The CUNY Graduate Center's free festival of experimental theater and dance turns 23 this week, and this year it spreads into Brooklyn: four days, October 7–10, split between Midtown, a Red Hook studio, a Williamsburg hotel and a few private apartments.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center runs the 23rd edition of PRELUDE from Wednesday, October 7, through Saturday, October 10. Every event is free. Some of the site-specific pieces have only a handful of places and need an RSVP in advance; the rest are first come, first served.
The festival has been based at the Segal Center on Fifth Avenue since 2003. This year it spends part of the week in Brooklyn, with two new partners, Coffey Street Studio in Red Hook and the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, plus private apartments in both boroughs. Artists were asked to bring whatever suits their work right now, so the lineup mixes finished pieces, excerpts and works-in-progress across theater, dance, clown, performance art and music. The 2026 edition is curated by Alessandra Gómez-Misserian, Olivia Mermagen and Dylan Sherman, with the festival's founder, Frank Hentschker.
Wednesday, October 7
The Wythe Hotel, 80 Wythe Avenue, opens the festival at 7 p.m. with a shared bill: a piece by Nile Harris, a performer and director of live art, alongside Music and Masturbation, an essay-song for voice and solo cello by Ethan Philbrick, curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project.
At 7:30 p.m. Ethan Eva Karas stages the [home] project in a private apartment on the Upper West Side. It is an interactive piece about home, performed in New Yorkers' homes, and it never plays the same one twice. Karas was an Artistic Fellow at Playwrights Horizons in 2025/26.
At 9 p.m., back at the Wythe, Katiana Rangel and Jim Fletcher perform an excerpt of Sarah Kane's first play, Blasted, inside an actual hotel room. Rangel directs with Lucas Kane, with music by Lori Goldston. Registration for this one has already closed, there is no late entry, and the center warns of sexual and graphic violence, racist language and prop firearms; it is not for children.
Thursday, October 8
At 6 p.m. at the Segal Center, Amando Houser presents DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch, about a swamp witch who wants to become a "real girl" and make a human basketball team. It shares the evening with a work-in-progress by Sophie Becker, whose work sits between ventriloquism, theater and experimental comedy, and 5 Dancer Medley by the Bessie-nominated, Queens-based artist JoyBoy: five dancers, eclectic pop and some audience participation.
At 7 p.m. in Elebash Recital Hall, Working the Elements: Site-Responsive Performance is a conversation between choreographer Morgan Griffin, Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley of the curatorial project ACOMPI, and Christina Yang.
At 7:30 p.m. Karas brings a second version of the [home] project to a private residence in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, produced by Jacob Leaf.
At 8 p.m. at the Segal Center, Filipino-Chinese playwright and performer Kenneth Keng leads Buong Buo Binago!, a dance and a lesson in colonial history that the audience takes part in, asking how a culture renews itself after attempts to erase it. Peruvian-born artist Gianfranco Reyes follows with Bacchanalia, where military ceremony runs into cabaret, karaoke and dance.
Friday, October 9
At 6 p.m. in Elebash Recital Hall, An Independent Producers Roundtable brings together Linda Brumbach, founder of Pomegranate Arts, with Nora Chellew, Emma Orme and Bailey Williams to talk about producing new performance outside the big institutions.
Also at 6 p.m., at the Segal Center, Iris McCloughan shows I Prefer to Die in This Moment, a work-in-progress on trans power, objectification, sex and the meeting of performer and audience. It is paired with Isa Spector's a small gift and Anna Thérèse Witenberg's Thoughts on Practice; Witenberg has worked with Sarah Michelson, Nick Mauss and the Merce Cunningham Trust.
At 7:15 p.m. choreographer Liz Westbrook presents Centerpiece, a dance moving through a cinematic tableau of memory and desire. At 8:15 p.m. Alex Tatarsky, the maker of Americana Psychobabble and Sad Boys in Harpy Land, turns the audience into test subjects for new material, taking in the Garden of Eden, haunted furniture, American magic and boxed macaroni and cheese.
Saturday, October 10
The last day belongs to Coffey Street Studio, 153 Coffey Street, Red Hook. At 2 p.m. Jake Brush presents Manhunter, a video installation and performance built from anonymous, sexually explicit voicemails, a face mold of the caller and reenactments using prosthetics and CGI, followed by a conversation with Sherman. Brush's work has been shown at Wave Hill, The Shed and Electronic Arts Intermix.
At 6 p.m. a four-part bill gathers Hanna Novak's Protection; Raja Feather Kelly's FUGUE: An Unauthorized Dramatized Eight-Episode Netflix Docudrama About How I Murdered David Lynch; an untitled piece by Brooklyn choreographer Symara Sarai, one of Dance Magazine's 2025 "25 to Watch"; and MudMothers: Memory in and of the Wake by the Juilliard-trained movement artist Ja'Moon.
The festival closes at 8 p.m. in the same studio with the Franky Awards ceremony.
All events are free. RSVPs and full details are on the Segal Center's PRELUDE 2026 page.
