JanArtsNYC + Under the Radar Festival Preview

Summary

All Of It – JanArtsNYC + Under the Radar Festival Preview

Host: Alison Stewart (WNYC)
Date: January 2, 2024
Guests:

• Pat Kaufman (Commissioner, Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment)
• Mark Russell (Director, Under the Radar Festival)
• Luke Murphy (Writer/Performer, “Volcano”)

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Episode Overview

This episode of “All Of It” dives into the vibrant cultural landscape of New York City in January—often considered a quiet, post-holiday month—highlighting how JanArtsNYC brings the city to life through an impressive array of live arts events. Host Alison Stewart speaks with leaders behind these celebrations, spotlighting the Under the Radar Festival’s resilience and evolution as well as a featured performance: Luke Murphy’s “Volcano.” The conversation offers listeners insight into festival programming, creative adaptation, and innovative performance-making in NYC’s ever-evolving cultural scene.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why JanArtsNYC? (00:55 – 04:50)

• Challenging January’s Reputation:
  Alison Stewart opens by reframing January as an energetic month for NYC arts, thanks to JanArtsNYC—a large umbrella initiative celebrating live performance in the city.

• JanArtsNYC’s Mission:
  Pat Kaufman (Commissioner) explains that JanArtsNYC connects 12 festival partners, supporting thousands in the live performing arts, “not just in New York City, but around the country and world” (03:08).

• Festival Participants:

  • Under the Radar Festival (a key partner)
  • GlobalFEST at Lincoln Center (January 14), featuring diverse global music acts: “They bring really unknown or obscure international music to the festival—like fusion from Sahara or folk music from Ukraine or blues from America...” (03:43)

2. Under the Radar Festival: Adaptation & Growth (05:28 – 09:37)

• A New Era for Under the Radar:
  Historically housed at the Public Theater (now on hiatus there), the festival seized the opportunity to expand, now partnering with 17 NYC organizations—“Instead of just one main partner.” (05:44)

  “We just took that opportunity to reimagine the festival for New York City … Now we have so many partners.”
  — Mark Russell, 05:44

• Creative Opportunities & Collaboration:
  Mark Russell notes excitement in marketing and programming with diverse viewpoints:

  “Getting all of these different perspectives from these organizations and collaborating with them so that my taste is in there somewhere too makes it come together … It’s been really exciting.”
  — Mark Russell, 06:17

• Clarification of Festival Relationships:
  Russell clarifies Live Artery is a “featured participant” within Under the Radar, not the other way around (06:37).

3. Spotlight: Luke Murphy’s “Volcano” (07:03 – 14:46)

• Blending Stage and Screen:
  Luke Murphy describes "Volcano" as a hybrid—a sci-fi mystery unfolding over four episodes, originally conceived during COVID when artists shifted to livestreaming. He aimed to reframe theatre through the structure of television miniseries:

  “People have a choice between throwing on a Netflix show or watching culture through a computer screen … So the show came in a way from saying, all right, well, if this is the platform…figure out how to think about structure.”
  — Luke Murphy, 07:43

• Breaking Rules in Artmaking:
  Both Murphy and Russell discuss how circumstance led to creative rule-breaking:

  “This form that we promote with Under the Radar doesn’t have many rules anyway. It’s supposed to break rules.”
  — Mark Russell, 09:37

• Audience Experience of “Volcano”:
  Murphy details how audiences watch through glass walls, separated from performers, which creates “a very voyeuristic quality” (11:08):

  “You lose your sense of being in a theater and you just end up really feeling like you’re peeking through a closet door into a room you shouldn’t be seeing…”
  — Luke Murphy, 11:22

• Physical Demands and Durational Performance:
  The show is lengthy and intensely physical—four episodes of 45 minutes each, with only two performers on stage for the duration:

  “When you have two people who never leave stage performing for three and a half hours, you…genuinely go a little bit crazy.”
  — Luke Murphy, 13:03

  “The longer you’re on stage, the more you just grow in front of your audience … there’s something quite makes things very honest, actually.”
  — Luke Murphy, 13:48

• Collective Endeavor:
  Murphy notes at the end, the audience is “just as impressed with themselves as they are with what you’ve done” (14:36), creating a collective sense of achievement.

4. Additional Festival Programming (14:46 – 16:11)

• Mark Russell lists standout Under the Radar presentations:

  • “As You Like It” by Cliff Cardinal at Skirball Center (14:52)

  • “Our Class” by Arlekin Players at BAM (very intense)

  • “Queens of Sheba” at Lincoln Center, one of Russell’s favorites

  • “Hamlet Toilet” at Japan Society (“going to be pushing lots of buttons”)

    “One of the reasons we kept going is I wanted to see this, have this show land in New York.”
    — Mark Russell, 15:21

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On JanArtsNYC’s celebratory spirit:

  “Anybody who takes advantage and participates in Jan Arts New York City is going to make it the best month of the year. So we think alike.”
  — Pat Kaufman, 01:50

• On expanding the festival’s community:

  “Instead of just one main partner, we have Lincoln Center, the Skirball Center, and, well, they go on—17 different organizations.”
  — Mark Russell, 05:44

• On live-streamed culture during COVID:

  “All of a sudden, people have a choice between throwing on a Netflix show or watching culture through a computer screen.”
  — Luke Murphy, 07:43

• On rule-breaking in artistic forms:

  “This is a great opportunity to really break them and really imagine outside the box. Why are we doing theater now? Is what I ask all my artists. And why do a festival now suddenly came to me.”
  — Mark Russell, 09:37

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:55 – 03:11
  Introduction to JanArtsNYC and its significance

• 03:11 – 04:50
  Overview of festival partners and marquee events

• 05:28 – 07:03
  Under the Radar’s transition after the Public Theater, and new partnerships

• 07:03 – 09:37
  Under the Radar’s expanded creative scope and collaborative energy

• 07:12 – 14:46
  Luke Murphy discusses “Volcano,” its structure, and performance demands

• 14:46 – 16:11
  Mark Russell recommends additional featured works

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Where to Learn More

• Under the Radar Festival: utrfest.org (16:17)
• Volcano by Luke Murphy premieres Jan 10th at St. Anne’s Warehouse

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Tone and Style

The episode mixes practical festival previews and deep creative insights. Russell and Murphy both radiate enthusiasm, curiosity, and a willingness to challenge conventions, reflecting the ethos “All Of It” aspires to embody—a celebration of culture’s vast, ever-evolving landscape.

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This summary curated for listeners seeking a vivid snapshot of New York’s January arts surge and the innovative spirit fueling it.

Transcript

[Uncle]

I' ma put you on, nephew.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

All right, unc.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

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[Uncle]

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[Uncle]

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You might say something like, doggone it.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

Hey, Chihuahua. Holy schnauzers.

[State Farm Advertiser]

But if you need someone who can actually help, just say, like a good.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

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And get help filing a claim from your local state farm agent for your small business insurance needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. Hey, I'm Alison Stewart. January can get a bad rap. It's when winter usually digs in its heels and the city quiets down. Sometimes it feels like a collective post holiday ennui settles in. However, in New York, we rarely settle down. It's time for Jan Arts NYC as in January Plus Arts. For the past 11 years, the mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment Initiative has celebrated live performance from the Winter Jazz Festival to Lincoln Center's Global Fest to dance at the Joyce. So as we step into a new year, we've invited some of the folks working on the program to and preview some of the offerings happening around the city. In just a moment, we'll be joined by Mark Russell, longtime director of under the Radar Festival, and Luke Murphy, whose acclaimed show Volcano is part of the festival. But first, we want to check in with Commissioner Pat Kaufman. Pat, welcome to the show.

[Pat Kaufman]

Hey, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's the first time that you and I have gotten to speak since I took on this exciting responsibility of being the Commissioner for Media and entertainment. And it's so funny. You. You got my opening line. I was going to start by saying January gets the bad rap for being the worst month of the year. But anybody who takes advantage and participates in Jan Arts New York City is going to make it the best month of the year. So we think alike.

[Alison Stewart]

Pat, what is the mission of Jan Arts?

[Pat Kaufman]

The mission of Jan Arts is to service this wonderful umbrella under which so much so many great examples and so many terr industry people get together to celebrate the live performing arts in New York City. And we have 12 partners with whom we work. And those partners bring great new ideas and great new performances and have a chance to convene and meet with each other and share ideas. And out of that will come even more exciting performances and ideas and to support the professional touring companies and all that really allows this industry to flourish, not just in New York City, but around the country and world.

[Alison Stewart]

We're going to be talking about under the Radar in just a minute. What are some of the other participants? Who are some of the other participants? What are some of the other events? Share with me three or four.

[Pat Kaufman]

Okay, we have. The participants are great. And I just want to make sure I don't leave out why there's so many we have as our participants, you know, we have. We expect 45,000 performing arts people to be involved in this. First of all, a very important one of the centerpieces and one of the most important of all of our partners is of course, under the Radar Festival. And you're going to hear a lot more about that as this goes on. And they work with the new organization that Mark Russell founded, which is the New York Live Arts Live Artery. So they're co presenting with Mark Russell. Another one is GlobalFAST, which is about music, and it'll be presented at Lincoln center on January 14th. And this is the most dynamic global festival that's going to explode on the stages of Lincoln Center. They take advantage of all that Lincoln center offers and they bring really unknown or obscure international music to the a festival like fusion from Sahara or folk music from Ukraine or blues from America, I don't think that's obscure, but I bet they find blues that I don't know and haven't heard. And they bring this to the audiences, the mass audience that perhaps don't know.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

Pat Dan, I'm going to dive in here because our under the Radar guests have been holding for a little bit. I want to make sure we give them enough time. My guest has been Commissioner Pat Sweeney Kaufman of the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. JAN NYC kicks off this week. The first event under the JAN Arts umbrella is the under the Radar Festival, which has been a fixture in New York for more than a decade. Last June, the public, which had been its home, announced it would be putting on the project on hold indefinitely, ineffectively shuttering the festival. But no, the show will go on. And to hear more about how and where, we have Mark Russell, director of under the Radar. Hi, Mark.

[Mark Russell]

Hi. Hi, Allison.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

And Luke Murphy was a writer and performer whose volcano is featured in the festival. Hi, Luke. Nice to meet you.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

Hi, how are you?

[Host / Alison Stewart]

So, Mark, under the Radar's home, the public announced the festival would be on hiatus indefinitely. You had to Find a new home, new partners.

[Mark Russell]

Yeah. Well, we just took that opportunity to reimagine the festival for New York City, and now we have so many partners. Instead of just one main partner. We have Lincoln center, the Skirball center, and, well, they go on. There's 17 different organizations pertaining participating in this under the radar festival.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

So how has reimagining it. What has it done for you creatively? What was something that you were able to do now that maybe you hadn't been able to do in the past?

[Mark Russell]

Oh, so many things. One of the main things I'm always interested in doing is. Is how we market this and getting all of these different viewpoints, these different perspectives from these different organizations and collaborating with them so that my taste is in there somewhere too. Makes it come together and it's. It's been really exciting. Incidentally, the. The commissioner got something wrong. We are not part of Live Artery, but Live Artery is a part of us. They are one of our featured featured participants, and they. But they also have their own festival going on, so it's a lot going on. Yeah, a lot going on.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

Luke, let me bring you into the conversation. Your show Volcano is one of the pieces in the festival starts January 10th at St. Anne's Warehouse. Is that correct?

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

Indeed.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

Okay. Want to make sure I got you in the right place at the right time. The show on the website, the show says it's part theater, part dance, part sci fi thriller. I get that after watching an episode. I only watch one. The whole series. How would you describe it?

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

You know, one of the problems with talking about the show is that there's the. The narrative is this kind of sci fi mystery and how it. How it unfolds and how it gets pieced together over these four episodes is. That's the experience of the show. So when you talk about it, you're trying to kind of hold as much back while giving something so it doesn't seem completely obscure at the same time. I guess it came out of. We originally made it during COVID and what was happening at the time was that a lot of live work was. The opportunity that artists were being given was to kind of live stream the works that they were making for theater, which was great to kind of keep people going and keep people working. But you were suddenly competing with, you know, I think, Tiger King. Like, all of a sudden, people have a choice between throwing on a Netflix show or watching or watching culture through a computer screen. So the show came in a way from saying, all right, well, if this is the platform that we're working with. Then how do I think about a television show structure or a mini series structure? And then that kind of unlocked something because it made all the rules that you'd normally kind of think about when making a show for stage. All of a sudden, I was working with a completely different set of rules around how do you get an audience to come back? How does a story progress? And then that lent itself to a much more fantastical narrative. So there is this kind of strange sci fi story kind of seeps out from the edges and gets stronger and stronger as the show goes on.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

With dance and with dance. Mark, it's so interesting. Luke said it was really interesting, this idea of taking culture and applying it to the medium of video and of series like a television series. But that threw out a lot of rules, which I think is kind of interesting. And I feel like you maybe are in a similar situation after being in one venue for one time. You did something a certain way, but now those rules are out the window. Tell us a little bit about something that's very different about this festival as compared to ones in the past.

[Mark Russell]

Well, you know, this is what's so exciting is that, I mean, this form that we promote with under the Radar doesn't have many rules anyway. It's supposed to break rules. And so this is a great opportunity to really break them and. And really imagine outside the box. Why are we doing theater now? Is what I ask all my artists. And why do a festival now suddenly came to me. So I have. I've been having to reinforce that that's. There are so many things. There's cultural exchange rate over at the Invisible Dog, and that takes 10 people at a time. The. There's some things. There's three things that you can see at Lincoln center in one night, if you wish, like a six, a seven, and a nine. And then it's great to have St. Anne's Warehouse back with us because that's where under the Radar started back in 2005.

[Alison Stewart]

It's a great space as well. My guest is director of under the Radar, Mark Russell, as well as Luke Murphy, whose performance Volcano, premieres January 10th as part of under the Radar. Okay. So we're trying not to give away too much about. To your point, like it's. We shouldn't. But can I ask you to describe how the audience sees the work?

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

Absolutely. So the audience, they enter and the show is presented in this. In this room with two glass walls. And the audience watch from I guess the kind of traditional. The downstage Edge. And then also from the stage. Right. Edge. So the audience are kind of watching us on. We're kind of cornered by the audience on two sides. And there's a glass. We're inside a glass. Glass box, basically. So we're inside this room, this living room space. And these two walls are transparent for audience to look through. And it gives it a very voyeuristic quality. We don't acknowledge the space beyond that barrier. So the audience are really kind of, over time, they kind of lose. You lose your sense of being in a theater and you just end up kind of really feeling like you're. You're peeking through a closet door into a room that you shouldn't be seeing as. As that world kind of falls apart, really. So, yeah. Is that. Am I treading the needle? Right?

[Host / Alison Stewart]

That was well done. That was well done. I will let people know that your performance. It's a physically demanding performance because as you said, and dance and a lot of dance. How do you prepare for such a physically demanding performance?

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

Yeah, it's a great question. Differently all the time, I think, is the truth of it. The show. What's really nice about a narrative that takes. It's quite a long durational show. The structure of the four episodes, each episode is around 45 minutes. So for the audience and for us, it's, you know, it's quite an extended period of time watching. And that means that there's both the. There's the physical journey that you go on to kind of keep your engine moving for, you know, just under four hours of action or like three hours of action. And. And then separately there's the emotional line which, you know, when you, when you extend, when you have two people who never leave stage performing for three and a half hours, you. You genuinely go a little bit crazy. You know, you genuinely go a little bit crazy. So, you know, you're just trying to. You're trying to hit that right level where you need to get yourself going to the point that your body is going to be behind you and that you're. You're going to be well supported to do what you need to do and that you also don't empty yourself out so that you're going to have enough left in the tank. You know, what's kind of interesting about performing the show is I have a background. One of my first jobs in New York was I was in the first cast of Sleep no More In. So I'm used to doing these really long shows and that kind of became a really big part. I just Like, I really like performing for a long period of time because I feel like you just. The longer you're on stage, the more you just grow in front of your audience, the more you create, the reality just gets truer because you are really there and what's going on with your exhaustion is palpable for an audience. And there's something quite makes things very honest, actually. So that is true in this show. It's true in a lot of shows I've made. But by the end of a show that long, audience are kind of applauding themselves for staying. You know, they're just as happy with. They're just as impressed with themselves as they are with what you've done. So you get to kind of share in your collective endeavor of doing it together. Yeah.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

Mark, shout out a few other things that folks can see with under the. The under the radar festival.

[Mark Russell]

Oh, they can see there's a show called as you like it, but it's radically reinterpreted by Cliff Cardinal, and that's at Skirball Center. There's also a piece at BAM called our class, which is very. An very intense show by the Arlecon players. The gosh.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

At.

[Mark Russell]

At Lincoln.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

At.

[Mark Russell]

Excuse me, At Lincoln center you can see Queens of Sheba, which is one of my favorites. And one of the reasons we kept going is I wanted to see this. Have this show land in New York. So we've had that excitement.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

Where can people find more information? Yes. Because there are so many ways. Let me. Let people know where to go.

[Mark Russell]

Yeah, yeah. You know, one last one is the is at Japan society and it's called Hamlet toilet. It's gonna be pushing lots of buttons. And I'm so excited about Luke's piece because it really does stretch all sorts of media. The medium dance of watching. It's going to be a powerful, powerful experience. I haven't seen it live yet, and so I'm really looking forward to that moment.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

My guests have been Mark Russell of Under the Radar. You can check out the website. What's the website?

[Mark Russell]

The website is utrfest.org utrfest.org and also.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

Thanks to Luke Murphy. Volcano premieres January 10th. Thank you for your time.

[Mark Russell]

Thank you. Thank you so much.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

So much.

[Uncle]

I'm gonna put you on, nephew.

[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

All right.

[Host / Alison Stewart]

Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?

[Uncle]

I've been hitting up McDonald's for years now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.

[State Farm Advertiser]

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[Nephew / Luke Murphy]

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

[State Farm Advertiser]

And we'll help your growing business. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.