Pantone’s 2025 Color of the Year is Mocha Mousse, positing “the everlasting search for harmony filters through into every aspect of our lives—our relationships, the work we do, our social connections, and the natural environment that surrounds us.” Despite the signature purple in the Under the Radar logo, the search for harmony feels relevant here. There’s a real need for connection today, and it spills out in a few pieces of 2025’s Under the Radar Festival.
You could smell coffee grounds from the lobby of New York Live Arts before even entering the theater. Congolese dancer, choreographer, and storyteller Faustin Linyekula is intentional with this decision. The grounds serve as a reminder of goods exported from West Africa at large, but also the coffee doubles as the reddish dirt roads that cover so much of the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo. My Body, My Archive is more than a dance piece, it’s an invocation. Black American jazz musician Heru Shabaka-Ra accompanies Linyekula onstage, playing the trumpet hauntingly. The trumpet overlays sounds designed by Franck Moka, and together, they take us from earthly to spiritual. Linyekula first introduces us to the sculptor, Gbaga, who created wooden figures of his maternal ancestors. Despite little documentation of their existence, Gbaga’s carvings find and capture the ancestors’ essence. In harmony, Linyekula and Shabaka-Ra communicate with their individual ancestors, arranging themselves in juxtaposition to one another, as Linyekula also rearranges the 10 or so sculptures into different formations. The piece crescendos both with music and momentum as at last, Linyekula stands in the middle of the circle marked by the wooden figures—the women. They communicate with him and he with them. It’s a divination as the spirit and the performer almost become one. Linyekula and Shabaka-Ra are in a trance and the audience is a witness to this reunion of a lineage and its kin. Then the show is over. It’s a visceral experience, and yet I still left feeling more intrigued than satisfied. On the train ride home, I sat with questions about the line between spiritual and spectacle? And more importantly, what did the women have to say?
Like My Body, My Archive, I consider Temporary Boyfriend a love letter. The show begins with a figure making circular patterns on a Citibike in the warehouse space at The Chocolate Factory Theater. The audience is enthralled by not only his movements but a small light shining from the front of the bike in the dark theater. The lights raise. Both Malcolm-x Betts and Nile Harris rotate, mounting the bike and contorting their bodies. They begin bundled up in coats and jeans and button-up shirts (designed by Betts with Basquiat-esque drawings that many would call streetwear). Harris and Betts’ movements are intoxicating as they create a story of deep care for one another, and of the harrowing isolation of being Black and gay, even within a brotherhood. Geng PTP’s sound design makes way for the cyber-surreal experience, weaving together sound bites from pop culture, like the sound from the end of TikTok videos, or the words from Dr. Umar Johnson telling us to “stay focused, brothers and sisters,” or the rhythms from dance, house, and Black ballroom music. Harris and Betts float and fight the tunes, creating an improvised conversation with their bodies. They move apart and find each other, touching to create new movements and thoughts again and again. The music gets louder. Clothes come off. A gun is fired. No one is harmed, but none of us are the same. The athleticism leaves both performers dripping with sweat, and me salivating. Betts and Harris exit laughing and smiling. I leave grateful for Black kinship.
I enter Wakka Wakka Productions’ Dead as a Dodo with my inner child in tow. The theater gets dark, and soon movement, puppetry, music, and projections are all laced together. The show follows a skeleton boy and his best friend, Dodo, a skeleton bird. Together, the two bony friends journey underworld—running from a bone collector, getting swallowed by a great big pink and purple sequined fish, and being eaten by a giant plant-like organism. The two friends search for the land of the living; while the boy is disappearing and losing his bones, Dodo sprouts to life, developing feathers and flesh. They two get separated. They’re pulled on different paths, and ultimately lose each other to find each other in very different realities. The boy ends up with all his bones missing indeed but becomes fully realized in the underworld, whereas the Dodo fully materializes as a living creature and hatches an egg! But the audience is left with a deeper understanding of evolution and the inevitable reality of climate change. The show is rich in puppetry with (spoiler!) a seemingly life-size mammoth that emerges at the end of the play that leaves both the boy and the audience in awe; and the boat that really does appear to float on the homemade water. It’s a heartfelt story, and the synchronization of the company and originality of the songs is enough to forgive what feels like a rushed ending. The complexity of the story is a feat for any ‘theater for young audiences’ company to tell in 80 minutes. I left feeling culpable and innocent at the same time.
While My Body, My Archive, Temporary Boyfriend, and Dead as a Dodo all read as contrasting shows, modern dance and movement glues them together. These pieces are physical. Bodies made fluid dialogue as they gestured though the space, bouncing new thoughts off one another. Nothing is missed in conversation, even when words aren’t being said. There’s a clear level of estrangement through all of these pieces. Whether it’s Betts and Harris connecting again and again both onstage and off; or Linyekula tracing back his ancestors in the now DR Congo, specifically the women in his lineage; or Dodo and the boy who become separated, only to reunite under circumstances neither imagined. These stories chronicle our need for connection against the discord (re: colonization) (re: homophobia and anti-Blackness) (re: environmental degradation) the world presents us with. What’s clear is that there’s something in this festival for all of us whether it’s you as the lover, the lost child, or the yearning friend. No matter the disparate forms, subject matter, or location, they’ve left us all with plenty of room to find harmony.
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My Body, My Archive, Temporary Boyfriend, and Dead as a Dodo were all a part of this year’s Under the Radar festival.
