Meropi Peponides ’13 Joins Under the Radar Festival as Co-Creative Director
Dramaturgy alumna Meropi Peponides ’13 has been named a co-creative director and producer-in-residence of the iconic Under the Radar Festival, which is set to return in 2025 for its 20th edition. Peponides will lead the Festival alongside co-creative director Kaneza Schaal and Artistic Director Mark Russell. The festival, known for its experimental theatre, will run from January 4 to January 19, 2025.
Celebrating its 20th edition since its founding in 2005, the Festival will be presented across different venues in NYC. Highlights of the upcoming festival include Khawla Ibraheem’s A Knock on the Roof; Faustin Linyekula’s My Body, My Archive; TECHNE, an experiential exhibition featuring large-scale artworks by John Fitzgerald, Godfrey Reggio, and Marc Da Costa; an all-female staging of Shuji Terayama’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle; and the annual Under the Radar Symposium. Partner theaters for the event include New York Theatre Workshop, New York Live Arts, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Japan Society, and The Onassis Foundation.
Originally produced by The Public Theater, the Under the Radar Festival went on “extended hiatus” in 2023 due to financial reasons. The news sparked a mix of anger and melancholy online, with many lamenting the challenges facing artistic experimentation in New York City. However, the festival has quickly reemerged through a collaboration among several NYC non-profit theatre companies, ensuring its return to the city’s cultural landscape.
The Under the Radar Festival started in January 2003 as an experimental event called Fresh Terrain, co-produced by the University of Texas at Austin and New York’s Performance Space 122. It featured artists like Richard Maxwell, Big Art Group, and others. The first New York edition took place in 2005 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, initially as a conference that evolved into a 7-day theater festival under Mark Russell’s direction. When Oskar Eustis became Artistic Director of the Public Theater in 2006, he invited Under the Radar to be part of his inaugural season, expanding it to a 12-day event. The festival quickly became a significant annual meeting point for theatre professionals globally, mixing international, national, and local artists to highlight emerging talent and global trends in alternative theatre. Over time, it gained a loyal audience at the Public Theater and inspired other festivals focused on new opera, performance art, and experimental dance.
“The Under the Radar Festival has been a major influence in shaping my perspectives, sensibilities, and passions as a theatre maker and producer,” Peponides said in a statement. “Its global reach and the platform it gives international artists is an essential part of the ecosystem of New York City performance, and has shown how this work forges connections between people across the world, and speaks truth to the human condition. It is an honor to join Mark and this stellar team to help chart a path for the festival’s future.”
“There are so many New York Cities," Schaal added. "So often they don’t touch. My family squatted in a building just blocks from PS122, NYTW, The Public—but never stepped foot inside them. As Under The Radar expands into its new life, how can we live up to the promise of theatre, the promise of participatory society, of people gathering around campfires to tell stories, of the Greek’s ‘demos kratia’, literally ‘people power,’ where voting and theatre happened alongside each other? At its best New York is a city of entry points, places to begin and dream the impossible. As developer empires engulf the city, we are losing those entry points. Under The Radar has always protected entry points to craft, community, the city, and the world. I am thrilled to join and expand this practice. ”
Meropi Peponides is a theater maker, dramaturg, podcast producer, writer and co-founder of Radical Evolution Performance Collective. She has been co-creating and producing theatre for the past 18 years with a focus on devised ensemble work, new plays, site-specific work and community-based performance. Her work explores cross-cultural affinity and seeks to disrupt cultural hierarchies by drawing inspiration from and lifting up BIPOC and nonwestern traditions. From 2014-2023 she was the producer and then co-director of Soho Rep. While there, she produced 18 off-Broadway productions, most world premieres, that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Lucille Lortel Award, and numerous OBIE Awards, among others. Upcoming with Radical Evolution: National tour of Canciones, an immersive, site-specific play with music and The Hunger Project (working title, commission from Soho Rep). Other organizations with which she has collaborated include The Foundry Theatre, The Movement Theatre Company and The Public Theater. She also organizes with Artists Co-Creating Real Equity (ACRE), Justice Committee, and Artists Against Apartheid.