It’s somehow fitting that the news that the Under the Radar Festival was being cancelled was buried in a New York Times article that one could be forgiven for thinking was about Alicia Keys, rather than the Public Theater’s ’23-’24 season announcement. The Public barely got mentioned in the subhed of the article. But season announcement it was, though Keys was the real news. “By any measure, the musical will be big,” Michael Paulson crows. “It has a cast of 20, the biggest budget of any show the Public has ever done, and, of course, music by Keys…” Buried at the bottom, after brief summaries of the rest of the season, was the news that Under the Radar was to be no more. “It’s entirely a financial decision,” the Times reports of artistic director Oskar Eustis’s decision.

The response among Artists in New York and further afield has been one of frustration and disappointment. Frustration with Eustis’s star-fuckery and commercial ambitions at the head of a leading non-profit theater (from whom he collects a nearly $1 million annual salary). Disappointment with the latest instance of retrenchment – abandonment – of boundary-pushing performing arts in a New York City that seems less and less a cultural capital with each passing year, and more and more a playground for a bored and basic rich. It’s hard to disagree with that assessment, but for my part, I can’t help but feel that Under the Radar was itself part and party to the problem, as much a leading light of contemporary performance as it was a gentrifier of the field. The loss of another institution, particularly in favor of commercially oriented work, sucks. But the situation the field finds itself in was driven by its own commercial concerns. (And in the interest of full-disclosure, a company I worked with was presented as part of the Incoming! Series at UTR in 2016, and as such was part of that year’s Devised Theater Working Group cohort.)

The road Under the Radar took to being a tent-pole of a supposedly vibrant January performing arts scene stretches back to the 1990s, when Mark Russell, UTR’s founder, was the artistic director of the former Performance Space 122 in the East Village. As he told me in an interview back in 2012, “I always held the slots in January for artists I wanted to introduce, the young artists I thought had international touring promise. For instance, that’s when I did, I believe, Danny Hoch and Richard Maxwell.”

If you don’t understand the significance of the month, count yourself lucky. For decades, New York City has played host to the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), which unfolds in a midtown convention center in the brutal cold of January, right after the holiday season when plane tickets and hotel rooms are cheap. APAP itself is a big sprawling mess – the sort of place where programmers can hire singer-songwriters and multicultural dance troupes for university student union performances, as much as it has to do with theater and dance (contemporary, experimental, or otherwise). But Russell had always seen an opportunity in the program. PS122 in the 1980s and ‘90s had produced various solo performers and companies for whom touring opportunities to colleges and arts festivals were critical. So why not keep the space open to remount a few shows from the last season, or slip in a promising new show in a slow time for other New York stages, to put them in front of people who could offer these artists additional opportunities?

The prototype for UTR took place in January 2003 in Austin, at the University of Texas. Russell was the outgoing AD of PS122, and looking for new opportunities. Fresh Terrain, a festival featuring the likes of Richard Maxwell, the Rude Mechs and Big Art Group, was structured as both an opportunity to experience work but also more broadly as a framework for understanding and thinking about contemporary practices that fell well outside the conventional well-made play and psychological realist acting. With proof of concept, Under the Radar was born in January a year or so later, timed – again – to coincide with APAP. The first iteration wasn’t a production of the Public Theater, though; it was an independently curated affair across multiple downtown performance venues. It was only later that the Public stepped in, bringing Russell and his small team (possibly just Meiyin Wang) onto the payroll and assuming production duties moving forward.

The Public’s reasons for doing so were always somewhat obscure, though in some ways it wasn’t entirely out of place. Hard as it is to imagine today, when the Public is synonymous with celebrity-studded casts doing Shakespeare at the Delacorte and pop-star driven Broadway fare like Here Lies Love, once the Public was far more experimental and edgy, home to both crossover hits like Hair and powerful, poetic non-realist performances like Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Following founder Joe Papp’s tenure, the artistic director role fell to Joanne Akalaitis for a couple years in the early 1990s. An all but unthinkable choice today, there was an outcry in 1993 when she was ousted in favor of George C. Wolfe, whom the board was banking on as a preferable combination of commercially savvy and artistically credible. Wolfe only lasted about a decade before he was replaced by Oskar Eustis, a theater director most well-known for having been ousted from the helm of Angels in America as it moved to Broadway in favor of…George C. Wolfe. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Eustis has always seemed more a politician than an artist. His lengthy tenure was secured by being able to navigate the competing pressures of commercial success and artistic ambition that marked the institution in the wake of Joe Papp. Eustis assumed his current role in 2004, just as Russell was bringing Under the Radar to New York, and longstanding rumor has always been that Eustis’s desire to bring the festival in-house was at least partly to neutralize the risk that the pendulum could swing back towards artistic edginess, in which he could find himself pushed out in favor of Russell himself.

With the backing of the Public, UTR was able to establish itself as a leading institution presenting both edgy New York and international artists on one of the city’s most prominent stages. But the entire time, the fundamental purpose of the festival always remained tied to APAP. A decade ago, when UTR performances were held at various other theaters around the city as the Public underwent a multimillion dollar renovation, it wasn’t uncommon to arrive at a venue where over the half the audience seating was reserved for Symposium participants, a several day-long series of events produced by UTR that were direct outreach not to public audiences but to APAP members, who were introduced to various artists and educated on the diverse practices UTR was trying to showcase. Even as its reputation grew, in other words, UTR remained firmly part of what had started out as a marketplace, where presentation of work was intended to create new opportunities for the artists elsewhere.

And UTR wasn’t alone for long. Shortly after Vallejo Gantner took the helm of PS122, a couple years after Russell’s departure, he formalized what had been Russell’s January practice by launching the COIL Festival. A meaningless name concocted (or so I was told) by the staff while drinking, COIL originated as a dance-focused event re-presenting shows for APAP attendees. And others followed. By the early 2010s, Ben Pryor’s American Realness was a scrappy upstart. Taking place at Abrons Arts Center in the Lower East Side, it consisted primarily of low- or no-tech dance and performance art showcases. But that sort of work was amenable to pared down production, and the urgency and diversity of the artists allowed American Realness to – at least briefly – overshadow the more well-funded but predictable works at UTR and COIL. Seemingly dozens of imitators followed. Incubator Arts, the successor of the Ontological-Hysteric’s Incubator series, launched its own mini-festival before folding. Special Effects was a project of Big Art Group’s Caden Manson, if I recall. New York Live Arts and Gibney were booked all day with back-to-back dance showcases.

But the biggest and most fundamental change, at least from my perspective, came when Performance Space 122 vacated its long-time home at the PS122 building on First Avenue for renovations in 2012. Rendered a homeless producing organization, its annual COIL Festival became almost its only activity all year. What had been conceived of as a showcase for remounts of notable shows from its year-round season became a series of world premieres of New York artists and New York premieres of international shows. With the Prototype Festival of contemporary opera following quickly, January suddenly became a really big deal for people well beyond the parochial business concerns of APAP.

There were two modes of thought on all this. One perspective – the one most commonly shared among presenters – was that this was all for the best. Whatever its beginnings as a presenter’s marketplace, the collection of January festivals had become a tentpole of the city’s cultural year, the time when “experimental” and “downtown” supposedly reigned supreme. The quality of the art and its concentration during a slow period among the conventional theaters allowed for more visibility. Papers like the New York Times ran massive features on the variety of performances, with music, theater and dance critics collaborating on picking out shows from endless line-ups of multidisciplinary artists. New audiences really did start showing up, drawn to the extensive coverage. If the mission of these organizations and festivals was to introduce otherwise marginalized or misunderstood work to the broadest possible audiences, there was something to be said for the staggering growth.

But the other perspective – and the one that I personally share – was that for as big as everything seemed, in reality, the world of contemporary performing arts was feeling smaller. PS122 was presenting far fewer shows than when it had a permanent home; less artists were getting its support and those that were being presented were being fawned over. The dissolution of Dance Theater Workshop into Bill T. Jones’s New York Live Arts reduced commissioning opportunities for “emerging” (a terrible word) artists in favor of splashier events. The Joyce Soho closed in the early part of the decade; 3LD, a tech-forward performance space that often served as a venue for January closed as the 2010’s petered out. It followed the loss of the Incubator space at St. Mark’s Church and Dance New Amsterdam in lower Manhattan, which at least continued under the management of Gibney Dance. The spaces and venues that served as a patchwork network of opportunities for young and boundary-pushing artists were being thinned out, with the only game left being the handful of prime spots at the marquee January festivals, which were themselves primarily reserved for the likes of Young Jean Lee, Rachel Chavkin’s the TEAM, or Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, whose European-funded magnum opus Life and Times was the high-point of success for the APAP marketplace. Precious few other artists got that opportunity to tour their work widely and expand their ambitions within the experimental modes they came up through. Chavkin was well on her way to becoming a Broadway and Off-Broadway mainstay director (when even was the last TEAM show?). Young Jean Lee jumped from a non-textual performance piece like Untitled Feminist Show at COIL to the (admittedly more fitting, for the subject) scripted drama of Straight White Men as part of the Public’s regular season.

Over a decade or so, what happened, it seems to me, is that an older generation of presenters – or “curators” or “artistic directors” or “producers,” what have you – hijacked the means by which a certain form of art was being made and shared. They did so in the name of creating opportunities for it…but what even was the art they were talking about? To call the diverse works presented “experimental” is to lump them into the same marginalizing category that ignores the extensive, sometimes decades old practices and dramaturgies informing these works in favor of treating it all like something made up on the fly. “Downtown” only applies exclusively to New York-based artists, when the broader education and advocacy purpose of the festivals is to create dialogue around global practices and convergences. And is the work even representative of the diversity either locally or more broadly? Any international show brought in on tour is dependent, typically, on some other government fitting most of the bill (the same true of BAM or St. Ann’s or PEAK Performances…I once met an artist programmed as part of Performa who was shocked to discover they had done so just assuming he’d handle getting his own government to pay him himself). Russell’s and Gantner’s jetsetting lifestyles may have given them some additional leverage to push for certain shows or artists to get the chance, but it remains a game of the possible, not the ideal. Anyone who’s been to a festival internationally can tell you that what gets put up in January in NYC is a narrow and triangulated slice of what’s actually happening abroad. And as for the New York “downtown” community (whatever that is supposed to mean)? What you see in January is hardly indicative of the broad scope of work, and was never meant to be – the whole point of the APAP timing was to present work with the “potential” to tour. Not a bad thing in itself, but hardly the only way to value a work. Nor did being programmed in such a festival amount to much in the way of support aside from exposure. (Sometimes the only support you got from PS122 for COIL was press; some artists funded their entire production budget elsewhere and brought their own venue.)

Concurrent to all this was a professionalization of the field that disserved it, one that was led – contra expectation – by the administrative part. The Wesleyan college program in curatorial studies that Sam Miller launched about a decade ago invited the concept of “performance curation” into the discussion of contemporary performing arts in the US, even though the very idea of curation – a selective process of framing – presupposed the entirely non-existent economy by which work could be created that was “curated.” As the profile of the festivals grew, it tended to obscure that organizations like PS122 were doing less to actually support artists; attempts by UTR to expand its offerings through the creation of the Devised Theater Working Group that fed into the Incoming! Series did somewhat expand the opportunities they offered, but from the inside, it was clear that the opportunity remained solidly around the APAP marketplace. The opportunity we were offered was exposure, and the chance that someone else would give us new opportunities and funding. Perhaps a single show a year moved forward as part of UTR’s program.

A truly odd state of affairs: By the end of the 2010’s, the contemporary performing arts had developed an increasingly sophisticated system by which they could talk about who should be presented and how, within whatever framework was favored, without ever resolving the issue of how anyone could create work in the first place. Which returns us to the often sublimated marketplace aspect of January and UTR and the other festivals built up around it.

As mentioned, some very good artists got recognition and opportunities from the festivals. 600 Highwaymen stands out as a great example of a company whose work (which I almost always adore) got widespread recognition and many opportunities after UTR invited in their 2013 piece The Record, which was originally presented at Brooklyn’s the Invisible Dog. Over the years, UTR became something of a New York home for the company, who continued debuting diverse and challenging pieces there, up through this year with the last iteration of A Thousand Ways.

But how does a young artist get to that level these days? Whatever the successes of PS122’s COIL Festival while they were homeless, its legacy is nonexistent. As soon as the PS122 building reopened, they rebranded as Performance Space New York (PSNY), brought in Jenny Schlenzka from MoMA as artistic director, and kiboshed the idea of presenting actual performing artists in favor of the vague sort of long-term investigations and pop performance art party tricks that entertain tech billionaires at Art Basel Miami. As part of the city’s cultural life, PSNY has been virtually non-existent.

Of course there are still venues supporting younger artists making challenging work. The Chocolate Factory in Queens, the Brick and JACK and the Invisible Dog in Brooklyn; Snug Harbor and the Bushwick Starr. Downtown Manhattan isn’t dead. HERE and La Mama and Dixon Place and many other besides carry on. All with diverse missions and approaches, and, to be fair, there are many more besides. And this isn’t the first time New York has witnessed a winnowing of venues. PS122 itself was an outlier that survived and grew through the ‘80s as the East Village DIY spaces disappeared. In the ‘90s the Lower East Side was home to nearly a dozen urgent independent theaters like House of Candles and Todo con Nada, none of which have survived. It’s hard, sometimes, for the pessimist looking at what they see as a depleted set of opportunities in New York to separate the actual issues from the nostalgia for what once was. (A question well worth considering given that Paul Lazar has apparently launched an open letter campaign demanding Mark Russell re-take the reins of the former PS122 as Schlenzka completes her exit.)

But if this seems unreasonably negative a piece to write about the end of a festival that not only exposed me to some truly great work but also supported one of my own occasional forays into collaborative art-making, it’s worth pointing out that the criticisms included here were what was being said by artists and administrators and critics the whole time. The sense that January was both too much and too little was something Claudia LaRocca could have said to me back in 2012, when everyone would mock it with the hashtag #apapsmear. Does any of this differ so dramatically from some of the points Helen Shaw made in her “Six Closing Thoughts” on the 2010s, published the last day of 2019?

I’m not a cynic, but I share the pessimism of almost everyone I spoke with this January. The foreign artists increasingly bored with the underwhelming selection, the press reps I’ve known for years who lament the good old days when the shows were exciting and their clients were diverse artists and companies rather than presenting houses pushing their seasons. I do sincerely believe that Russell’s (and Meiyin’s and others besides – Russell may have been a founder but he was no island) mission has always been to support and advance art that tries to find new ways to address our experiences and concerns, and that challenges our expectations of how performing arts work and speak to us. But in the end, Under the Radar not only feels like it ran its course (perhaps accelerated by the dislocations of the pandemic), but also played a more ambivalent role in the evolving situation artists face in the city than was ever their intention. It never figured out how to bridge the contrasting tendencies of bigness and smallness that marked its 16(?) year span. What began as a program glommed on to a related convention, with a mission to educate, expose and evangelize critical new work, grew into the flagship of a fleet of imitator festivals. By the latter half of the 2010s, the January festivals had surpassed APAP itself as the marquee name. But as they concentrated themselves, they never overcame their fundamental smallness – the limited opportunities, desperate competition for attention in a crowded schedule, and lack of serious financial support to meet the ambitions of artists drawn by the seeming promise.

The loss of a platform like Under the Radar is undeniably bad for the field and for the cultural life of the city. I lament any decrease in opportunities for New York artists – who can frankly be as parochial as any other scene, augmented by the typical New Yorker’s pretension – to be confronted with different ways of making and creating work. And the loss of a means – however limited – by which artists can expand their ambitions is no help to anyone. But in the end, UTR feels a bit like a part of any other gentrification process: It was step up from the grimyness of the old DIY indie spaces in the city, a fancier new abode for the artists in one of the city’s premier theater institutions. It offered the chance to scale up ambitions, but as everything got more expensive, most people weren’t getting more money. Artists and institutions were priced out one after another, until in the end, UTR – which once promised the most ambitious, new and contemporary work you could find, but was now all but the lone hold-out – was rendered a tenant who’d exhausted their landlord’s generosity.

At least we don’t have to talk about “January” anymore.