(photo by Aleksandr Karjaka) Kat Lessor and Steph Huettner of the tbd. Dance Collective sat down with me on Vinton St. outside of Project Project on a hot Wednesday evening just before the beginning of Omaha Under the Radar. When I asked what they were looking forward to most in the festival, both remarked that in addition to the opportunity to meet potential collaborators, they were excited to hear audience interpretations of their upcoming performance at the Slowdown on Sat

“I think itʼs gonna be a little bit ridiculous,” Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, director of Omaha Under the Radar, told Melissa Dundis of KVNO Radio, referring to the festivalʼs grand finale, a rendition of Frederic Rzewskiʼs Les Moutons de Panurge (1968) led by Bassoons Across Nebraska. Rzewskiʼs score directs any number and combination of instruments to follow each other monophonically through a modal melody played in rigorously defined, sequential fragments, but with the caveat t

Performers do things with their bodies. Some performers at Omaha Under the Radar are explicitly asking what bodies do with their performances. For Ammie Brod, violist for Ensemble Dal Niente, professional florist, and featured performer on an evening of solo works at Milk Run on Friday, this can mean something as simple as talking with a composer about what feels good physically when she plays her viola. The composer and performer Jenna Lyle says that she and her collaborator

Part of what makes Omaha Under the Radar seem distinctly Midwestern is a preoccupation with making contemporary performance accessible to a diverse audience. People in the United States who work with contemporary performance outside of major metropolitan centers like the Bay Area, Chicago, and New York find themselves without an established audience already in town. When I lived in New York, performers lamented that they performed mainly for other performers. And yet their ve