The Brooklyn Rail

Radical, for me, is not crossing a boundary but exposing it as constructed. It is not necessarily shock or demolition; it is the opening of a door where there was only a wall. Often it arrives as displacement, not excess: a small shift in perspective, posture, or rules that changes what is possible, and cannot be undone. It turns away from what we already know and commits to what we do not yet know, long enough for another path to appear.

In my field, between theater and performance, radical work is endless. But if I had to choose one central reference, alongside my beloved Peter Sellars, it would be Trajal Harrell. His radicality is relational. He brings together genealogies that history has kept apart: postmodern American dance and voguing ballroom culture, butoh and the runway, the museum and the stage. It is an avant-garde without arrogance. He does not try to surpass the past; he rethreads what was severed, until the incongruous becomes possible.

In Harrell’s work, radicality is not an aesthetic but a method. It is about rewriting the imagination before rewriting style. Each of his works opens the possibility of inhabiting a choreographic elsewhere—a liminal space where bodies escape rigid classifications and can exist in their full complexity. This, to me, is a profound example of how radicality can function quietly yet decisively, transforming not only what we see but how we are invited to think and feel.

“Radical” stops working the moment it becomes easy to consume. When queerness is reduced to a color in the institutional palette, when the migrant becomes an aesthetic device, when difference is displayed but not actually heard, the word collapses into a lifestyle accessory: an identity gadget. It also fails when “the new” is sold as progress, without touching the machinery that decides who gets to appear, who gets to speak, and who is given space.

For me, radicality means acting from within like a Trojan horse: entering the system under the guise of fluency, then subverting the very mechanisms through which power—including mainstream cultural power—reproduces itself. It is not about declaring opposition from the outside, but about quietly dismantling structures from within, altering their function until they can no longer operate as before.

When I imagine the future of radicality, I see the quiet persistence of a flame that refuses to be extinguished. I think of Antonio Neiwiller’s intuition: a space where bodies continue to exist in their full presence, even when everything around them tends toward simplification, massification, and life flattened into two dimensions. A multicultural space not achieved through the accumulation of differences, but through the refusal of the very idea of a center, preferring circulation and exchange.

This future radicality will be made of slow processes, mobile communities, and practices of care. It will emerge through unexpected alliances and gestures that cannot be domesticated. I imagine a theater people will still attend to feel presence: to see bodies fall, rise again, and sweat, carrying the weight of the world in their bones and returning it, without filters, from one human being to another.

It will be a place where what happens cannot be copied or reproduced, because it is alive until the very last breath—an excess no technology can capture. A sensitive act of resistance against the bi-dimensionality of existence. Art as a space where the human—multiple, trans, diasporic, vulnerable—remains unpredictable, and therefore irreducibly free.