/ to carry it/ well.” His song was followed by more from Flor de Toloache as the theatre emptied.

Rather than dive immediately into the roundtable discussions that have been the hallmarks of previous symposia, participants were assigned to one of four smaller rooms for a set of Artist Provocation sessions. In each session, four artists—seemingly linked by some thematic or generative overlap—would take turns deriving a provocation for the field from one of their recent or current projects. My room began with visits from Brandon Kazen-Maddox, Meropi Peponides (on behalf of Radical Evolution), Asia Stewart, and Derek Goldman (on behalf of the Art of Care initiative), who all make work that invites the audience to participate in novel ways. The next group of artists, Lars Jan, Beatrice Glow, Graham Sack, and James Allister Sprang, discussed their work on cutting-edge mixed-reality, multimedia, and immersive technological performances. Finally, Samora Pinderhughes, Michael Zadara, Samar Haddad King, and Aaron Landsman shared the ways they wield their artistry toward civic and communal ends. Because there were only three sessions, missed presentations from a fourth group, comprised of Robin Frohardt, Virginia Grise, Geoff Sobelle, and Troy Anthony, whose provocations related to the scale of their artistic works. 

The pairing of artistic practice and fieldwide provocation created spaciousness in these sessions as the multiplicity of generative approaches illuminated different surfaces of shared themes. Generous, curious conversations followed each round of presentations. A few of these stood out:  

• Asia Stewart discussed her participatory work Any Experience with Men and Alcohol as an invitation in which openings and intimacies are created through participation. After her presentation, Derek Goldman remarked on the way that Stewart’s artistry is an example of making risk-taking palatable through care. 
• The artists-cum-technologists all encouraged us to think about the different kinds of partnership and research and development stages that technologically ambitious performance needs. Their work asks us: Where is reality located? Can we meet it there? 
• In their work on The Healing Project and Yaa Samar Dance Theatre, respectively, Samora Pinderhughes and Samar Haddad King reminded us that art is a way of repairing and creating the world we want. In its work with those impacted by incarceration, The Healing Project positions vulnerability as a counterweight to violence. Haddad King took this notion further by reminding us that human life is more sacred than art–and that we are humans before we are artists. Both projects resonated with Aaron Landsman’s provocation: What can art do that politics and government cannot?  

Landsman’s question still reverberated after the lunch break, when we reconvened for the long-awaited roundtable session. Again, the symposium insisted on openness and artistry, this time by having artists lead. The group was split into two rooms, with Landsman and Elena Araoz each facilitating one. They began with icebreakers and a physical warm-up, then introduced the principles of their twenty-year art and advocacy working group, Perfect City. These included emotional amnesty (no one holds what you say against you); aesthetic amnesty (no one’s ideas about art are better than anyone else’s); exploration without expectation; compensation for labor; and logistical flexibility. These principles helped ground us in the “avoidance mapping” activity developed by Perfect City, which is exactly what it sounds like: a map of whatever you’re avoiding. 

We can read maps before we can read words, Landsman explained, and so there is a level of intuitiveness to drawing one. In the first round of avoidance maps, participants were asked to draw a map of something they avoid in their personal lives. The maps that emerged represented space at all scales, from avoiding a particular seat at a favorite bar to avoiding an entire nation. People drew the routes between the subway and home that they avoid, the parts of their state they won’t drive through, the judgement and expectations they’re dodging. As I observed them explain their maps to others at their table, I noticed two main reasons for their avoidance. The first was interpersonal. People wanted to keep out of sight of their ex, or walk a couple blocks out of their way to avoid a kind but chatty neighbor, or stay out of the region where their estranged family lives. The second motive was safety. Some maps navigated around blocks with higher gun violence, highway routes with known Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, or states with laws against reproductive freedoms. At the end of this share-out, there was no challenge to confront what we avoid—no call to action at all. Instead, folks knew their own spaces differently and had new language to communicate this knowledge. 

At the end of this share-out, there was no challenge to confront what we avoid—no call to action at all. Instead, folks knew their own spaces differently and had new language to communicate this knowledge.

In a second round of the avoidance maps, participants created a new set of avoidance maps for their professional lives. What do you avoid in your work? The facilitators grounded this round in Paolo Freire’s invitation to “make the road by walking,” a phrase they linked to the existence of paths of desire in the real world. People walk the way they want to, not the way they’re told, and so the process of mapping can lead to revolution. In this way, these maps contain traces of desire and therefore utopia. 

Perhaps in an enactment of this aspiration and idealism, the second set of maps were noticeably less tied to physical space. Again, we entered the realm of metaphor. People drew the red tape they work around and the hoops they jump through to access even limited resources. They drew spirals that meant relentlessness, boxes that held their fear of accidentally harming someone, and footsteps that signified organizational longevity. At the close of the activity, they were invited to reflect on fieldwide avoidances aloud. Having accustomed themselves utterly to the language of the map, it seemed nobody knew quite what to say. 

Holding the door open is exhausting, but worth it when an artist walks through–and doubly so when a community follows them in. That’s what seemed to happen, at least, when the door of the Under the Radar Symposium was held open this year. Artists rushed in to remind their colleagues to listen, to innovate, and to carry stories forward with care. They asked provocative questions about the boundaries of art making as it brushes up against audiences, institutions, technology, and government. They built a secure container for people to confront what they’ve been avoiding without demanding an immediate redirection of that avoidance. In all of this, they quietly insisted for art at the heart of community—and for humanity at the core of art.