Welcome to the brand new annual physical theater festival based in New York City: PhysFestNYC. The 10-day festival will consist of performances, workshops, and community events that bring the incredible diversity of NYC's physical theater practitioners into one place for artistic exchange and audience engagement.

Donations $1 - $999: You are a Festival Supporter! Enjoy a special welcome when you come to PhysFestNYC in January.
Donations $1,000 - $4,999: You are a member of the Founding Circle! Enjoy a free festival pass in 2024.
Donations $5,000+: You are a Founding Partner! Enjoy a free festival pass for all fests to come.

PhysFestNYC will be a community-focused festival that celebrates, enriches, and envisions our field of physical theaters. As an annual gathering, it will provide space for practitioners, audiences, and the physical-theater-curious to share in presented works, diverse workshop offerings, and community-building events.

Physical theater has a varied and often disjointed story in the United States. As a field, it includes various genres such as mime, clown, performance art, puppetry, cultural movement traditions, and dance theater, yet it also exists in the space between and around these genres, combining and redefining them in real time. What it has in common is a centering of the body as storyteller, a tendency toward experimentation, and an openness to (re)considering the definition of theater and/or theater processes.

What is “Community-Focused?”

Horizontal Leadership. Instead of being led by a singular party, the leadership team of the festival will consist of various cohorts so as to best reflect the varying desires and perspectives of the physical theater community.

Access and Inclusion. Though we all have a body in common, those bodies are incredibly diverse in shape, politicization, performance style, lived experience, ability, etc. We want PhysFestNYC to be an accurate reflection of the range of practitioners in our field, as well as a rich space for discourse that pushes us toward increased inclusion field-wide. All parts of the festival will be designed with access and inclusion in mind.

Responsive Planning. We will take one year to design the festival debut: A January 2023 launch event, August thinktank, and January 2024 festival debut. With a tiered rollout, the festival’s design will be an emergent response to the desires, ideas, and needs of those in the physical theater community.

In January 2022, BKBX, Clown Gym, and Stella Adler hosted an Open House to introduce the idea of PhysFest and to get feedback from the community.

You can read the Open House Report HERE.

PhysFestNYC 2024

New Annual Physical Theater Festival in NYC

Team Members