Strategizing Against Fracture and Dissolution at the 2025 Under the Radar Symposium

On the morning of 9 January 2025, the Santa Ana winds began to let up over Los Angeles, so firefighters could finally advance containment of the five wildfires that had already blazed across over 29,000 acres. At the same time, a motorcade in Washington, D.C. arrived at the Washington National Cathedral for the national funeral service of Jimmy Carter, one of the United States’s most environmentally consequential presidents. (Flags remained at half-staff that day to honor him, though they were hastily and temporarily raised to full-staff during the second inauguration of Donald Trump later in the month.) Before the end of the day, the United States House of Representatives would sanction the International Criminal Court in protest of its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, while Israeli airstrikes would kill at least twenty-two people in Gaza. And in New York, hundreds of theatre professionals filed into the New York University (NYU) Skirball Center for the Performing Arts for the annual Under the Radar Symposium. As we gathered in a dim theatre that morning, it could have felt like we were walling ourselves off from the world. Really, the opposite was true.

In a political moment broadly characterized by fracture and dissolution, the symposium and festival brought people together across borders, languages, and cultures to make and support art—a gathering that Meropi Peponides, Under the Radar’s co-creative director and producer-in-residence, recognized as an “audacious act of optimism.” Co-creative director and artist-in-residence Kaneza Schaal took that audacity a step further, calling it insanity that “in the face of imperial obsessions with capital and permanence, we have given our lives to shit that disappears.”

But to keep making shit that disappears, we need organizations, institutions, and structures of art making that are strong and flexible enough to withstand the forces that would disappear them. The symposium’s morning keynote kickoff and afternoon roundtable forum worked toward those structures by exploring visions for strengthening the live and performing arts field. “All of us are dealing with massive change and instability,” said festival founder and director Mark Russell. “Given that, we are focusing this symposium on what we can do and what is working and what is possible.”

The three keynote speeches followed, each dealing, in some way, with present tense catastrophe by asserting history and legacy as resources.

Spurred, perhaps, by that promise of the possible, the keynote kickoff progressed rapidly, its tempo and energy set by the brass-and-megaphone musical entrance of SXIP Shirley. Then came Russell, Schaal, and Peponides’s remarks, followed by a series of welcomes by Tommy Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne of ArKtype, the festival’s producers; Jay Wegman, director of the New York University Skirball Center for the Performing Arts; and Pat Swinney Kaufman, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. Each spoke only briefly, mindful that one of the festival productions needed the theatre at 11:00 a.m. to finish tech. (When keynote host Carmelita Tropicana scurried onstage a few minutes later, she drove the pace again. Her opening words: “Alright, we don’t have time. We gotta go fast.”)

Still, this pace yielded to the weight of loss during an “in memoriam” segment honoring several members of the theatre community who passed away in 2024—Diane Ragsdale, Philip Arnoult, Morgan Jeness, David Schweitzer, and Fred Frumberg—to whom this year’s festival was dedicated. Tommy Kriegsmann and Mark Russell briefly eulogized each friend, culminating in a standing ovation and Russell’s admission that “I don’t know how to imagine the future without them, but we will. Their memories and deeds will show the way.” That invitation to seek the guidance of the past continued to ring in my mind as the three keynote speeches followed, each dealing, in some way, with present tense catastrophe by asserting history and legacy as resources in building a more resilient, connected future. 

Mei Ann Teo’s keynote centered legacy in their recent work as part of Ping Chong and Company’s artistic leadership team, which formed as part of the company’s organizational transition following the retirement of founding artistic director Ping Chong and executive director Bruce Allardice. They shared four questions the artistic leaders are asking themselves as they carry through Ping Chong’s legacy: “Why do we exist? How do we continue? What do we hold on to? Where do we let go?” In their own artistic practice, Teo adds a few more questions of their own—“How do we move from consumption to communion? What will we need? Can the theatre offer practices to survive?” They are exploring these ideas through Oryoki, a highly choreographed meal ritual in which all participants ask for and receive only exactly what they need. In an Oryoki-inspired performance with company, Teo silently served 150 participants—including members the company’s staff, leadership, board, artists, and teaching artists—and then reflected on the ways that Ping Chong and Company had materially and spiritually shifted all of their lives.

This embrace of connectedness expanded to an international scope as Dorcy Rugamba’s keynote advocated for “intercultural collaboration to break down the barriers around universal memory.” He used his own experience as a theatre student in Rwanda in the early nineties to talk about the potentially destructive tendency to hold one’s own local reality as separate from global history and society. He and his peers aimed to understand the world through art, yet they were still surprised when the Rwandan genocide began. He attributes this to a compartmentalization of history that prevented them from connecting their own circumstances to the Holocaust and other fascist, genocidal histories in Europe. Now, he seeks to dismantle this destructive siloing through his work at the Kigali Triennial, which invites one Rwandan and one international creator for each of the eleven artistic disciplines it spans. “In a world increasingly withdrawn into itself… this openness is a fundamental challenge for peace,” he said. 

Kamilah Forbes, executive producer of the Apollo Theater, brought these sentiments home to New York. She recounted the early aughts beginnings of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival and Under the Radar on the margins of arts and entertainment. But, she said, and “we must sit in the margins to have the right angle, to have the right viewpoint to tell the truth.” The keynote returned to the morning’s implicit theme of legacy, naming artists like Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin who spoke truth to power. Forbes charged the audience with the responsibility to do the same, invoking the word of Toni Morrison: “The time when artists go to work… not when everything is fine, but in times of dread.” And with that, we cleared the Skirball and prepared to reassemble just a few blocks away to, as Forbes and Morrison instructed, get to work.

At the roundtable forum that afternoon, roughly three hundred global arts leaders came together over five focused questions composed from the six hundred questions participants had eagerly submitted for consideration. These prompts invited participants to name significant recent shifts in the field, discuss their successes in making bottom lines work without pricing out audiences, imagine new ways of pooling and sharing resources, consider collective and individual actions to survive and thrive as arts workers in this political moment, and envision pathways for new and younger arts workers in the coming years.

I sat in on a few minutes of conversation at each of the twenty-two tables at the New York University Paulson Center while my HowlRound colleagues led two additional groups in a synchronous virtual symposium. So while it would be impossible for me to provide a full rundown of each of these twenty-four distinct roundtables, I’d like to put some of them in conversation with one another in order to trace a handful of the live and performing arts industry’s primary concerns.

In response to the prompt to name shifts in the performing arts field, participants often discussed their organizations’ work to emphasize accessibility, create safe working conditions by bringing on intimacy choreographers and coordinators, and account for the climate impact of production needs like theatrical design and touring. They noted a decreased tolerance for moral ambiguity in today’s audiences and questioned the impact of companies like Meta and X moving away from content moderation and fact checking: how do these realities change our relationship to information?

Participants at several tables lamented dwindling arts coverage and funding. Foundations, they noted, have shifted away from arts funding to prioritize social and environmental projects. At the same time, participants from at least three continents reported waning public funding for the arts amid what Howard Shalwitz, associate director of the Center for International Theatre Development, called an “increasingly right-wing world politic”; and multiple people working in university contexts named “institutional neutrality” policies that put political guardrails on the work they are able to do. That conservative tilt seemed to loom over every conversation.

Tables everywhere buzzed with ideas for incentivizing arts funding.

To remain fiscally sound without compromising audience reach or artistry, Michael Francis, producing director of Producer Hub, called upon his table to “hack capitalism” through innovative models, drawing from his organization’s endeavors to set up fiscal sponsorship processes that remove barriers between artists and their cash. Others at the table suggested leaning into Indigenous knowledge and ways of creating outside of capitalism, a shift that Samantha Scott has seen highlighted in art and leadership from her perspective at New Zealand’s Massive Theatre Company. Tables everywhere buzzed with ideas for incentivizing arts funding: What if debit card fees went toward funding the arts? What could it look like to expand Washington’s Cultural Access model, in which counties have added a 0.1 percent sales tax that goes to funding regional and community arts? Could “community give” days decrease philanthropic preciousness?

As conversations deepened, I noticed that many dwelled at length on the topic of partnership. At some tables, this interest surfaced as a dissection of outdated practices of presenters and producers “claiming” artists or productions. In one particularly egregious example, Anna Mülter, artistic director of Festival Theaterformen in Germany, detailed a practice of some German presenters securing exclusive European producing rights to artists’ work. While this might help with press and drive international audiences, it provides no benefit to the local community and actively restricts artists. Brian Joseph Lee, founder of the creative agency CNTR ARTS, swiftly dismissed the practice: “You’re saying exclusivity, but I hear scarcity.” And scarce funding, others at the table agreed, would not be solved by a scarcity mindset.

The third of the six discussion prompts seeded alternatives rooted in abundance: “Despite the upcoming regime change and similar proliferating changes worldwide, let’s imagine three examples of pooling and sharing resources—with one another and international partners—in ways we haven’t before.” In response, participants dreamed up potential partnerships and discussed effective collaborations they have undertaken. Speaking of his work at the Fisher Center at Bard College, Aaron Mattocks said that “we are seeing partnership help us manifest the work” despite funding challenges. While “partnership” often meant working with other arts organizations or similar institutions, many participants also sought partnerships with their local communities, whether that meant acting as a resource or seeking feedback. Director and designer Jeff Becker invoked theatrical spaces in his home of New Orleans that act as relief centers during hurricane season, while Samantha Scott spoke of New Zealand theatres working to honor treatises with the Maori peoples by having Maori elders introduce them to the wisdom and practices of their culture. “Partnership and connection,” she said, “leads us to discovery.”

We can foster innovative funding structures, establish novel partnerships, and protect our art—and one another—by continuing to turn toward each other.

Other theatre leaders hoped to discover generative paths forward through cross-sectoral or even commercial partnerships. One table debated what producers “on the snob end of the spectrum” might learn from more popular ideas of culture and entertainment as represented by Las Vegas attractions. As they began to consider the perceived value of experiential entertainment, they turned to Stephen Smith, creative strategist for Meow Wolf, who affirmed consumers’ interest in multimedia installations and immersive art. (“Also,” he said, “plushes sell.”) Jeff Becker invited his virtual roundtable to consider partnerships with the healthcare industry, while Fiona Coffey, director of the Office for the Arts at Harvard University, rattled off a list of foundations and corporations with major funding priorities at the intersection of the arts and technology: Siemens, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Onassis Foundation. Representing the intersection of the arts and science, the Simons Foundation even hosted a post-roundtable reception in conjunction with their open call for their Triangle Program, which funds collaborative teams composed of artists, scientists, and curators or producers. Scientists from Simons roamed throughout the reception, offering the assembled presenters the opportunity to enact their partnership goals.

In the weeks following these conversations, challenges that participants dreaded grew deeper. The symposium took place before institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution were rocked by presidential decisions that narrow their scope to prioritize simplistically nationalist stories; before funding limitations along these same lines hit the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Institute of Health, and others; before the United States federal government began investigating institutions of higher learning and detaining pro-Palestinian campus activists. When we met in New York, the complexities of international travel and producing had not yet been further complicated by broad tariffs (or the potential for such tariffs, depending on the day) and increased scrutiny at United States borders.

Yet I am heartened to know that this room of global performing arts leaders was already focused, as Mark Russell noted, on what we can do. This was not an acquiescent crowd. We can foster innovative funding structures, establish novel partnerships, and protect our art—and one another—by continuing to turn toward each other as the symposium participants did. Kamilah Forbes’s reminder reverberates here: now is the time to go to work.